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WEDNESDAY 26 MARCH 2003 __________ Members present: Mr John Horam, in the Chair __________ Memoranda submitted by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada and the Chairman of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development (Canada) Examination of Witnesses MS JOHANNE GÉLINAS, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada, MR JOHN REED, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada and Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, MR CHARLES CACCIA MP, Chair of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada, MS HÉLÈNE SCHERRER MP, Member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada, MR BOB MILLS MP, Member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada and MR JOE COMARTIN MP, Member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada examined. Chairman
(Ms Gélinas) Thank you very much, Chairman, and good afternoon to the members. I would like to start by thanking you for the invitation and I would like to make some brief remarks and then I will be pleased to answer any of your questions. I am joined at the table today by John Reed, the principal responsible for the audit work in my office that we conduct on sustainable development strategy and for our work related to the Johannesburg Summit. I am also pleased today to be joined by the delegation of Canadian parliamentarians, headed by the chair of Canada's Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Mr Charles Caccia, and also including Mr Comartin, Mr Mills and Ms Scherrer. I realise of course that this Committee is primarily focussed on the implementation of sustainable development in the United Kingdom so you may well be wondering why a Canadian is here to provide testimony. The simple answer is that I think we share a common interest to get action on sustainable development and the Johannesburg Summit and although the approaches taken by our countries towards sustainable development differ in many important ways I suspect that our governments face many common challenges. With this in mind, I hope to learn from you and also to share with you some of my perspective. Specifically, I would like to leave you with some very simple messages. First, the Johannesburg Summit is important for the world. Its noble ideas and commitments represent a current global plan to protect our planet now and for future generations. These hearings are evidence that this Committee is already conscious of its importance. Secondly, the successful implementation of Johannesburg requires a new and different approach than the one used to implement the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Rio, too, produced many noble ideas and commitments but governments fail by and large to implement them. We cannot make that mistake again. Thirdly, effective governance and accountability must be a central part of the new approach. Governments need to develop a concrete, prioritised and resourced action plan for implementing Johannesburg. Progress against these plans must be tracked and departments and their ministers must be held accountable for that progress. Fourthly, national audit offices like my office, the UK National Audit Office and similar institutions in 180 countries around the world have an important role to play and can offer leadership in promoting effective government performance and good governance. Fifthly, parliamentary oversight is needed. In Canada I am often referred to as the environmental watchdog. The label is understandable from a public perspective but parliament is the real watchdog of government. Lastly, the public must be engaged in this process providing public oversight. Among other things, there is a need to explain what Johannesburg means and why it matters and to explain what governments and others are doing to put commitments into action and to seek public input throughout. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity and I will be pleased to answer any questions. If I may, I will now turn to my colleague Mr Caccia. (Mr Caccia) It was your invitation which inspired it. It is only a theoretical elaboration and I hope it might be useful. We would like, as parliamentarians, to congratulate you for your initiative, which we find far reaching and very enlightened and it sends out a signal also to us in Canada, which we will take seriously. We would like also to congratulate not you in this room but outside this room those in the Energy Department of the UK who produced the White Paper in which the target of 2050 is elaborated for a reduction of greenhouse gases by 60 per cent. Although the choice of 2050 is a very bold initiative it forces us to think into the future more than we usually do and that 60 per cent reduction is a stunning item. Some of us had the privilege of meeting the author in Ottawa last week, Bob Wright, and to hear more on that document. Thirdly, we would like to congratulate you on your good choice in inviting the Commissioner because that gave us also an excuse to come with her! The post-Johannesburg agenda that you are proposing, and I will conclude with that, is certainly impressive as it reads. Particularly interesting is your intent to examine how the commitments made at the Summit could or should reshape existing UK policies or strategies or act as a catalyst for new initiatives and of course we were wondering what that exactly means. Probably you are thinking of reshaping your taxation policies or your energy policies, which you are already doing actually, policies related to water quality and water supply, policies related to the disappearing fish resources or the forest resources as well, whether you are thinking also to do further work in pollution prevention. The overall concept that you are putting forward of examining existing US policies in connection with the Summit is a very clever one and we want to congratulate you. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Caccia, and like you we hope we will concentrate effectively on the follow up to Johannesburg by the means at our disposal just as you will with the means at your disposal. Thank you for your very charming remarks. Mr Thomas (Ms Gélinas) First of all, I should say that Canada really reacted in concrete terms to Rio. That was the beginning of this effort to move towards sustainable development by first of all creating my position but putting also a legislative requirement for departments, 25 departments plus 5 agencies at the federal level to develop a sustainable development strategy. So we have 28 at the moment sustainable development strategies which have to be revisited every three years. We have gone through two generations and now we are entering the third one. Strategies should be tabled to parliament by the end of this calendar year. This is the way by which Canada has decided to move towards sustainable development. One of the things I have said is that in deference with what is going on in the UK, we have decided to go with a