Proceedings of the Subcommittee on the
Boreal Forest
Standing
Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 7 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Monday, April 21, 1997
The Subcommittee on Boreal Forest of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:04 p.m. to continue its study on the present state and future of forestry in Canada as it relates to the boreal forest.
Senator Doris M. Anderson (Chair) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chair: The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry began a study of Canada's Boreal Forest with a fact-finding tour to the western provinces last fall, and we are now hearing witnesses from various government departments which deal with forestry issues, industry associations, and various other groups. The fact-finding tour last fall revealed a number of concerns about forest management, the role of the federal government, and the long-term sustainability of forestry in Canada's largest forest system.
Today we are delighted to have before us Mr. Brian Emmett, who was appointed to the position of Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development in June 1996. I wish to introduce as well Antonine Campbell, who is the Director of Parliamentary Liaison for the Office of the Auditor General and the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.
I understand you have an opening statement, Mr. Emmett.
Mr. Brian Emmett, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development: I have made available copies of my first report to Parliament, and I have also made available copies of a prepared statement which, you will be relieved to know, I do not intend to read. I will, however, speak extemporaneously on some of the key points in my first report and in my prepared statement.
The first report is obviously important from my point of view. It does not contain a great deal, if much at all, on the issue of forestry per se, but I thought it important to me to get off on the right foot and to communicate to Parliament my understanding of my mandate, my work plan, and my priorities. I wanted to ensure that the direction I was setting for the new work that Parliament had asked me to undertake, in conjunction with the Auditor General, was in the right direction.
In looking to the future and in setting my work plan, I started by asking myself two key questions. The first is, why do we have a commissioner in place today? Why was one appointed? My answer is that there are underlying concerns about the performance of the federal government with respect to environmental issues. Those underlying concerns were prominent in the public, in the environmental community, and amongst parliamentarians. They were reflected in a promise in the Liberal Party's Red Book to create an independent auditor general for the environment, and they have shown up in a number of places over a long period of time. In the investigations I did for my first report, I found that many of those concerns were well-founded by the record and that remedial action is needed.
The second question I ask myself from time to time is the office is called the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, not simply the Commissioner of the Environment. I think that is a reflection of an understanding that Canadians want three things: they want an economy that is well managed and that performs well in a conventional way; they want high standards of environmental quality that are seen to be improving; and they are concerned about equity and fairness issues, particularly about the fairness of the legacy they are leaving to future generations. The title of Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development reflects an understanding that Parliament wants someone to focus on the environment and its connection to the economy.
In putting my first report together, I did not do any new work; rather, I reviewed a large body of existing work. I relied on three primary sources. Internally in the office of the Auditor General, I reviewed 42 reports on the environment and environmentally related issues. I carefully went through the transcripts of the deliberations of the House Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development which focused on a number of these issues, and I also used the material prepared by the OECD in its environmental performance review of Canada. One of my last jobs in the Department of the Environment was to go to Paris and defend Canada's performance in a round-table bear-pit session.
Looking at these reports, the basic finding emerges that I here repeated again and again: as Canadians, we have good intentions. We have a role in policy development that is creative, innovative, and recognized world-wide. However, there are problems with respect to management and implementation.
I have noted three main issue areas in the report. One is that far too frequently we fail to do what we say we will do. We have good intentions, but we do not live up to them. In the report, I called that the implementation gap. People have picked up on that phrase quite frequently in the past two or three months.
The second thing I noted is the frequent failure of departments to work together on issues that can increasingly not be confined to any one department -- a failure to coordinate and to work happily together. In doing the research, I read the report of the Crombie Commission on the Toronto waterfront. That report had a big impact on me.
When I went to graduate school in economics, I was taught that the market did not always work and that it failed to deliver on some values of society, particularly environmental values, and that a major role for government was to be a solution to environmental problems.
The Crombie Commission indicates, with respect to the Toronto waterfront, that the problem is that there are four levels of government. The result is confusion and paralysis. It creates a system in which no one can do anything creative and positive. Everyone can stop something, but no one can start anything. At the end of the day, the biggest problem to environmental progress on the Toronto waterfront in particular is government.
It was a bit of a shock for someone trained as an economist who spent a life in policy development in the federal government to see my basic training turned on its head. Government goes from being the solution to being the problem. To anyone who is concerned about the role of government and its creative role in the solution of major problems for society, those sorts of comments must be a major concern.
