Fisheries committee  Let me, if I may, talk a bit about each of those. Certainly on Bill C-32 and the act that's now in place, we would not be in a position to comment on the pros and cons of a piece of legislation, either an existing act or one that is being proposed, unless it had sections in it t

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  Yes, it is.

Fisheries committee  I think people know what they're responsible for, and some departments do a little better at getting at these issues than others. In terms of there being a coordinating committee between the affected departments, I don't know whether Mr. Ferguson knows about that. We didn't rea

Fisheries committee  I don't mean to be overly pushy, Mr. Chair, but since I'm retiring in a couple of weeks, it would be interesting to have those three departments sitting where we are and for a committee like this to ask them how they are coordinated to attack these issues, how they are tracking p

Fisheries committee  Mr. Chairman, perhaps I might ask my colleague Andrew Ferguson to comment on that. We looked a bit at it, but not very much.

Fisheries committee  Thank you.

Fisheries committee  We have asked, and the answers coming back aren't very satisfactory. Let me give you the bad news on this and then the optimistic news, because I think there is some optimism here. The bad news is that nobody seems to care whether they're done or not. SEAs, strategic environmen

Fisheries committee  Let me be very clear that I would never suggest that a budget allocation be increased to one department or another. As I said earlier, that is your job, not our job, as auditors, to do. I simply indicate, through the $10-million and $2-million issue, that these are questions you

Fisheries committee  Yes, that's exactly what we're saying. We wouldn't speculate about the future, but the last time we did an audit, which we're following up on now, the number of invasives in the Great Lakes was 160. When we did the audit this year, which is two or three years later, they're up to

Fisheries committee  I do. It's not of the cottage, but only the grandchild.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much for that question. Aquatic invasives is an interesting situation. There's a paragraph in our chapter 6 that I'd direct your attention to. It's paragraph 6.8. In there--I'm an accountant, so forgive me for talking in numbers and dollars--there's an allocation

Fisheries committee  That's a very good question. This is an area of concern to us as legislative auditors. On the one hand, we look at a fairly large amount of money that's been allocated in budgets to this area. But on the other hand, we don't see much action. In fact, 13 out of 40 is not a very go

Fisheries committee  What we are saying is that the information that the department has isn't being made available to parliamentarians and the Canadian people.

Fisheries committee  I am, yes.