bottom-up approach. It is not because you have 28 strategies that you have a federal strategy or a national strategy and we have reached what I call a plateau and now we have as a country to figure out what we want to achieve, what is the vision of what a sustainable Canada should be twenty years from now. So it is work in progress. The Federal Government has done a lot so far. Now what we are asking is what will be done differently now that we have as a country reaffirmed our commitment in Johannesburg? Because what we see is that Johannesburg is no different than Rio. It is just a reaffirmation of what we have said ten years ago. What we are saying now is that Canada has to walk the talk. We were very good at producing documents, paper guidelines, and so on, but now we have to see real action on the ground and this is where I am at. As an auditor, I am looking for results and I will report to parliament year after year on progress towards the commitment that was made in Johannesburg. So there is some progress but we still have a long way to go. (Mr Caccia) Initially, to answer your question, there was a public hesitancy or even indifference because of the slowness in the selection of the Secretary-General. Maurice Strong, who was the Secretary-General in 1972 and in 1992, declined to do it again and the choice that was eventually made was considered by those who are familiar with that process as a very weak one, as a compromise, a last minute choice that did not have the kind of inspiration and vision or the articulation that Maurice Strong used to bring. But eventually they did approach various organisations and environmental NGOs became involved and somehow we managed to get there and while the content of the Summit cannot compete with the content of the two preceding ones, namely Stockholm and Rio, there is no way that it can come close to that even with the best of intentions, at least considering the times and the political will, so to speak, it is the best that could be expected under the circumstances, I would say. The only serious flaw of that outcome is that the implementation of the Summit - and this is something that I would like very much to register as forcefully as I can - was left again to the UN committee on sustainable development and the experience, not only the Canadian experience, with that outfit is not a very happy one. It is a weak body. It preaches to the converted. It has not managed to fulfil its mandate. It reports to a UNESCO agency and its reports fall on deaf ears. Therefore, there was a very urgent necessity to redefine or at least discuss, debate and possibly come up with an alternative to the UN committee on sustainable development. That, however, did not happen and a bunch of us met in Johannesburg when we realised that, parliamentarians from Europe and North America, and eventually by December we collected enough signatures for a letter to the Secretary-General of the UN expressing these thoughts and putting forward an alternative action. If you are interested, of course, we will be glad to submit the text of that letter, which has not yet been replied to for reasons related to other events in the world. Mr Thomas: Yes, that would be interesting. Joan Walley (Mr Caccia) There are two avenues open to us as parliamentarians. One of course is, as you just defined, the work of committees like yours and ours in various parliaments. Definitely that is a very badly needed one, particularly when it is able to make presentations to the respective governments in relation to what the governments say at the UN. So the work of parliamentarians is increasing in relevance and in impact. Secondly, the UN has to sort itself out and examine its own effectiveness and here if you look at the family of UN agencies you can see well established agencies in charge of health, like WHO, UNDP in charge of development, etcetera, but here is this often called a unit which still does not have the status of an agency. It is still in the minor league, so to speak, and on top of that relegated to the Siberian plains of Kenya. So it is very marginal in location and in impact. One proposal that the UN Secretary-General hopefully will look at is, first of all to elevate the unit to the status of an agency so that it has also the necessary means and impact within the UN system, and secondly to give it the role of implementing the findings of the Summit because then, as in the case of the health agency in Geneva, you give the assignment of sustainable development and environment protection to the agency that has been created by the UN itself for that purpose. So that would be one formula that would be followed. But coming back to your basic question, definitely the UN can by only as strong as its member nations are and the member nations can only be as strong as their parliamentarians and governments are within their own respective systems. So we always come back to us in a way and the public. (Mr Caccia) Yes, and you will find some very like-minded characters like us in Brussels on the Environment Committee and the committee that deals with Kyoto, and so on. We have some very good allies over there. Sue Doughty (Mr Comartin) Charles said, "You answer this," because he does not want to attack his own government! I think I am speaking generally on behalf of the Environment Committee. We were disappointed that we did not do sufficient preparation as a country. We have played major roles in UNEP. Our environment minister is the head of UNEP, or was at the time of the Summit. We as a committee only got two briefings - as Charles has said, one worse than the other. The second one was in February, five or six months before. We felt that the government was not ready for the Summit and had not done the background work that was necessary. I think that was reflected on the role or lack of such that we played at the Summit as a country. I think we could have done a lot more. I think there were parts of the globe that were looking to us to do more because of the historical role we have played and some of the responsibilities we have. I remember the second briefing in particular. Charles was his usual self, attacking the presentation as being woefully inadequate and it did reflect where the government was at at that point. They did do some more work before Johannesburg but it was not enough and our role suffered as a result. What we are worried about, if I can carry it a it beyond that into the future, is that we do not move into the implementation stage as rapidly as we did. What I want to say about the Summit is that one of the things that it did do was focus the attention in Canada on Kyoto. I am not sure you are aware but the Prime Minister did announce in Johannesburg that we in fact were going to ratify Kyoto before the end of 2002. So from that vantage point the Summit was a major plus for us and I have to say the environmental NGOs of some of the other opposition parties had been using the upcoming Summit to keep the pressure on the government to ratify