We have failed to do what we say, we coordinate poorly on horizontal issues, and the third thing is that reporting needs improvement. That is a bit of a dry phrase. Often we talk about indicators and so on, but, to put it simply and bluntly, bureaucrats in general do a poor job at communicating with parliamentarians and overseeing environmental and sustainable development issues, a particularly user-friendly activity. Often the language can be jargon filled, and often the focus is on complexity rather than simplifying issues. Not only do we need to define results better, not only do we need to measure better, but we need to report better in much more comprehensible ways.
I picked out two main consequences of these three major problems. First, the environment suffers. Second, and more important to me in terms of my job, people are becoming disillusioned with government and its performance on the environmental file. The government's leadership position and its capacity to lead on the policy agenda is in danger of eroding. It is a leadership role that was won at great cost and effort. It is easy to lose, and, once lost, it would be difficult to get back. As a former policy person, that concerns me greatly.
We can do a number of things to deal with the concerns I raise in the report. First, we need to be clear about defining what business we are in as departments and what business I am in as the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. We have the mechanism for doing that in the sustainable development strategies that are now required from departments of the federal government.
Second, we need to be much better at results definition measurement and regular, understandable reporting. Again, the results definition is something that should be addressed in the sustainable development strategies we are expecting this year, so the sustainable development strategies offer us a vehicle for dealing with these concerns.
Third, having defined the business we are in and having become better at results definition and so on, we need the capacity to learn, and that is something the Auditor General's office has developed expertise in. We can apply things like auditing tools and institute value-for-money auditing in order to learn from our experience and apply that to perform better. The reviews of the sustainable development strategies and the other studies and research projects we will be undertaking will help us learn from our experience and apply that to future performance.
The fourth thing we need obviously is the capacity to change. One of the most interesting things about the sustainable development strategies is the requirement that they be renewed every three years. That provides us a regular period over which they can be reassessed, where we can learn from experience, and where change can be incorporated. It would be an evolutionary process of getting better and better at understanding the sort of work we are in and how the environment, economy, and sustainable development fit together.
I see my role in this as helping Parliament examine the record of the government and hold it to account. I offer two new tools with respect to the ability to manage the Public Service: the sustainable development strategies and the obligation created in the act that created my position and myself as commissioner and my colleagues who are working with me.
In addition to helping Parliament, my role is also to help the public assess the government's performance and to hold it to account. One of the reasons for the existence of my job is a perceived lack of sensitivity with respect to the federal government concerning Canadians' environmental preoccupations.
I also see my role as one of potentially working with departments to strengthen capacity and to improve tools to make complicated decisions to measure things that are difficult to measure and to report clearly on things that have proven a challenge in the past. I have worked on these things them myself in the past, and they have proven a challenge, not because people have lacked diligence but because they are difficult to do in many cases.
I hope that taking that three-pronged approach -- helping Parliament, helping the public, and helping departments improve their capacity -- will serve Canadians, help improve the environment, and support the leadership role that I believe the government should continue to aspire to. We have the talent, creativity, and energy to achieve what Canadians want to achieve, and that is sustainable development. In some cases in the past we have lacked the focus on the management side of the equation -- the will, the patience, and the discipline to work through these difficult implementation issues to meet the challenge of sustainable development.
Those are the central messages of my first report in a nutshell, and I would be delighted to elaborate on any of these point or take any questions you may have.
Senator Taylor: As the Chair will tell you, I have been agitating for some time to have an environmental ombudsman or the equivalent working with the Auditor General's office.
I am always worried when people talk about sustainable development. It was a great buzz word three or four years ago, but now I am beginning to think it is going toward the negative side.
When you talk about sustainability, do you evaluate the values of biodiversity the forest? We are particularly interested in boreal forest here. Are you delving into the other needs that the forest supplies for us in game and wildlife and native rights and native use? It is the home for 400 of our 500 aboriginal bands in Canada. How do you factor that into sustainable development?
Mr. Emmett: This is a major question. Sustainable development is incorporated into the title in the act. I have worked in the environment field for a long time. I worked in it in 1973 when the watch words were "limits to growth" and not "sustainable development." Personally, I prefer sustainable development for a number of reasons, although I find it, as you say, in danger of meaning so much that it loses its meaning.
