Environment committee  But then again I would say, why not leave it to the Prime Minister to take whatever mechanism he or she thinks is best to fulfill this very important obligation? That's my genuine view.

Environment committee  As a student of these matters and as an occasional adviser, it would give me more comfort, but if I were asked for my advice by the government on it, I would advise against legislating this sort of mechanism, an internal mechanism like this. I go back to my view that I wouldn't

Environment committee  May I say, Mr. Godfrey, though, that war cabinet was chaired by the Prime Minister—

Environment committee  —not another minister. He didn't delegate to another minister the responsibility for the conduct, as you were saying, in an excellent example, of the war. He chaired that committee himself—Churchill did, or Mackenzie King did, let's say.

Environment committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I am not a lawyer, nor am I a constitutional lawyer. I cannot give you my professional opinion on the constitutionality of those clauses of the bill. When I read it, I saw it as an expression of the intentions of the federal Parliament,

Environment committee  Well, again, I'm going to revert to my experience inside the government and say that I don't really think it's useful.... You're a former minister, Mr. Regan--

Environment committee  That is an excellent question. I would actually not have a separate committee for sustainable development, because those issues you are talking about in the bill and that we've been talking about today are so fundamental and so integrated that I'd want to see them considered in

Environment committee  --so I have no lessons to teach you. But I don't think it's useful for Parliament to tell the government precisely how it needs to take the kinds of decisions that you expect of it in order to--

Environment committee  If I may say so, I don't think you want accountability in relation to the work of that kind of body. You want the government, represented by the PM and his colleagues on the front benches, accounting to you for what they've done, either against the promises they have made or the

Environment committee  Certainly the President of the Treasury Board has responsibilities under the law as the chair of that statutory committee. I'm not sure if I've ever seen that. You normally hold either ministers accountable for the spending that has been made by their departments or the PM accoun

Environment committee  I agree with Mr. Meadowcroft when he says that this is too complex a question for one to be able to answer directly.

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, Mr. Regan, I agree with Mr. Meadowcroft that there is a need for fundamental change. I don't have his expertise to tell you that it should be an 80% or 90% reduction--I wouldn't venture that before the committee--but I agree that fundamental change is required. I think

Environment committee  I don't think a list of 10 factors is excessive. The items or goals listed there are so broad and complex that, if the government were asked to develop a plan for each one of them, we would end up with a Soviet-type five-year plan. It would be completely useless. I prefer to see

Environment committee  I would say that the schedule, as it now stands, covers the waterfront. If you were to expect a strategy to address all of this, you would be looking for a plan that was simply too huge and too complicated to be manageable, implementable, developable, measurable. In the text of

Environment committee  Yes, sir.