Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 6th, 2010

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Do I have any time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thirty seconds.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

I will let someone else take over.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Lévesque.

We will now hear Mr. Bevington, who has seven minutes.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Madam Fraser and everyone else, for coming here today.

I am very interested in your report. And certainly for people in the Northwest Territories it was very significant at this time, because of course we're going through a process now in which the federal government is looking at regulatory changes.

One of the regulatory changes that has been proposed, and which seems to have some weight within the government, is to actually condense many of the boards into a single board. Now, within your paper you seem to indicate that the regional boards are working effectively. I think for most people in the Northwest Territories, when you propose opening up land claims to make these boards into one board, there are some real stop signs that go up for people.

Is it your impression that the system we have in place now with the regional boards is effective in dealing with the situation?

[Sheila Fraser]

Chair, I'd perhaps like to start by saying that we don't actually evaluate the effectiveness of boards or in fact any programming. We can only look to see whether they do those evaluations themselves.

This particular audit was a follow-up to an audit that we did in 2005 on the various boards. On the co-management boards, we had found a number of problems with capacity, with lack of clarity around decisions they were making, and in fact with what seemed to be seemingly contradictory decisions. So we recommended at the time that the federal government needed to intervene to help build the capacity to support them, because many of them, as I'm sure the member is quite aware, are small and would often maybe not have a lot of projects and then would get something very significant that they would have to deal with. So it was to build the capacity of these boards to be able to deal with often very significant projects.

In this audit we looked at the recommendations we had made and the commitments that the department had made at the time, and we found that they have actually done a lot of work to support the boards. Now, that doesn't really get at the question of whether the boards themselves are effective. That's quite a different issue. But we have seen quite significant progress on the questions of the roles and responsibilities, strategic direction, and how they are carrying out their work.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Okay.

In your report you talked about the environmental process in the Northwest Territories. You talked about the regulatory system protecting the environment. But really, the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act is much more than that, because the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act provides communities and people in the Northwest Territories with the ability to at least comment on the kinds of issues that would be most likely in the provincial regime.

Section 115 deals with “the protection of the social, cultural and economic well-being of residents and communities in the Mackenzie Valley”. So when you speak of the environmental regulatory system, you speak mostly of the environment. You don't speak of the other part of that act in terms of how effective it is at delivering that for the people of the north, or how that is working. Because that certainly is the unique aspect of the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act.

[Sheila Fraser]

Again, I agree. We didn't look at the social or cultural impacts and how those were being protected. Our audit was much more focused on environment. And again, we didn't go into an evaluation of the effectiveness of the act. That would be something that INAC, actually, would have to carry out, in conjunction obviously with communities and the territorial government.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

But you agree the environmental regulatory system in the Northwest Territories is designed to do much more than just look at the land and water.

[Sheila Fraser]

Absolutely. We looked only at the environmental portion of that.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

When you talk about the economic development programs, perhaps if you wanted you could get into a little more detail on that. Was there any sense of why the programs were not being judged for effectiveness, why there wasn't a system in place to do that?

[Sheila Fraser]

This is not an uncommon finding in our audits, that for many of the programs, especially programs that have been established for quite a while, the objectives were often very general at the time they were set up. There were not clear performance indicators established. I think we'll have to see over time. There is a new policy that all direct program spending is supposed to be evaluated over five years, which will be coming into effect in 2013.

So if that policy is respected, then for all of these types of programs there would be effectiveness evaluations done to help managers decide if they are meeting the objectives, or if improvements have to be made. But often it goes back to actually the establishment of the objectives, and we see that one department, HRSDC, did have fairly clear objectives and performance indicators, whereas INAC did not. So that's something they should be working on to improve over time.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Out of the environmental assessment process, many times there were objectives for industry. You didn't actually go into that detail, where you would look at what came out of the environmental assessment process that laid out patterns for industry to follow in terms of its development. Did you assess those, or is that another matter?

[Scott Vaughan]

Chair, that would be another matter. We looked at the regime and the structure of the regime per se. We didn't look at specific environmental assessment procedures and whether or not they created then a clearer road map for industry.

Going back to your related question, what we did say, in the areas with the settled land claims, is that an important and critical component of the well-functioning co-management boards was the degree of public participation and clarity, and, as the auditor said at the beginning, in terms of who was to be consulted, and if they were not consulted it created delays for industry and the project approvals.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bevington and witnesses.