When I worked with "limits to growth", I found it to be a term that brought with it connotations of difficulty and choices that were hard or impossible to make. Dr. Brundtland did a huge service to the world by refocusing the debate with a phrase that brings with it the promise of solutions; the promise that we can have high levels of environmental quality and levels of environmental quality that are improving; that we can take into account issues of equity at the same time and that they are not necessarily mutually incompatible. In fact, if you look at them properly, they are mutually reinforcing.
My own view is that the sustainable development is difficult to define precisely, but I would rather be directionally correct than precisely wrong. I like "sustainable development" because it has a bridge-building connotation to it. Particularly as defined in the act, it has a broad definition, including the integration of economy and environment, equity between current and future generations, equity and fairness today between people of different income levels, and aboriginal peoples. Those are difficult issues.
My attitude is to make a list and begin to deal with the things that I feel I can deal with now and then move into the more complicated ones as I get a handle on some of the ones that are easier, although that is a relative term. Integration of environment and economy is first on my list, and then I would want to move into concepts of equity, fairness, the distribution of environmental quality and of income over time as we develop the capacity to do so. It is a long-term proposition. This idea of fairness is integral to the concept of sustainable development.
Senator Taylor: I am also involved in First Nations or aboriginal rights, and I an concerned that people are standing around watching the fire burn and worrying about saving certain things, but no one is at the whole. In other words, we talk about how many trees we can cut and how much paper we can produce. I think you will be looking at the forest as a carbon sink and how much it cleans our environment.
There seems to be, perhaps because of provincial rights or something, a loathing by federal departments to issue any edicts on the environment because that in turn impinges on provincial economic development, whether it is mining or trees. Even now, you are talking about getting out of the fisheries.
Are you and the Auditor General's department brave enough to go out and cite these things and say, "Look, this may be a constitutional battle or a jurisdictional battle, but, whether you know it or not, your trees are disappearing and your game and your natives are losing cover"? It is a difficult question to ask you because you have just started, but do you think your mandate is good enough to go in there and cull these things and say that they may be constitutional and jurisdictional problems but these things are happening, or will you stay back and just go where you think the federal government has a right?
Mr. Emmett: You have raised another extraordinarily difficult issue. It has arisen before, and obviously it arises in my own mind as my interpretation of what my mandate is and what we are comfortable with and what would be brave and what would be foolhardy.
My view is that it is like the issues of coordination I mentioned earlier. Very few issues are confined to one department, and the same applies to jurisdictions. Very few issues apply to one jurisdiction any longer. In many cases, some of the problems we have with implementations are problems with jurisdictions getting along with each other and working effectively together.
I certainly see the role of the commissioner as being one of looking at problems, describing them as completely as we can, and pointing them out. While our mandate is confined to the jurisdictions of the federal government, in many cases the problems will require higher levels of cooperation between jurisdictions if they are to be solved. I see having the capacity to look at problems, discovering a lack of federal-provincial cooperation which prevents solutions from being reached, and describing that as a problem. I do not see a legitimate role for the commissioner as being one of being particularly prescriptive in that area. There is an area where political decisions need to be made and an area where I can make a contribution.
Senator Taylor: I can see you are not wanting to be prescriptive, and I may have to check my dictionary again, but I think you are in a position to be "proscriptive". In other words, you could say that we are in danger. You do give the prescription, but you tell us something will die if we continue doing this. It is not your job to prescribe but to tell us what is happening.
You mentioned climate warming, and this is an interesting topic. When I look at Canada, and perhaps it is because I am an engineer and an exploiter myself, most of the exploiting and developing that is done today is done by the provinces. I am not saying that the federal government should have the right to go in and tell Saskatchewan that they cannot clear-cut that much, or tell P.E.I. they cannot farm that much, but I do think that the public of Canada is looking towards your position -- you may not realize what huge expectations we have of you as being part of the Auditor General -- as that of an environmental ombudsman. They want you to sound the warning. They want you to let them know when the codfish is running out and the trees are leaving, what our ozone layer is, but not to pose the prescription.
