Environment committee  Well, the purpose of the petitions process is to give Canadians a tool to ask questions about programs and policies at the federal level. That may be to look at measurable reductions in pollution or it may go to other matters. I think it's looking at the full gamut of the federal

Environment committee  As I mentioned earlier, the Auditor General did a study on the overall nature of trusts between the federal government and provinces. The general trend or general rule of thumb is that there are no conditions attached in those transfers, so that there are trusts for strengthening

Environment committee  I don't know, sir. We'll get back to you on this.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. When we looked at the audit, obviously, each province has its own climate policies and climate change policies. They're serious: the provinces are taking action. Our mandate from the Office of the Auditor General is to look at it from the federal side

Environment committee  What we found in the regulations and across the board was not an issue of implementation itself. Rather, we found an inability at Environment Canada and other departments to measure the results. Do they know the results of their interventions? If you don't know the results of you

Environment committee  I think there's a lot of really interesting work under way in the legal profession, as well as others, on how you measure effective enforcement and how you actually know indicators of looking at effective enforcement. I think this is something that, based on the recommendations,

Environment committee  This would be up to Parliament. The Auditor General did a study on overall trust funds. I think the outlier with the trust fund we looked at for the climate and clean air was that the anomaly with this is that there is a target, and because there is a target there has to be a way

Environment committee  I think there were two things. In terms of the efficacy of the system, it's extremely important that the warnings are issued on time and are accurate, but also that Canadians understand them and the warnings reach them. Our understanding now is that the CRTC has said that broad

Environment committee  I think it was a little of both. We looked at the analysis that the Department of Finance provided. In 2006, in their strategic environmental assessment, they had done some analysis on probable reductions because of a tax credit. They put it at around 110,000 tonnes. Environment

Environment committee  I wouldn't be able to comment generally. We looked at three regulations and made recommendations on them. In respect of the regulations we looked at, we suggested that Environment Canada needed to reconsider their overall approach to regulatory compliance and promotion. They acce

Environment committee  Thank you. I think there are probably two answers to that question. First, there is a kind of inventory for which the methods used are those of the United Nations and the Kyoto protocol. It is separate for the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets that the department has pr

Environment committee  Of course, there are doubts about the two measures we examined in this report, the Trust Fund and the tax credit. In both cases, there is no system that makes it possible to determine whether there are real reductions in greenhouse gases. As for the government's other measures, I

Environment committee  We found that in terms of the overall network, Environment Canada had proposed several cuts, as you've said, to several weather stations, and many of them are automated. There has been a backlog then on how many of those have been closed, and because of that backlog the departmen

Environment committee  If you'll permit me, in English, sir--

Environment committee  --I think what we found from the report was that the departments themselves did not have a methodology by which they could calculate. Our understanding is that they will look at the tax returns that Canadians will submit through Revenue Canada in 2011. Then, based on the number