Now let's go to Mr. Duncan.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Thank you very much.

Welcome to the committee.

It probably has not escaped your attention that the Minister of Indian Affairs was in the north this week. A major reason he was there is that the regulatory system in NWT has become a reason for investors to vote with their dollars to go somewhere else. This has become a concern and a refrain that is reflected in feedback we get from the local politicians in NWT, and our own department recognizes it as well. That's a backdrop to much of what we're doing.

Part of chapter 4 dealt with monitoring cumulative impacts on the environment. There was money in Budget 2010 for that activity; of course, Budget 2010 came out after chapter 4, very shortly thereafter. That was more formally announced this week when the minister was in NWT. More importantly, the minister has appointed a chief federal negotiator to lead consultations and negotiations on structural changes to the land and water boards as part of the work to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, Northwest Territories Waters Act, and Territorial Lands Act. These are all significant and major changes since your work was done.

As a result of the economic action plan, obviously there has been a lot of stimulus spending in the north. We're getting feedback right now that some of the little economic activity actually being generated in big parts of NWT is a result of government stimulus spending, and that this could actually be a much worse picture than it actually is if you look at other sources of investment. There is definitely a need to make some changes, so I congratulate you on pointing it out and offering some direction in that regard.

I'll come back to where I originally was going to start: why did the Auditor General pick NWT? You had three northern jurisdictions. First, how did you get there? Once your office has done a study such as chapter 4, do you actively continue to follow up, or is it just the next time? Consequent to that, is there some kind of report card or not?

[Sheila Fraser]

Thank you, Chair.

I'll let my colleague think about why we picked Northwest Territories and answer that question.

I appreciate the member's having provided an update. This work for this chapter was completed in November of last year; obviously there has been a lot of new development since then. I would also reiterate that we don't look at effectiveness of boards and things. That is really a policy decision on which we would not comment. Our only mention of the boards here was to say that we did a follow-up on the 2005 audit and found that the department had actually met the commitments that it had made previously and had provided much more of the needed support to the boards.

Our usual process in doing an audit is that when we have recommendations and the department responds and agrees with us, they will usually produce an action plan that will say specifically how they are going to address the issues raised. Depending upon the timelines that they themselves establish, we will go back and do a follow-up audit at some point in the future. It could be two or three or four years from now. There would be some sort of monitoring or understanding of what's happening, but we don't track in great detail all the progress the departments are making. For purposes of our own performance report, we get an evaluation from them once a year as to progress that's being made.

I know we wanted to do some work in the north and we wanted to do a joint project between our INAC team and the commissioner's group. I'll let Mr. Campbell answer the question of why we picked the Northwest Territories.

[Ronnie Campbell]

Thank you very much.

We chose the NWT for a couple of reasons, one being that we thought it was a much bigger task to include all three territories with their different regimes that play there. We did want to focus in part on the relationship among those various pillars, the settlement of land claims, the regulatory regimes that would be put in place, and the capacity of aboriginal people to take advantage of that economic development. In the NWT, of course, there is so much activity on land claims settlements that we thought it was an opportune time to do that.

In addition to coordinating with the Commissioner of the Environment, we also ordered the audits of the various territorial governments. Our audit team responsible for the NWT is about to table a piece that has some relationship to the work we were doing. All the stars sort of lined up there.

We had also fairly recently completed some work on the Inuvialuit final agreement and its implementation. We had an audit team that had some knowledge of the structure and environment in the territory, so it made sense for us to do it that way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Just a final comment, not a question.

Just on the record, we agreed with all the recommendations of your report. I just wanted to put that on the record.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

It's on.

Now we are going to go to our final round. Members, I think what we'll try to do here, if it's all right, is maybe try to stick to three minutes. That will allow us to get a few more questions in with the remaining time.

Mr. Bagnell, you have three minutes. Then we'll go back and forth, to get as many in as we can.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

When we were in government still, the program put in $500 million for cleanup of federal sites in the north. In that you're doing the environment, did you look into how that is going at all?

[Sheila Fraser]

That wasn't specifically part of this audit, no.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Okay.

I'm interested in oil and gas, both on land and in the water. Rather than me asking a question, does anyone have any comments? Do you have any involvement, in that they are obviously related to the environment? Then I'll ask my questions.

[Sheila Fraser]

The commissioner can talk about some of his upcoming work.