In the short time I have been in Ottawa, I have seen a general timid attitude, perhaps because of the fights we have had with Quebec in the past several years over provincial rights, to even announce something as not looking too good for fear that we will hurt feelings, even on something as small as manganese or gasoline. The provinces all have an axe to grind, and 15 jobs in Nova Scotia may be gone, but the point is that someone must announce these things. Do you look at your job as being there to analyze what is dangerous to our environment, what is dangerous to our way of life, and devil take it as far as whose responsibility it is?
I forgot to mention the third factor in this, which is business. We must deal with business and provincial and federal governments.
Mr. Emmett: From my point of view, our mandate begins with the federal government. In some sense, most of the issues you touched on in your question are typically handled these days in a complicated manner. Many items involve either international agreements on environmental issues or international agreements on trade issues which are negotiated by the federal government. That is a federal mandate. Those in turn create commitments for Canada.
My observations have been that Canada frequently does not live up to those commitments, and frequently that is a result of failure of coordination either between departments or between jurisdictions. Certainly I see my job as establishing an inventory of our commitments are and establishing the areas where we are not living up to our commitments, determining the extent to which the environment is suffering because of that and why it is suffering because of that, whether it is a failure to coordinate or failure to implement at the federal level or failure to work together between the two levels of government. I must try to establish the reasons and go on to make recommendations as to how they can be fixed in a management sense. I do see myself as looking at sounding alarm bells where I can on environmental issues.
Senator Taylor: I will get into something more specific. You mention that, when you get a petition from the public, you will pass it on to the department that is responsible, and you said you had a time line on it.
Mr. Emmett: Yes.
Senator Taylor: "Ministers are required to respond to petitions with a set time period." Is that an arbitrary thing?
Mr. Emmett: No, it is not. That is specified in the legislation, and it is 120 days.
Senator Taylor: That is good, because I am sitting on a committee now where the Mounties have been able to dodge answering a question for ten years.
Mr. Emmett: There is a time line in the legislation which, in my experience, is probably quite ample for the way most things are handled.
Senator Taylor: Do you audit timber resources? As you know, there is much argument about annual allowable cut and what timber we have out there to cut. The fortunate thing is that the corporations are arguing there is enough timber there to last into the next millennium and the provincial governments argue that there is enough turning into the next millennium. No one is saying that we might run out of it in this millennium. Is part of your duty to review the annual allowable cuts as announced by the provinces and compare that to what is actually taking place?
Mr. Emmett: We have not done that. I did a quick review before coming over today of what the Auditor General had done before my arrival. The last value-for-money audit of the forest function was in 1993 when the federal role in forestry was quite different than it is today. This was updated in 1995 at the point where Forestry Canada was being folded into Natural Resources Canada. Therefore, most of the audit material we have is out of date. At the moment, I do not have it explicitly on my work program. We will be receiving from Natural Resources Canada, like all the other departments, a sustainable development plan, and I expect that will deal with their plans for forests as well as other parts of their mandate. We do not have any audits on the forests or allowable cuts or those sorts of issues scheduled over the planning period, which would be for about the next five years.
We expect forests will play a significant role in the review we are just beginning now of Canada's climate change commitments and policies.
Senator Taylor: Could you elaborate more on the climate change?
Mr. Emmett: Climate change is an area in which it is difficult to be specific since, as you know, it is a very large issue, a mega issue, which involves major scientific and economic questions. We are just at the beginning of it. I am learning this rapidly, since I do not come from an auditing background. I was accused in my former job of always taking the view from 60,000 feet. I find that when you do auditing work, you must get down from 60,000 feet quite rapidly in order to audit questions.
On climate change, we are probably still at a fairly high level. One of the first things we are planning on doing is having a seminar in Ottawa on May 21 to bring people together, followed by a meeting of an advisory committee to help us choose ,from the whole universe of issues out there, the ones we will focus on. Clearly the role of the forest -- its role as a potential sink for carbon, its role in climate change -- is a candidate for a closer look, but it is a difficult to say right now exactly how we will structure the issue and the questions for further detailed examination.
Senator Taylor: Dr. Michael Apps spoke to us about climate change, and he came out from a different direction. I thought I would just pass it on, or perhaps we could even send it to you, because it was intriguing. He was arguing that climate change is already taking place and that it will affect the forest. In other words, we have always thought about the forest helping climate change, but will we have a forest as we know it if it will not be a certain type of tree? We also have the so-called movement north in order to accommodate the warm climate. It cannot be done here because we are right up against the Canadian Shield and there is no soil on which to grow the trees. It was rather intriguing. Perhaps we will send it to you. You might find it interesting because it approaches climate change from the opposite side.
