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Hi. My name is Julie Gelfand and I’m the federal commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. Joining me today to discuss our collaborative report on climate change is Carol Bellringer, the Auditor General of British Columbia, Michael Pickup, the Auditor General of Nova Scotia and Glenn Wheeler who led the Northwest Territories audit for the Auditor General of Canada.

I’m really pleased to welcome all of you today to this discussion on our ground-breaking collaborative report on climate change which was tabled this morning in the House of Commons in Ottawa. I say ground-breaking because this is the first time federal and provincial Auditor Generals have partnered to assess an issue of such national magnitude. Over the last 18 months, each participating provincial office completed an audit of climate change and reported its findings to its legislative. I did the same at the federal level, delivering my report to parliament last fall. The Auditor General of Canada, in his capacity of auditor of the three territorial governments, also provided a climate change report to the legislative assemblies of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. And today on behalf of all the people and offices who participated in this historic project, I have the great honor of delivering the resulting collaborative report to Canada’s parliament.

Before opening the floor to your questions, we’re going to take a few moments to review the key points we’ve raised in the collaborative report. So first, the good news, the findings from the federal, provincial and territorial climate change audits confirmed that Canada’s governments are working on climate change. All governments have agreed that climate change is an important issue and have committed to taking significant action.

So Canada is out of the starting gate. The bad news is that the work Canada needs to do is far from done. The audit work on climate change showed that overall, no government in Canada has met all its climate change commitments. Most who have set greenhouse gas reduction targets are not on track to meet them and no government is fully prepared to adapt to the impacts of climate change. In other words, Canada still has a long way to go.

As I said, most governments are not on track to meet their targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seven governments had not set an overall reduction target for 2020. Six jurisdictions have: the federal government, British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Of those who had targets, two are on track to achieve them, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Michael?

Thank you. So in Nova Scotia, au audit found that the government had legislated a 10% reduction target to be met by 2020 and we noted in our audit that this was in fact met with an 18% reduction by the year 2015 and this was all based on a 2005 risk assessment and a 2009 climate change action plan.

Canada has now set a more difficult target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. All provinces and territories have stated that they intend to contribute to reaching it. However, only New Brunswick, Ontario and the Northwest Territories have set targets for 2030. Others have set sector-based targets for different sectors of the economy and the targets are based on different baseline years. So the governments do not seem to be aiming in the same direction and the federal government did not yet know how it would measure each territory and province’s contribution to reaching this new national target.

The audit work showed that a majority of provinces and territories had developed high-level strategies to reduce emissions, but they lacked detailed timelines, implementation plans and cost estimates. In addition, many governments did not know if their planned actions would be enough to meet their emission reduction targets or they already knew that their planned actions will fall short. Carol?

Thank you, Julie. British Columbia issued a climate leadership plan in 2016 which outlined the government’s planned actions to reduce emissions, but the plan didn’t build a clean and measurable pathway to meeting the targets and it was missing a clear schedule and detailed information about implementing the mitigation plan.

Glenn?

Thanks, Julie. The Northwest Territories’ greenhouse gas strategy which expired in 2015 lacked meaningful emission targets, did not have targets for major emitters and did not have a significant impact on emissions levels. However, a new strategy was to be included in the territories’ climate change strategic framework and is to be released later in 2018.

The audit work also looked at what governments had done to help Canadians prepare for the impacts of a change in climate. The first thing governments need to do is figure out what the risks of climate change are. Our report shows that only Nova Scotia had undertaken a detailed government-wide assessment of risks. Michael?

So what we found, Julie, in our audit here in Nova Scotia was that the government did a risk assessment in 2005 and we reported that as a positive finding. However, we also noted that it’s now been 12 years since that risk assessment was done and it’s time to update that and then to update the climate change plan accordingly. Then, after doing that, it will be very important to publicly report in a full way on that action plan. We encourage the government to do this and in fact, we made recommendations to that effect. The government has accepted both of these actions and had committed to action to meet our recommendations. Julie?

The Auditors found some very good practices in specific jurisdictions, such as work that was underway to map flood plains or to address the permafrost thawing in the North. Some governments had undertaken risk assessments for individual communities, sectors or government departments. Glenn?