Kyoto. So from that perspective it performed a good function. In any event, to carry on, the role of looking where we are going, are we in fact going to be serious about implementing Kyoto as opposed to Rio? I do not think that determination has been completed. I want to say in that regard that the work the Commission does, the work that our committee does has certainly drawn to our attention that if we are going to implement we need the tools to do it. When I say "we" I mean Canada as opposed to other countries. I get the sense from some of the conversations, because we had dinner last night, that you are struggling as well. Do we have the tools to properly audit, to properly see that the implementation is occurring? We are finding some frustration that we are not at a stage where we can say accurately, "Yes, we have done the audit, we have reviewed the programme and in fact it is being implemented." That is an ongoing struggle for us. (Mr Mills) Chairman, if I could just go back to the last question about the UN. I attended the UNEP annual meeting of ministers in Nairobi whenever it was, last month or so, and I sat there tentatively for the entire conference and listened to 130 countries make presentations on what the key environmental issues were and about the implementation plan from Johannesburg and I guess what I was most impressed with was how hugely different everybody's perspective was in terms of how you would implement what was said, and of course for some it was strictly a matter of, "Well, we have too much population and poverty is the reason why we cannot implement anything and poverty puts more pressure on the environment than if we had things so what are you going to give us so we can then improve the environment?" So for this one block it was a matter of, "Well, the developed world must give us so that we can then care about the environment." But you got the impression that the strategy has to involve all of those issues and the one thing that not one person ever said in that whole thing was, "Well, we have got to deal with the population question," and I was just so impressed with the fact that nobody said that population in fact was one of the biggest factors in terms of sustainable development. It was very interesting to see the huge range that existed within 130 countries who all made presentations there and at the end nobody could agree on any strategy for implementation. The end document was so watered down and had been re-worked and they worked through the night, as they always do at these things, and ended up a document that really did not please anybody. There was not one member there who would have said this accomplished something. That is the frustration of the whole UN process. I do not have a solution, I just identify the problem that you all probably know already. It is a huge problem. Chairman (Ms Gélinas) John and I were in Johannesburg and when we came back we were wondering if we should audit the process to figuring out what really happened, how the government was prepared to go to Johannesburg. Both of us came to the conclusion that what was more important was where do we go from now to look forward, to look into the future. So I waited until I was back from Johannesburg to write the last part of my chapter zero, which is my opinion on things that are going on. We have come up with some very specific recommendations to the government and John can say a few words about that, but moreover we were following the process as it was going before Johannesburg and we can give you a little bit of information about the preparation itself if you want to. (Mr Reed) I think you were asking a little bit about the process of preparation in Canada and the consultation, and so on. There were quite a few processes put in place to prepare Canada but I think the backdrop for a lot of that was a great deal of scepticism in the public community, in the NGO community, as to whether this was a serious Summit or not. The consultations probably started two years in advance of the Summit and there was a cross-Canada tour trying to get the views of people as to what priorities they wanted the government to bring into Johannesburg. There was a great deal of frustration because the message was continually, "This Summit is not going to be about new ideas and new agendas and new priorities, it is going to be about fixing the problems of the past." For a lot of people that was enormously frustrating because new events had happened, new issues had arisen and so there was not a great deal of faith in whether the Summit would lead to something meaningful and there were a lot of jokes at the time that the Summit was in search of an agenda. People really did not know what was going to be on the agenda. So there was that aspect of, I guess, trepidation of the public going into it. I think you know all countries were asked to prepare a national report and submit that prior to the Summit and that also was an area of great controversy in Canada because the Federal Government started a process that was intended to lead to an honest and frank portrayal of the strengths and weaknesses against all of the Rio commitments and they assembled a blue ribbon panel of experts to compile this report and a process of checks and balances to make sure that it was in fact honest and frank. At the very end of the process the document was taken over by the government and edited substantially to the point where this blue ribbon panel refused to have their names associated with the report. So that, too, really fed this notion of is this a real summit or not. But as the Commissioner said, from an auditor's perspective it was not really important to us what the Summit said because that is policy. What is important to us is implementation and that is why, as the Commissioner said, when we came back the first job was, "Whether you like it or not, it is the Summit. Let's get on with the job of implementing it and develop very clear and concrete commitments. Take that kind of treatise and fuzzy language that you see in the plan of implementation and make it something concrete and real." So that is the process that has been started in Canada. Mr Thomas (Mr Reed) There is a couple of reasons. One, I guess, is that it was intended to be a national report as opposed to a federal report, so we would have a limited ability to comment on anything happening in provinces, in industry and civil society. So we wanted a good fit for that and I think they wanted to get a very well rounded spectrum of people and positions and I think they just felt this was the way to get a lot of neutrality and expert testimony. It was all public. All the transcripts, the memoranda, all of that was made public and I think that was all the more reason why there was disappointment with the final product. (Ms Gélinas) What we have learned through this process is that for the next time we are starting now our homework. So for the next time as an independent organisation we will have our own track record of what has