Mr. Emmett: I would be delighted to receive that.
The Chair: We will see that you get it.
Senator Taylor mentioned that you are somewhat of a watchdog for the environment. I have always thought that the Auditor General was a watchdog for finances and everything else about the government. Do you really see yourself as a watchdog on the environment?
Mr. Emmett: Since my job description calls me the Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainable Development, the answer to that question poses a bit of a challenge to me. I will try to answer it in full, if I may.
The idea of sustainable development always involves ultimately achieving a balance between environment and sustainable development, or an integration of environment and sustainable development. In some ways, it is captured by speaking to the men-in-the-street surveys that are done from time to time on the Canadian attitude. People are asked whether they would prefer to have a clean environment or a healthy economy. The people surprisingly, I think, show a sound, solid, intuitive understanding of sustainable development. They tell the polster to go away and that it is not a valid question because there is no reason we should not have both.
In the long term, that is my attitude. Sustainable development means that we should be able to have both and that, over the long term, we will be able to integrate. In the short term, the creation of the commissioner is a recognition that Canadians have been dissatisfied with the environmental performance of the government, not the economic performance per se. If one imagines the long run being an equilibrium of balance, in the short run I will place much more emphasis on the environment. My own observation over a period of many years in Ottawa is that the economy has many people to speak for it. It has many people to speak on its behalf.
For the foreseeable future, for my planning period, which is about the next five years, I expect to be focusing on environmental issues and talking about the need to manage better on the environmental side and to define our results better on the environmental side. In some ways, it is linked to an economic agenda because I do not see any reason not to import the language and concepts of good business practices into the management of environment issues.
We can learn a lot from that, and we should learn a lot from that. We can use those tools in order to progress. In the near term, I see putting the emphasis on the environmental side of the equation with the idea that, over the much longer range, we will try to achieve some sort of equilibrium.
Senator Taylor: Perhaps we could borrow you for a few minutes over in the Energy committee -- I notice you are a propane user -- to get more propane being used in government cars.
Mr. Emmett: I do a little bit of work on that.
Senator Taylor: Do you drive a government car?
Mr. Emmett: No, I do not.
Senator Taylor: I was going to ask whether it was fuelled with alternate fuels.
Mr. Emmett: The Auditor General has a very large fleet of one car.
Senator Taylor: But you make sure it uses propane equipment.
The Chair: I found the background paper quite interesting. You discussed the Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm 25 years ago, the Bruntdland Commission 10 years ago, and the Rio de Janeiro Summit or Earth Summit five years ago.
I also was interested in the 60 or so items listed in your report that you have been considering. It seems to me you have been rather busy since last June.
Mr. Emmett: I have a very good staff that has helped me out quite a bit.
Senator Taylor: I notice that Atomic Energy of Canada is mentioned in there. I sponsored a bill which splits atomic energy into the selling portion and the research and development portion. Have you any auditing of waste disposal, for instance, on the books, or would that come under you?
Mr. Emmett: I do not believe we have plans to do anything on the nuclear side in the foreseeable future with respect to the commissioner. The Auditor General himself is looking into terms of costing liabilities and so on.
Senator Taylor: The Energy committee went on a tour last year of the Government of California and the Energy Board of California. We met with the Los Angeles environmental authorities and heard about their free market system of marketing pollution rights. Would that be something you would do in the future, investigate a free market system of handling the pollution or cleaning up the environment? They auction off the right to put NOX and SOX and COX, sulphur, nitrogen, carbon compounds, into the air and then reduce them down.
Mr. Emmett: Yes.
Senator Taylor: Is that on the back burner?
Mr. Emmett: I understand that those are currently traded on the Chicago Stock Exchange.
Senator Taylor: As well as the San Francisco Stock Exchange.
Mr. Emmett: That is something in which I am personally interested, but I see that more as a policy issue. Departments need to take that on and come forward with suggestions.
Senator Taylor: That would be prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Mr. Emmett: That is a creative area for someone to examine, and certainly there is American evidence to build on.
