Public Accounts committee  You talked about settling this issue with Quebec. My role does not include giving advice on policy matters. That question is really for the department. It's up to the department to state whether or not it is comfortable with what the Province of Quebec has proposed. It's not my r

Public Accounts committee  It's another iteration of the potential for double counting or the problem of a lack of additionality. If offsets are not used properly, one project may be able to count twice for tree planting and some sort of carbon offset. We want to see these programs used to add value, not

Public Accounts committee  I would like to see the results of that, rather than just the instructions, to make sure it truly is avoiding double counting. I can't guarantee it at this point.

Public Accounts committee  We are still considering whether to follow up on this audit because of the changes in circumstances around the double counting with the low carbon economy fund. We have the same question. For example, in paragraph 1.5, we said they were going to spend up to $3.2 billion on the

Public Accounts committee  The department should have provided that. It's this committee more than it—

Public Accounts committee  Yes. For two billion trees, it's NRCan.

Public Accounts committee  They committed to planting two billion. The department realizes they won't get the benefits from those two billion if most of them die. If you wanted to have two billion survive, you'd have to factor in the survivorship rate. I don't know what it is for the first two years or w

Public Accounts committee  That concern of ours is illustrated in recommendation 1.43, where we recommended that they have “a long-term monitoring plan to assess the health and survival of the trees planted through the program” and “targets for the program's performance indicators” relating to that. These

Public Accounts committee  The first we heard of the cost barrier was in response to the recommendation in paragraph 1.47, where they said, “Given that habitat restoration is significantly more expensive, additional incentives for habitat restoration work would reduce funding available”. They looked at it—

Public Accounts committee  It is nice to see a program that has such a long-term horizon, because sometimes in government we tend to focus too much on “short-termism”. This is a theme in lesson number 8 of our climate lessons learned report of 2021, which we were here before this committee for about two ye

Public Accounts committee  It comes from the 2019 throne speech, which was following through on a political promise.

Public Accounts committee  Is what achievable?

Public Accounts committee  Yes, and that's why we finished this audit so early in the program. It's because we want improvements to be made and for the program to be successful. There's enough time left to catch up and achieve the 2030 target. But quite a few partnerships will have to be established and an

Public Accounts committee  It's important to remember that it's not just a two billion tree target, but three objectives. In addition to carbon sequestration, there is biodiversity and also human welfare. If we focus on monoculture, that would achieve only one of the three.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for reminding us of the human face to all of this. We're talking about graphs and trees and so on, but it wasn't that long ago that the skies were orange here in Ottawa, as in Edmonton and elsewhere, because of the incredible fire season we had. It was felt not only he