been done. Mr Challen (Ms Gélinas) As we speak, we do not have this to offer you. You will have to invite us next year so we will be able to talk to you about that! We have made it clear on our side what we were expecting from the government in the coming year and we are expecting for sure a plan of implementation. At the moment we have an intention from the government to have one but we have not seen any and this is why we are trying to move ahead in the future with the help and the support of our committee to get some answers about what is going on. Three weeks ago I was in front of the committee and I raised myself a couple of questions that I would like to get answers for and next week in fact the committee will hear some of the central agency and the department responsible to answer those questions in front of them, so we may have a little bit more clarification of what is the government plan. (Ms Gélinas) We do not have evidence. We have heard things but we never report back on rumours, so I have to stop there, unfortunately, on my answer. (Mr Reed) To be fair to the government, we know the process has started. We know the discussions are occurring interdepartmentally and I think they are in a way trying to do the same kind of thing that we heard DEFRA is doing, having identified key priority areas. That is the dialogue that is going on within the departments right now, of all that plan of implementation which are the ones that really matter. But as the Commissioner says, evidence, no. Nothing has been produced yet, nothing has been circulated, but we know there are discussions going on. (Mr Reed) Yes. (Mr Caccia) The Canadian delegation was, what, 130 people, so it included every sector and segment of society including levels of government, including the municipal sector as well. So the representation was very broad, no doubt, and then NGOs and whatever, you name it. The presence was quite good on the whole but on the speed of the government in implementing the Summit there is generally a tendency of leaving things to the last moment and the advantage of having a Commissioner is that this time things will not be left to the last moment. This time the government departments will move into action almost certainly before the first year will expire, namely before next August there will be some action and therefore by the time we reach two or three years past Johannesburg the performance of the government will be there, there will be something to look at. But I do not think that would happen had it not been for the fact that pressure was exerted by the Commissioner on the system, particularly the centre of the system, with the Privy Council office. (Mr Caccia) I do not know. We have not discussed it yet as a committee as to what we will do. Keep in mind that our committee receives legislation from the House and therefore our timetable is pretty heavy. We look at bills and we do that quite intensively, almost with religious fervour, and we send back those bills sometimes with 120 or more amendments, to the chagrin of the government. So when we have that type of time allocation we have also to keep in mind this other item that will eventually emerge, so maybe we will be able to answer your question in the near future. Right now we have not reached the point. (Mr Caccia) Well, that would be the close definition of a zoo and I do not know whether we want to go into that! But on a private basis, each one of us knows the environment critic in our respective provinces and so there is always some kind of communication at a personal level but the geography of Canada and the regional differences are such that it would be better if each province or each legislature were to do its own assessment and provide its own reply. (Ms Gélinas) What we may say and we often say, at least in my area, is first let us get the federal house in order and then lead by example. We can try to embrace everything but we may reach failure, so let us go step by step, making sure that at the federal level all the pieces of the puzzle are there and then if others, like at the provincial level, want to take the lead they will be free to do so. (Mr Caccia) Well, this is a very fine initiative by the Commissioner and, as she mentioned earlier, I believe, she appeared already before the Fisheries Committee and definitely the Commissioner, in order to make an impact on the system, including the parliamentary sector, has to almost invite herself before a committee and sometimes the chair is not receptive, in which case you cannot force it, sometimes there is an enthusiastic chair and then it happens and it becomes then an immense educational process in order to bring parliamentarians up to speed on the issues. Mr Thomas (Ms Gélinas) This is news to me. (Mr Caccia) But that soon detracts from the value of that type of initiative because very often the input from local governments is actually in advance of the thinking at the federal level for a number of good reasons. (Mr Mills) Two points I might mention. There is an Environment Minister's meeting from the provinces with the Federal Minister, so there is that coordination, and from the province that I represent they were in Johannesburg as well and taking a very active role in particularly the climate change aspects of that. Mr Ainsworth (Ms Gélinas) Let me say a few words first about what is this international organisation and then I will turn to John to give you the detail. He is leading that. What we tried to accomplish through the working group on environmental auditing is to exchange information and to advent the audit practice specifically in the environmental field. We have a work plan and what we are trying to do with 48 other countries is to make sure that we are moving ahead in the same direction, if we can, on sustainable development. As you probably know, sustainable development is not a best seller. It is very hard to talk about and we have to find ways to translate that into something concrete and it is complex. When you look at the commitments that were made in Johannesburg and so on it is very difficult for a non-expert to figure out what it means. John was saying that just the vocabulary on its own is difficult to understand. So what we are doing is trying to translate that into concrete terms that an auditor will be able to implement in some way. So we will tell you what we have started to do to advent our thinking on how to audit. (Ms Gélinas) Which are doing environmental auditing on a regular basis. (Ms Gélinas) Methodology to audit. (Ms Gélinas) Should we say an international methodology? Probably not. It is an approach. It will be more accurate to say an approach. (Mr Reed) I think it would be hard to go that far. Let me just say two other words about the members, because it is important for what we are doing. There are actually 180 auditor generals in the world and 45 on this committee but there is quite a range of the mandates that those officers have. In some ways we are at one end of the continuum because not only