Environment committee  Maybe I could ask my colleague Andrew Ferguson to respond to that.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Joining me are my colleagues Richard Arseneault, Andrew Ferguson and Mary Anne Strong. As you know, we tabled our Status Report last week. It included 14 chapters, five of which showed satisfactory progress and nine of which showed unsatisfactory progress.

Environment committee  Thank you very much for those two questions. In terms of the legal and constitutional aspect, I've tended to look at this bill as focusing only on federal government activity. Under this bill, we would be asked to assess the fairness of performance information being reported ab

Environment committee  I'd be very pleased to talk about that. I remember one time in another life, with the Office of the Auditor General, I was charged with the responsibility of leading an audit of one of these agency reports--in that case, it was an assessment, not an audit. I was given a draft of

Environment committee  Mr. Godfrey, I would certainly hope so. It starts with one or two, or twenty--I don't know how many you can do initially--government-wide targets. You'd want to be as clear and precise as you can be with those. Then you would want a mechanism to back those targets up into the d

Environment committee  I do, yes. I would hope not, sir, because 120 days is not an inconsequential amount of time for consultation. There are two consultations in this. The other stakeholders, beyond the commissioner's office, would have a lot to be consulted on. We would be consulted solely on wheth

Environment committee  That's a bit tight, but it's probably something that could be looked at.

Environment committee  Not really at this point. I'm so darned pleased that this bill is being discussed by the committee today, in the sense, as I say, that it puts into a tangible way the kind of overarching plan that we've been calling for over several months. There are many ways to put an overall

Environment committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I think that is an important point to get on the table. When we looked at this initially, there was the concept of “audit” in here. Audit is something we obviously do day in and day out in the Auditor General's office, but it does have certain

Environment committee  Mr. Watson, no, I don't think it's a duplication. In the review that was started back in, I guess, November last year—I think we tabled at the end of October, so the government committed to doing the review over the current year and then reporting back in October of this year—the

Environment committee  Mr. Watson, yes, we have, and the Office of the Auditor General has been. We're consulted, sir, when the provisions of a proposed act would affect the work we do. And as I mentioned earlier, this certainly does, so we were consulted in that capacity, and we would be pleased to be

Environment committee  Well, Mr. Watson, really, substantively, no. We were consulted, I think three or four times, perhaps—three, I guess—and then we've had phone conversations with some of Mr. Godfrey's colleagues. All the issues we put on the table are reflected in here. Now, I say again that the d

Environment committee  The latter. It was brought up to us a bit--chapter 4 on protected areas. I think I mentioned last week that the department said quite candidly that they simply hadn't allocated enough resources to this. On another occasion, though--chapter 5--we looked at the amount of money that

Environment committee  Mr. Cullen, certainly I couldn't agree more. We said last week and we'll say again that in looking at the chapters we had last week, where progress wasn't satisfactory, for many of them there have been far too many words used and far too little action expended. One of the things

Environment committee  Well, Mr. Cullen, it seems to me it would depend on how this bill is implemented. Certainly the bill as presently drafted doesn't just speak to Environment Canada; it deals in Privy Council Office, as you know, and that sort of thing. So I don't think it would just be Environment