Thanks Julie. For example in Nunavut, the government in 2017 did an assessment looking at the risk that climate change posed to sources of drinking water in communities. It also completed an assessment of climate change risks to the territories’ mining sector including infrastructures such as road, access roads, air stripes and tailings for mining waste.

As the federal level, we found that only five out of 19 departments that we examined had assessed their climate change risks. As a result of the weaknesses and risk assessments, adaptation strategies often lacked detail and the federal government, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northwest Territories had no adaptation strategy or plan at all.

Several audit offices found challenges with coordination between departments. For example, departments that were assigned leadership roles on climate change often did not provide sufficient information, guidance and training to the rest of the government. That was the case federally with Environment and Climate Change Canada. In some cases, the lead department did not have sufficient resources nor the authority to require ministries to take specific action and on reporting, only seven jurisdictions, including the federal government, were regularly informing the public on the status and results of their actions taken to reduce emissions. Without regular monitoring and reporting on progress, governments cannot assess if actions are working as intended and Canadians cannot hold their governments to account for their commitments. Carol?

So in British Columbia, the government issued reports on progress to reduce emissions and that was according to legislated requirements, but we did find that the 2016 report had left details in the reports that were issues in 2012 and 2014 and the public reporting in adaptation has been limited.

Finally, our report provides a series of questions that Canadians and legislatures can use to keep their governments’ feet to the fire on climate change action. Questions like what will governments do to demonstrate that they will be able to reach their greenhouse gas emission reduction targets? How will these actions be funded? Or if governments dedicated – dedicate resources to adaptation actions, how will they ensure that the most pressing risks are being prioritized? We encourage you to have a look at these questions.

So why does all this matter? Well first of all, greenhouse gas emissions have yet to go down and the impacts of a change in climate are already being felt. Canadians are experiencing more severe weather, more flooding events, more intense forest fires and rising sea levels. Meeting the new 2030 target will require significant effort and actions on top of what is currently planned or in place. The pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change is a step in the right direction. It brought together key players to chart a possible way forward. What we need now is to see it implemented and now I’m going to open up the floor to your questions. Merci beaucoup, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. I’ve just been told we have over 200 people calling or listening in to us today so that is great news. Welcome everyone. I’m going to be providing the questions. I invite Julie, Glenn, Michael and Carol to take these and chime in and through the conversation, we will have a very productive dialogue. So our first question is an open-ended one for everybody. We would like to know what surprised you most in this audit work that was undertaken?

Glenn, do you want to start?

Sure, I would love to. I think from the perspective of the three teams that undertook audit work in the northern territories, the biggest thing that surprised us was the lack of an overall risk assessment for where government should focus their effort with respect to climate change. So for example, we found in pockets of that sort of risk assessment in some of the territories, in the Yukon, sorry, in Nunavut, that government looked at this to drinking water and communities. They also looked at climate change risk to the mining sector. In the Northwest Territories, the government looked at risk associated with public buildings and roads, but what we didn’t see was an overall assessment of all the risks that the territory, each of the territories was facing. That’s important because from our point of view, only by having an overall risk assessment can governments be in a position to allocate their limited resources to areas of greatest risk.

Michael?

I think what surprised me most here in Nova Scotia when we did the audit was that, you know, while it was a good story that the targets had been met ahead of schedule, the fact that the risk assessment in the plan now quite outdated in the sense of having been done in 2005 and that time is going by and those things hadn’t been outdated. That was the biggest surprise that – you know, the government has done reasonably well, they’re ahead of schedule on the targets, but missing that next step (inaudible) and let’s get everything now updated, let’s get a new plan in place and let’s report to people accordingly. So I think that – that was my biggest surprise out here in Nova Scotia.

Carol?

In British Columbia, I would say the greatest surprise was on the adaptation side. We certainly heard a lot publicly around emission targets and progress in that area, but when we started looking into the adaptation side, there are a lot of ministries that are involved with this. The more – the central ministry in the group in the climate action secretariat, they for example only had three employees working on adaptation and 36 working on mitigation. So while it was something going on across the province, lots of good action, we would have expected something more central in terms of control and leadership.

