Environment committee  Thank you, Chair. I should clarify. There is no lead other than Environment Canada. Environment Canada has decided—certainly at the time we did our report—that it will not proceed, unless it has changed that decision that it would not lead further efforts to—

Environment committee  —is up in the air.

Environment committee  For the second strategy, I think Environment Canada changed the structure it uses to explain the targets. In my view, the changes are just part of the progression from the first strategy to the second strategy. We feel it is important that the government, more specifically Envir

Environment committee  Yes, “lead” in that sense, Mr. Chair. At the moment, the future of ESTR—and it is lovingly known as “Esther”—

Environment committee  Yes. I'll ask Jim for the official title. It's “Ecosystem Status and Trends”, I believe.

Environment committee  Chair, that was the first effort to pull this together at a national level. There have certainly been reports on specific regions and particular species, but it's the first time this was all pulled together.

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, I would agree. I think it was very comprehensive. It was historic in the sense of the first time done. One of the results it pointed out is that all the major types of ecosystems in Canada are in decline to some extent, some only in particular aspects—

Environment committee  Thank you. Right now, no one is a leader in the field. Environment Canada decided to ignore the 2010 report, which was very important. In fact, it was the first report that described the status and trends of our ecosystems. The report was addressing a number of recommendations t

Environment committee  Not really. I will let the officials from Environment Canada explain those decisions.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In this instance, we're talking about Parks Canada's budget, separate from Environment Canada's, even though the same minister is responsible for both. We did not look to see how.... We really focused on the question of how they were doing on the conservati

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, it was only on a selective basis. In this particular case, we looked at it because, as the member mentioned, we were concerned about the extent of the backlog of work to meet the commitments Parks Canada has made. We looked at it in this particular instance largely jus

Environment committee  I'll ask Mr. Ferguson.

Environment committee  In this report we focused on particular programs, so we didn't look at all the things that Environment Canada has done. So we haven't really done an analysis of that. The one that we are able to do, and most certainly will follow up on, is that we can get you specific numbers on

Environment committee  I'm going to ask my colleagues if there's something specifically embedded in SARA that I'm not familiar with. Bruce?

Environment committee  There are a number of legal tools the federal government can use, permitting and such, under SARA to achieve its objectives. I do not believe that there are any legal sanctions, if you will, on the government. That's not unusual in legislation of this sort. It's not as if somethi