do we have an audit to do, performance audits, effectiveness and efficiency in government, but we have a very explicit reference to environment in our legislation. So although we may be at one end of the continuum we have a large number of officers who have a performance audit mandate, which allows them to look at, among other things, environmental issues. But you also have some officers who do not even have a performance mandate. They are strictly still doing financial audits for the government. So as a working group we need to bring that whole group together at the same time. So sometimes our approach is to provide high level guidance in a way that each office can adapt within their mandate. One of the ways we have done that as a working group is always starting with the production of papers, descriptive papers about what we want to look at, and the very first one that group produced was simply how to do an environmental audit because it was new for many members. We have done a paper on water now that was authored by the institution in the Netherlands and those audit countries have already done over 300 audits on the topic of water alone. We have a second guidance paper which has been developed on waste management and that is being authored now and will be approved very shortly and that is intended to give guidance on how to audit waste. The National Audit Office in the UK has authored a paper on sustainable development and that one which is also in draft form now and eventually will be finalised. So that is a paper that is basically trying to give awareness on what SD is and how our offices could audit it and then behind that - this is where the audit guide comes in - we will take those ideas which are in the plan of implementation, turn them into plain language so that people can understand them and then identify audit criteria on how offices like ours could assess performance. But it will not be prescriptive and INTOSAI is not a prescriptive organisation, it is guidance. (Mr Reed) Well, you would not have seen it because it has not been officially released by the working group yet, but I think we could easily share a copy. It is authored by the UK, of course. It gets reviewed and vetted by the entire body within an approvals process, so I think that is something that could be made available. (Mr Caccia) You have an excellent Commission actually on sustainable development and probably you have already invited them to appear before you and I cannot think of a more powerful alliance than the one between your Committee and the Commission, the National Audit Office and DEFRA. You have a tremendous amount of intellectual capital that you have invested in this issue and you have to bring it to bear in a coherent manner through your Committee's work. (Ms Gélinas) What we have said is that partnership is probably now the way to go and that was part of Johannesburg, that partnership will be the way to implement some of the commitments that were made. What we have said as auditor is we have to be careful because things are moving in a way that it is becoming more difficult to audit government because part of the task is given to partners and we cannot get to the partners to figure out if they are doing what they were supposed to do. So we need some good governance, a new type of arrangement, so that no matter what is the partnership model that will be put in place we can still hold government accountable for the results. We have thought of that for a while now and it becomes more and more difficult now to report back on what the government is doing because in many cases they will have partners who are doing the job and we cannot get there. So part of the challenge is to make sure that there are clear arrangements, that the role and responsibilities are clear, the arrangements are well know, there is transparency, as we should expect, in the government. All these elements should be put in place so that no matter what is the partnership programme that will be put in place we will be able, if the Federal Government is involved, to report back. (Mr Reed) Just very quickly, I think there are many types of partnerships. Some are directly implementing public policy, in effect they are displacing work that traditionally has been done by government, and those are the ones that we are especially interested in. If there is anything that we all collectively will need to find out as our governments announce these partnerships, I think it is to know which ones are actually displacing traditional roles of government because those are the ones you have to pay attention to, because that is where accountability in governments comes in. It is not always going to be easy to make that determination because sometimes they are announced as just good things to do and it would be difficult to know whether that partnership is actually replacing a regulation which might have been written. So I think that is the key thing that you need to try and determine, is that partnership something which is displacing a traditional government role, and if it is then you ought to be interested or we as an audit office would be interested from an accountability in government standpoint. Joan Walley (Mr Comartin) I suppose, Chairman, at least the people sitting here at the table, who are politicians, would have a widely divergent view on that particular issue. My guess would be that mine would be fairly close to Miss Walley's but Bob's would probably be significantly different. Mr Ainsworth: We will allow that to rest, I think! Gregory Barker (Ms Gélinas) The problem we are facing in Canada - and I will not get into the politics of it, I will leave that to Mr Caccia - what we are seeing at the moment is that we have different strategies. The Department of Industry had its own strategy, the Department of Environment, International Affairs, and so on, and we are wondering how we can move forward in the future if we do not know what is the big picture. John has used a metaphor to illustrate that it is like asking the partners to do a puzzle without the picture on the box. So we do not know as a country what are the priorities, what we would like our country to look like and we need something, a destination somewhere to make sure that all the strategies are moving in the same direction. They may not go at the same speed, they may not choose the same mode of transportation but at least we would like to know where they are going and if there is some contradiction in their path. So what we need is a vision. We do not have, as we speak, in Canada a priority. If you ask anybody what are the environmental and SD priorities of the government you will be lucky if you can find an answer. You may find many answers but they will not be the same and what we have asked was for the central agency like the Privy Council, Treasury Board, to help the departments shaping that vision so that each of the departments will be able to follow a path that will bring us to the same place. So we need that. We are at that stage