Environment committee  I don't disagree with a lot of the submissions you've heard on that, which have said that five years is okay, but it ought to be 10 years. Also, it is an iterative process and, of course, those targets can be amended. What, to me, has been lost a little bit lost in some of the e

Environment committee  Again, it is difficult to build that within the four corners of a statute like this. Probably the best you can do is to make sure the statute is consistent with it and has some kind of portal or crosswalk to some kind of Canadian emissions effort-sharing agreement that runs in pa

Environment committee  It's the quintessential “easier said than done situation”, but we haven't really tried in a meaningful way, at least not in the last decade. Commencing that conversation across federal-territorial-provincial governments is the important first step in putting those numbers forward

Environment committee  Thanks for the question. In the absence of dedicated provisions that provide an avenue for judicial review and remedy, that's a decent option, and it would signal to the courts that there is an overarching duty to meet the targets. There are a couple caveats, though. One is t

Environment committee  There are two levels of thinking along the lines of “binding” in this context. That's not a particularly helpful concept here, but let's tackle it. First of all, this statute is legally enforceable, and that's represented or indicated by the mandatory provisions throughout. How

Environment committee  It's a huge multi-decadal question, Ms. May, as you know. It's complicated and it goes in both directions. One of the benefits of having the commissioner's office in the Office of the Auditor General is that it's well resourced and it has a lot of bench strength. It does not en

Environment committee  Yes. Thanks for the question. As you all know, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, Canada has a number of regular reporting obligations in the form of annual emission inventories, such as for example, biennial reports that inc

Environment committee  There is simple option A and complicated option B, so we're now on to complicated option B. One proposal, or one suggestion, is to amend subclause 10(1)—that's the provision for the contents of the plan—to make it more detailed and more prescriptive. This committee has heard p

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. It's hard to speak to resources, and I will openly say that I am somewhat biased and that I think the office deserves more resources. I think its role as an independent oversight body is a valuable one and that it would benefit from additional resourc

Environment committee  The way this would likely work in the offices of the environment commissioner—and I'm speaking from my present vantage point, not my previous vantage point—is that these would likely be performance audits, so value-for-money audits, non-financial audits. Within that area of the c

Environment committee  Sure. At a general level, of course, there are jurisdictional constraints flowing from the Constitution with respect to how far the federal government can go. It has only so many constitutionally based levers to pull, and the present government has been using almost all levers av

Environment committee  —it's basically making the information on the contributions of provinces and territories to emissions reductions a mandatory part of the plans required under clause 10. You could leave the rest permissive under subclause 10(3), although there is sensitive territory to cover there

Environment committee  It's easier said than done and the devil is always in the detail, to offer a few platitudes. One option is to, first of all, make it explicit, so that there's legislative intent signalling that conflict of interest is a live issue that will be safeguarded against. Again, there

Environment committee  This is not an aspect that I anticipated speaking about today, but I welcome the question. To be completely candid, I have not been tracking that aspect of the bill's development. I do recall the minister mentioning discussions with some of the representative indigenous bodies a

Environment committee  Yes. I have a couple of things. I guess you have to start somewhere when it comes to putting together the institutional supports that this regime requires. It's not all that surprising that the minister put together this group, apparently on a volunteer basis, from what I unders