Environment committee  Yes, absolutely. Again, I'm probably one of the worst people at Environment Canada to respond to questions on the chemical management plan, simply because I don't work directly—

Environment committee  Yes, absolutely.

Environment committee  I'll clarify a couple of points. The first is that sustainable development does have three pillars, as the member has indicated. However, the purpose of the Federal Sustainable Development Act is actually highly focused on the environmental pillar, and that's indicated in sectio

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, that's one area of market change under the new system. The act requires that there be an extensive consultation in every three-year cycle of the new system. We have just launched the first such consultation period. It has to run at least 120 day

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. I would start with the more specific question, which is with respect to implementation strategy 2.2.1 in the background tables. That implementation strategy and those activities relate to the chemical management plan that the Government of Canada is p

Environment committee  I would submit two things. There is a process by which the department, in collaboration with other departments like Health Canada, is working through large batches of assessments. My understanding is that their prioritization is a scientifically based prioritization. I would im

Environment committee  In terms of the honourable member's description of the process, just before the last question, I would say, yes, that is the approach. In terms of your last question, I believe the minister actually spoke to that in a fairly specific sense when he appeared at this committee las

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. The new system or the proposed system that's described in the consultation paper before you does represent a significant change. It is absolutely true that the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has commented repeatedly on th

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The honourable member has described, I believe in a very clear way, one of the key challenges of the former system, which was that each department wrote its own plan, so each plan had its own set of objectives and its own framework. They didn't actually nec

Environment committee  You're absolutely right. This strategy does not replace government decision-making. The targets and the implementation strategies are not established only by departments, they actually have to be established through decision-making processes. So a memorandum to cabinet goes to ca

Environment committee  I'd be happy to. Thank you for the question. In terms of going back to the quote from the Minister of the Environment that you just went through, the proposed system, we believe, delivers on that commitment and that vision going back a couple of years in each of the three key c

Environment committee  Very briefly, your point about targets is a good one. Page 18 or somewhere near in the document describes the standard for targets in the future, which is that they're time-bound, they're specific, and they're measurable. That is an ideal to which we would like to move the entire

Environment committee  It does.

Environment committee  Our view in developing this is that the act itself gives us a very clear legal framework, and we have been proceeding to working across the government to establish a system of planning on goals, targets, and implementation strategies, and of tracking our results-based progress.

Environment committee  That's an interesting point. I would say it may not be jumping off the page, but where we talk about linking sustainable development to core planning, on pages 5 and 6, underneath that there is.... We have asked, and Treasury Board has responded positively, in terms of working th