when I am talking about a plateau. This is where we are at the moment. We need that vision. Politicians are involved in building that vision, Canadians are involved, we are all involved in creating that vision, but the political will has to be there and we are asking who is the pilot in the plane. (Mr Caccia) Usually political parties, as you know, and governments think from one election to the next. That is the pattern of democracy. Sustainable development poses the unique challenge of having to think beyond the next election and that is where your challenge is for politicians. We are not accustomed to doing that. All our efforts are usually aiming at winning the next election and then once that goal has been achieved then the next one. So in the case of sustainable development the political problem, if you like, is no longer four years or a variation to it, it is twenty, forty, sixty years, beginning to think in terms of a century. This is why your report on the reduction by 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is so remarkable because it sets a benchmark which has emerged for the first time, as far as I know at least, within the government. The White Paper I am referring to. Therefore you can imagine then the difficulty that the Commissioner faces when the Commissioner has to convince parliament to think beyond the next election while their masters are focussed on the next election and in avoiding embarrassment for the next election. Therefore, you do not want to close down the fisheries, you do not want to reduce cuts in the forest, you do not want to deny water permits to those who want to export water because it is good for a certain region, you name it, there are many resolutions that are short term and the Commissioner for Sustainable Development instead is swimming in long-term waters. Chairman (Mr Caccia) I will quote for you from page 5, item 12, of the paper that is before you, what the Commissioner has written, namely, "a new kind of deficit: not a financial one but an environment and sustainable development deficit - a growing environmental health and economic burden that our children will have to bear. We reached this conclusion based on 10 years of audit findings as well as analysis of key trends over the past decades." So this is the message that our Commissioner is giving you and us and I think that comes as close as I can come to your question. (Mr Mills) All I wanted to add is that I think it is a communication thing. As an example, I just had a professional poll done on my writing this past Sunday, "What is the number one issue for you as a Canadian?" and the result is that 40 per cent of the people identified health as their biggest concern, 15 per cent were taxes, and so it went, and 2 per cent were concerned about the environment. So the key is to tie the environment to what they are most concerned about, and that is health. So as soon as you now start talking about the environment affecting your health you now have tied it in. They do care about the environment but when you tie it to health now they really care about the environment. So that is the critical thing for all of us who care about the environment, to tie everything to what the public's number one issue is and that is their security and health. (Mr Caccia) Yes, that is fine and that is desirable and it is as Mr Mills put it, but you also have to tie the environment to the long term economy because then people will start to listen to you carefully. Most of governmental decisions are based on economic considerations and when you are talking about the economy as it will be affected by declining quality, declining trends and all other elements that you have established by the Commissioner and other sources then you can develop a pretty strong economic argument as well parallel to the health argument. Mr Ainsworth (Ms Gélinas) I can speak for my work. We have found over time that to have an impact we have to talk about things that affect people. I will give you an example of one of the audits we did last year. We have looked at fuel contaminated sites. It concerns every region of Canada. First, that is something important because we may have an impact across the country. Then we have linked our analysis with some health issues and then to get attention of another sub-section of the audience we have linked that also with economic consequences. So it is easier now the way that we shape our audit with the three pillars of what is sustainable development to avoid using the word because it is very abstract, but we also bring that to a reality for Canadians, what does that mean. This is one of the challenges we have with Johannesburg. We have to translate that event and what it means into concrete terms for everyone and that is one of the challenges we have. I have to say that overall we have very few specialised journalists in environmental, I would say probably less than five, but nevertheless the environmental group find their way to get attention and industry also are involved in some environmental issues. I would say that probably every week we have good stories dealing with the environment, from different perspectives but still the environment. Even if it is not that high when you look at the polls, on the other hand it is on the agenda. We talk about the environment. Maybe not as much as we would like to, but still. (Ms Scherrer) Maybe for those of you who have worked at the municipal level, for example, we do not use maybe the broad term "sustainable development" or "environment" and if we do some polls and ask the people what are their priorities they will come up with pieces of environment, such as waste, or they will come up with pesticides and they will come up with the quality of water, which now is for us something that we talk about in the press. So maybe because we are so used to using the broad term "environment" people do not really know what it means in the day to day living but if you come up with pieces of environment, such as the quality of water, for example, it is one priority. But for the people, if you ask them, the quality of water maybe does not go under the broad umbrella of environment but if you talk about concrete actions, concrete subjects such as waste management, for example, it is a priority. It seems that when you come up at the provincial level and the federal level environment is just something like a cloud going around and you cannot touch it really and maybe the challenge that we have working for sustainable development, working under the environment, would be to make sure that it is concrete in the day to day living and that every citizen has his responsibility. Once we have done that maybe the people will get into sustainable development. (Mr Caccia) Establish a yearly award by this Committee for the best environmental writer in the UK and the first year you will have problems in finding one but once the word goes around that there will be recognition for a good environmental writer they will begin to pay attention. (Mr