At the federal level, what I was surprised at was on looking at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, I was surprised that the federal government was no longer talking about the 2020 target and had shifted all of its emphasis to a more difficult target that we’re going to have to reach by 2030. So that was on the emission reduction side. On the adaptation side, I was surprised at how few departments had actually done a complete risk assessment. We looked at 19 federal departments and found that only five had done a complete risk assessment and unfortunately, Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada who were the organization that actually set out the adaptation policy framework telling other ministries that this is what you have to do, they didn’t actually do their own risk assessment. So they were telling everybody else what to do but they didn’t do it themselves. So those were – those were two of the surprises that we found when we did the federal audits.

So while we’re on the subject of targets, were you surprised, madam commissioner, to find or are you – were left wondering with past reports and even in this report, seeing how many targets that we have missed, that we’ve missed already, are we ever going to meet one of these targets? Is Canada ever going to meet one of these targets?

So Canada has absolutely missed every single target that they’ve set at a national level, since the 1990s and that is most unfortunate. Our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. It’s not for me to predict whether or not we will meet the 2030 target. We do have a new plan called the pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change and even if we implement absolutely everything in that plan, we’re still going to have a delta, there’s still going to be a gap between implementing everything in that plan and achieving the 2030 target.

I guess what’s most important for us to see now is action plans to implement the pan-Canadian framework and we need to see the emission curve start to bend and go down for us to have really any hope that we will reach the 2030 target.

If I could add to that, Julie, that’s an interesting perspective from the national level or the Canadian level, but what we saw in the territories is that there – even though two of the three territories had mitigation strategies and adaptation strategies, there wasn’t a lot of effort devoted to individual targets. So for example, in the transportation sector or in the mining sector and one of the recommendations that we made I think in all three reports was the importance of the territories actually sitting down and thinking through what sort of targets they should be establishing, how they would measure them, timelines. So I guess, if you look at it from sort of the ground level up, there’s a lot of work to be done in some of the jurisdictions across the country as well.

That’s interesting and I was going to say, Michael, I’m not going to ask you about meeting targets because we know your jurisdiction did, but Carol might have something to say.

Indeed and what also strikes me and we’ve seen this list, each of the jurisdictions, and certainly in British Columbia, that it will also be important to keep up-to-date with the targets. As time goes on, there will be changes and as policy decisions get made, they should be made in the context of understanding what the impact is on the plan and whether or not there needs to be a major adjustment to the plan. In British Columbia, there’s lots of conversation about – with natural gas, liquefied natural gasLNG and the impact on the plan is an important component.

Thank you. I want to remind the folks who are watching us that we are still taking questions. You can submit them online and that’s keep this interesting, so keep them coming and Carol, out in British ColumbiaB.C., I have a question for you. How does B.C. compare to other provinces and are there unique challenges facing you out west?

So I think what you’ll find, when you look at the individual reports that rolled up into the summary and into the summary itself, you’ll see many – many differences right across the country. It’s very difficult to make that comparison in terms of where exactly do we stand as compared to others. Yes, the challenges in B.C. are different. Well, each of us has unique challenges. Wild fire, draught and flood are the – are the three major risks in British Columbia and as I’ve pointed out, there was a lot of focus on mitigation, on what were the targets and there was an overall plan, too high a level, it needs to be drilled down to real details in British Columbia which as you’ve seen, is not an uncommon situation but on the adaptation side, there’s quite a lot of work still to be done here in terms of putting that very detailed plan together. A lot of – a lot of coordination needed, not only within the ministries, within governments, but also with local governments and with indigenous groups and first nations in British Columbia.

And if I can add to that, I think Carol makes an important point about coordination and in the Northwest Territories, we had a situation where the department of the environment and Natural Resources, the lead department responsible for climate change wasn’t fulfilling its leadership role. So in that vacuum individual departments and communities were actually doing their own thing and while that’s noble, without having a strong leadership function and without having a good sense of what is going on, it makes it across various departments and across government, it makes it very difficult for the government then to report back to the legislative assembly in terms of progress they’re making in combating climate change and I think one other point to make, a view way up in the north, is that there are additional challenges that you might not always see in the south. For example, in the Northwest Territories, there are 33 communities spread out over a million square kilometers. So just the logistical challenges to dealing with climate change are – are that much more apparent when you’re dealing with a situation such as exist in Canada’s north.

