Canadian Heritage committee  I can answer to some of that, but I'll also ask Marie to deal with that. Over the last few years, the NCC has tried to be a leader in environmental movement by working toward being carbon-neutral in our festivities and by eliminating waste from these huge gatherings that we have

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Russell Mills. I am the chair of the board of the National Capital Commission. I am very pleased to be here today with Marie Lemay, our chief executive officer; and Guy Laflamme, who is the vice-president of capital expe

Transport committee  They worked for six or seven months on their consultations, and I have never run into anyone around here who didn't feel they had an opportunity to make their views known through the mandate review. It was a very thorough process.

Transport committee  I would just add that how the 75-25 is calculated is way beyond our authority.

Transport committee  As far as employment planning goes, we rely quite heavily on an excellent advisory committee the NCC has, containing some of Canada's leading land planners, architects, and so on. The emerging view is that people should live and work in the same place, that we shouldn't force peo

Transport committee  This has been studied in detail by the NCC staff, so I'll let Ms. Lemay comment on it. My comment would be that the greenbelt is a much more diverse area than Gatineau Park. It contains many different things. There's leased agricultural land. There are very environmentally sensi

Transport committee  I'll take on the governance part of it. First, thank you for your comments about openness. We're very pleased with what's happened. The new tool in the act, as far as that's concerned, is the removal of the spending authority limits. It will make us similar to other crown corpo

Transport committee  No, thank you.

Transport committee  Up until three years ago the NCC had a combined chair and chief executive role, and that's the way it had been for the first 50 years of the organization. Marie and I are the first people who have filled the roles of chair of the board, which is for me a part-time position, and f

Transport committee  No.

Transport committee  No, this is a management function, and the board is briefed on these discussions at its meetings and in the CEO's report.

Transport committee  All of that was done by the person who was the combined chair and CEO. If you speak to board members, ordinary board members or members of the commission from those areas, they will say that they had a lesser role than they do now. That's one of the problems with putting too much

Transport committee  Our mandate is to build a unified capital here, unifying both sides of the river. Transportation is an essential part of that. If responsibility for all the bridges was given to us, along with the appropriate funding, I think that would be perceived as a positive thing, though I

Transport committee  Marie.

Transport committee  Well, having an odd number is no guarantee that's going to be how the vote is cast. We have members from across the country, and quite often someone will be unable to attend, or when we do have a meeting, someone will declare a conflict and be unable to vote on something. In my t