Comartin) I am trying to figure out why he did not tell us that! Mr Savidge (Ms Gélinas) But not in terms of auditing. Certainly that helps us in a way that people want to know more about what is going on and will bring some very factual information that will help. Maybe one thing that we can take a few minutes to talk about is, two years ago we decided to do a report dealing with a geographical area, which is the Great Lakes, and we have looked at five different issues there and we have a report back on the environmental and SD situation in this area. John was responsible for that, so maybe that can illustrate the kind of issues that we are dealing with and how people react to that report. We get a lot of buying into our report because we were able to illustrate all the linkages between air pollution, water quality, agriculture and other aspects. (Mr Reed) The Great Lakes, as you know, border Canada and the US so clearly it is the equivalent of the air situation, that is if the US does not take action anything Canada does could more or less be muted in any event because they have a much greater concentration of industry and influence, and so on. In part of the framework of this audit we very much wanted to look at it from an ecosystem perspective and that is why, as Johanne says, we looked at issues of water but also issues of fisheries, agriculture, habitat, endangered species, as components of that ecosystem. There were more but we could not have done those. We also looked at the overall governance framework that existed in that region. There is a binational institution that oversees an agreement there. We had many, many lessons out of that piece of work but with respect to the binational component it really did drum home for Canadians, first of all if we expect the US to do their fair share we have to do our fair share and the reality was we were not meeting our basic commitments under our binational agreement. So it becomes pretty hard to try to convince another country to take action when they have not taken it themselves. Secondly, we determined that the key institution that protects Canadian interests, the International Joint Commission, was being undermined by reduced budgets and loss of scientific personnel and loss of scientific data. So it was a very different kind of audit. I am not sure that is getting to your question around the influence of the US, but it was clearly learning for us. (Mr Caccia) Going back to your experience in Toronto, it is easy to blame the Americans for this dark cloud that you mentioned but the fact is that in Toronto, where I come from, there is a very large power plant using coal and the pollution that we have is mostly generated on our side of the lakes rather than the American side of the lakes. Having said that, going now on CO2, it is for Canada going to be a major task to reduce by 6 per cent by the year 2012 based on 1990 because what happened between 1990 and now is a sharp increase in emissions and therefore we have to reduce by 23, not 25, 26 percentage points. So we are engaged in a major effort here, but it can be done. We are an energy waster. We have not yet learned how to conserve, how to innovate in energy efficiency and we have a plan now, which is quite elaborate. It was produced in October and it is also unique because it reaches out to the public. It invites the individual Canadian to do his or her share in the reduction of tonnage per year, in addition to what it is asking various sectors. So we have a long way to go but we have a reasonably imaginative and good plan and we will get there. But there is no blaming the Americans here, this is our responsibility and the fact that it is a difficult task is because of our making. (Mr Mills) I hate the Americans! I could talk a long time about Kyoto. Some of you might check the record on that one but two things regarding the Americans. First of all, Canada has exempted the automobile industry in terms of manufacture. However, because automobiles are a major polluter, the reason why we will achieve our goals on automobiles of a 25 per cent reduction is because California will. Thirty-nine states will in fact probably achieve Kyoto targets. So this concept that the Americans are doing nothing is just totally not correct because they are probably going to be the guys selling fuel cells to all of us and they are developing new windmills and all kinds of things. They are really quite into this. The other thing to remember is that where I come from we have oil deposits that are twice as large as Iraq's. Just to put that into perspective, people say, "Well, the Americans are going to war because of oil," we have twice as much oil in the Tarsans(?)as there is in Iraq, proven reserves, so it would be much easier to develop those reserves than to spend $100 billion, or whatever, in Iraq. That is another issue, but still the point is that those reserves are going to be developed and right now it takes a lot of energy to do that and right now it is natural gas that is producing that energy to produce the steam to get that oil out of the ground. Each year it is a 100,000 more barrels that come out of there. What it is going to result in because of Kyoto, I think, is we are going to go to nuclear and we will develop nuclear plants which will provide the energy to get that oil out of the ground. Is that what we wanted to achieve? From a public perspective, I think it is going to be a hard sell but if you want to sell that oil, that huge reserve, you have got to have energy to get it out of the ground and where are you going to get it from? Well, either you are going to put more CO2 into the air or you are going to use nuclear. (Mr Comartin) I cannot let that go by! You can imagine we have had this debate once or twice, several thousand times! Bob does make a good point and we do agree on this, that it is really the Bush administration, not the American public and certainly not the state governments. The state governments in fact, as Bob says, in most cases the majority of the state governments are going to meet what would be their Kyoto requirements by 2010/2015, which is very positive. But the problem with the cross-border air pollution is a major problem. I come from Windsor and I am right across from Detroit. I get all of the air pollution which comes up from the Mid-West in the United States, which is the industrial heartland of the United States still. So it is a major problem and it is one where - we go back to why we are here - the effect it is having on us is one that we are seeking some relief from the Federal Government, much as you did when you were on the receiving end when you were damaging the fores tries in Norway in the 60s and 70s because of the amount of coal and the sulphur in fact that you were sending across, the whole acid rain problem. We have begun to work on that with the Americans at the Federal level. Unfortunately, the Chancy Report on the use of energy in fact encourages the operation of coal-fired energy plants. So that situation