The Chair: In our trip out west in November, one of the concerns that came forward was about the adversarial nature of environmental assessment hearings. We heard from many sources about the inadequacy of environmental assessment as a forest management tool. We also heard about the reluctance of the federal government to apply and enforce its own laws. Do you see a role here for you?
Mr. Emmett: Yes, I do. This is an area I find interesting generically and specifically with respect to environmental impact assessment. I have four business lines in my five-year plan. Those concern value-for-money audits and green accounting, sustainable development strategies, and the petition function.
Within the value-for-money accounting, one must set priorities as well. In general terms, it is most useful to concentrate on the value-for-money side and issues that are related to environment economy decision-making, because those are things which set the tone or the terms and conditions for making trade-offs throughout the economy. Therefore, the most fundamental work being done is work on decision-making tools.
They rank highest on my three priorities in the value-for-money area. A close second are the major issues. Canadians are interested in things like climate change and ozone depletion and so on, and we will be looking at all those. The third area is more value-for-money applied to program delivery issues. They are all important, but we must establish priorities these days.
That is a long way around saying that, of those decision-making tools, the one we have under active study is the environmental impact assessment agency and act and how well it has been working. That is scheduled to report in the fall of this year. We will be coming forward with a view of the extent to which it is or is not working, in quotation marks, and I think working from my point of view means whether the assessment system leads to decisions that are better for the environment or not. We are still in the investigation and examination phase, and the results will be available in the fall. It is a high priority with me.
The Chair: That is good to hear.
Senator Taylor: You might have opened up something. Your position or job is sort of a substitute for having an environmental ombudsman. However, an ombudsman can blow the whistle any time he sees something that is environmentally wrong or damaging. The Auditor General, being an accountant, has a tendency to once a year get out a huge pile of books and immerse themselves in them and then come up with a thunder and lightning report.
Will you be stuck in that method of reporting after the fact of something being wrong, or will you be expected or do you consider part of your mandate to blow a whistle any time during the year that you see that something environmentally dangerous is happening?
Mr. Emmett: That is a question I had not really thought of. The Auditor General these days reports so many times during the year that there would be only a brief delay. He issues up to four reports each year, one of which will be a green report. I would have the capacity to bring something forward in another report if I wished. I do not think the question of delay is a significant one.
Senator Taylor: Do you consider your job similar to ombudsman? If someone was out taking a walk with their dog or out hunting and noticed a great deal of pollution from a mine or a mill, or something floating down the river, and if they phoned a 1-800 number and told you that this has happened, would you consider part of your job to be taking complaints from the public?
Mr. Emmett: Taking complaints from the public is part of the job through the petitions function, and I pass those on to ministers. On the other hand, I do read them as they go by, and I do see my job as being sensitive to what is on the minds of Canadians. As those complaints are routed by me to ministers, I am certain that over time they will influence my work program and the selection of topics that I intend to examine.
Senator Taylor: If someone phones in and says that in a river in Northern Alberta or in Labrador, or perhaps even in southern Ontario, something is polluting the water, or it could be polluting the air, do you have anyone to check on it?
Mr. Emmett: I believe I could do anything that the Auditor General could do in his area. Since my position rests within the Auditor General Act, I would have the capacity to look at those issues as long as they are within the mandate of the federal Auditor General.
Senator Taylor: Your budget is not restricted?
Mr. Emmett: We do operate within a budget framework, but there is the possibility of looking into a number of things. We try to set up a work program in advance that will focus on the issues that are of priority for Canadians.
The Chairman: The Canada Forest Accord commits Canada to maintain and enhance the long-term health of our forest ecosystems. We discovered on our western tour that there was concern about the slow pace of the provinces to move from the concept of sustained timber yield to sustainable forest management practices. Would you have any comment on that?
Mr. Emmett: At this point, I would only be commenting as a citizen since we have not undertaken any investigation. On this issue, my view would be as valuable as anyone else's, so I do not have anything to add.
The Chair: We must have you back later.
Mr. Emmett: I would hope to see things like this dealt with in the sustainable development strategies we will be receiving beginning tomorrow. We expect to see three of them tabled in the house tomorrow: Environment Canada, Public Works, and Agriculture Canada.
The Chair: All these papers you have submitted are helpful, and we will likely see you again.
Mr. Emmett: I would be delighted to return any time.
The committee adjourned.