is going to be a real deterioration. It is one again where we go to what we are here about, that Commissioner will in fact, I would think, be documenting that on an ongoing basis. Bob has the same problem on the western end of the country with plants being built in the American side that are going to increase not only CO2 but we are going to be getting benzine and mercury and some of the other really toxic material moving across because of prevailing winds. (Mr Comartin) I personally am having some involvement because there is this issue of the way the wind blows through the area you are at. We do have those coal-fired plants on our state. The State of New York has initiated law suits in the past and has one going on right now that we have actually participated in, both the provincial government, Ontario, and the Federal Government participated in that action and it was resolved and then the Bush administration just before the holidays, before the turn of the year, changed the regulation and in fact opted not to enforce. So the State of New York has now opened up a new law suit, so I am having some direct contact with the Attorney-General of that state. So we have those kind of contacts. Some of the other members of this committee were in Washington last January when we met with parliamentarians from Europe, both the Senate and Congressional Committees, and our committee was in Washington. That was mostly around climate change. (Mr Mills) I can add too that on the western half of things, just to put it into perspective for distance, from where I live I am one hour from Seattle, two and a half hours from Los Angeles and four and a half hours from Ottawa. So obviously we have quite a close connection to the south, sometimes more than to the east, but we do talk to them quite frequently and do communicate on issues, particularly environmental ones. Mr Chaytor (Ms Gélinas) They are revisited every three years. So we are saying that at the moment we are in the preparation of the third round of strategy. (Ms Gélinas) I will get back to that aspect later on, but at the beginning in 95 - correct me if I am wrong - the Federal Government produced a document called A Guide to Green Government which really put in place the basis of what a sustainable development strategy should look like. That has not been revisited over time, so it is the same document that the department are using to improve their strategy. Because nothing was really innovative from the government side my predecessor produced in 99 an expectation document in preparation for the second generation of strategies and there he clearly identified what the strategy should look like and which improvements should be made. It has had an impact. I was not there at the time so maybe John can add on that, but knowing that they were getting into that third strategy I did the same thing this year. I have produced an expectation document and this is probably as far as I can do beyond my audit role. It was clearly to set up what we think has gone wrong over the years. So we are the ones who have looked at all the strategies over and over again and we have made recommendations. So we have looked at what should be done differently for this one. One thing, just to give you an idea, that you should know is if you sum up all the commitments which are made in those strategies you end up by having 2,800 commitments. So it is easy for me to say that it might be difficult to implement those commitments. So one of the things we have done that will link back to the vision and the priorities was to say to Central Agency, "Set up the agenda in terms of the order of priorities so that the department in the coming years can focus on the essential commitment that they should implement and maybe put some other things aside. They don't have to have it in their strategy to do it." I mean, they can do it if ever they want. Those strategies were to be a document for change, driving change in the department, and what we have concluded last year is that they have not achieved what they were made for. So we have made a couple of recommendations, expectations more than recommendations, on what the new strategy should look like. This document is now available. It will be made public in the coming days. We have done that in consultation with the department, so it was not done in isolation. So now we have told the department what we are expecting but still they have the freedom to do whatever their want. It is a proposal. We are going to audit again some of the criteria we have put in place but still the format can differ, the commitment may be different. They have to have objectives, targets, actions - and what else? (Mr Reed) Goals, objectives, targets and actions. (Ms Gélinas) No. (Mr Reed) No, we cannot go that far. (Ms Gélinas) In their performance report the departments have to do their self-assessment on progress. In the past we have more looked at processes than results and we found out that we were always saying the same things. So we have changed our strategy and now we are starting to look at results. So that will change the approach to it and John is responsible for that so we can tell you how we are going to approach the monitoring and the reporting on those strategies from now on. (Mr Reed) We have actually done in some cases, yes. There are different kinds of work that we have done. Let me first of all address the coherence question because I do not know if we were going to get to that. There is a great strength in having individual departmental strategies and there was a prescription on how the departments were to do the strategy. They had to go through an issue scan, they had to consult the public, etcetera, but not prescriptive in terms of what needed to be in there; that was a departmental decision within the frame of its mandate. So there is strength in that on the one hand, but where there are major gaps on what in Canada are called horizontal issues - that is the term for issues which cut across many departmental lines - that is where there is an absence of direction either in the form of a federal strategy, a federal over-reaching strategy like exists in the UK, or even in the form of specific direction from the central agencies. So we have commented several times that there is a lack of coherence. Even on issues where departments should be moving in the same direction they are not. The one area where they are doing pretty well is in government operations, internal operations. Chairman: The vote has come at a rather appropriate moment. I feared it might come about an hour before but it has come at the right time because I think we can draw this session to a close. Could I thank all of you once again for taking the trouble to come and see us for these couple of days. We really do appreciate it and the evidence you have given will be extremely useful and I hope will help us in our job of making sure our government gives a proper amount of implementation to the Johannesburg progress. So thank you very much indeed. |