I would just add a little bit which was that when you look at the whole wrap-up report, you’ll see examples, I believe it was in Prince Edward Island, where they indicated that the lead department was completely unaware of what other departments were doing. So this lack of coordination was felt across the country and we felt it even at the federal level.

Thank you. As you so aptly pointed out, there were a lot of positive findings, good things happening in Nova Scotia. So I have a question for you, Michael. Since you seem to be making such good progress, what would say now are the biggest hurdles to keeping that momentum moving forward?

Thank you for the question and of course, other than having positive conclusions, I think, you know, we made three key recommendations in this report and the number 1 recommendation to me is that it’s been time for the 2005 risk assessment to be updated and for a new plan to be put in place to say what does this mean going forward? What will be the details of that plan? And what can the people of Nova Scotia hold their government accountable for along the way in that plan and what kind of reporting will the government do? So really, it is quite simple in Nova Scotia. Success to date, but not it’s time to take that success before too much more time goes by and get things updated and get moving forward on the – on the future. So it’s a relatively simply story to tell in Nova Scotia on a fairly complex issue I think.

Thank you. I have another question here for Julie, but again, everyone, fell free to chime in. Can adopting carbon budgets for Canada, the provinces and all sectors within and across provincial boundaries like those adopted in the U.K. and in France, be used to better track our progress and to hold governments to accounts?

Julie Gelfand: Fabulous question. We have not looked at that issue in detail and so what we looked at in our audits was what are the federal – what’s the federal government and what are governments doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Are they achieving their targets? Do they have a plan and what are they doing to adapt? I think that level of detail question is not something that we were able to look at unfortunately in our audit. I don’t know if any of you guys did?

I agree with your comments, Julie, that’s right.

Yes. I don’t think we can answer that. What I do think you could do is – that would be a great question to ask the department, the federal environment – Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada.

Thank you.

I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear the question.

Can adopting carbon budgets for Canada, the provinces and all sectors within and across provincial boundaries like those in place in the United KingdomU.K. and in France be used to better track our progress and hold government to account.

No, I have nothing to add from our report either.

Same here.

Alright. J’ai une question en français pour notre commissaire. I have a question in French. What are the priorities for Canada to get closer to the targets?

Should Canada tackle first in order to get closer to reaching its targets?

So, sorry, I can start, Carol, in Nova Scotia if you like, start with the – start with the later time zone. So part of the reason why I was so excited as Auditor General here in Nova Scotia to be part of this collaborative report, and knowing how well Nova Scotia fared in our report, was so that Nova Scotians can get a sense of what was happening in the country and what their role, their picture was in terms of where we were as a nation, notwithstanding any individual jurisdiction. So I think that was important to get excited about that.

And I think you know, one of the key take-aways from this collaborative report is what Julie referred to earlier when she talked about, you know, there’s a good discussion about where we are, where we’ve been, but what is probably most important now and that I want Nova Scotians to see and why I’m glad to be part of this is what does this mean on a go-forward basis. So in terms of meeting – the country meeting the 2030 targets, which, you know, are significant, what does that mean in terms of the individual players and reminding people that as one component, Nova Scotia, we’re part of a bigger scheme. So I think that was the key think and it is for me and that I’m really – why I really was excited about being a part of this and I think that the main take-away in terms of a go-forward.

Carol?

So just to add from – from the British Columbia perspective and in our report, we also outlined what we consider to be the obstacles to adaptation and one of them is the high cost. So when you get into some of the costs of these, and we’ve included some of those in our – in our British Columbia report, the dyke system for example is in the sort of $9.5 billion range, a flood would cost somewhere between $19 to $23 billion. So we’re talking big numbers. We’re talking about needing to cost those things out though, so that government can make that prioritization list. It’s not something that we can speak to. We’re not saying which should be done first, but what we’re saying is that that costing should be done and there should be that full risk assessment so the government can make those choices.

And maybe a slight variation to what – what Carol said, in our work in the three territories, what I think really struck us was the necessity of having a thorough and comprehensive risk assessment in place to identify exactly what are the most significant risks the territory faces, the territories face and only by doing that can you then allocate resources to areas of greater risk.

And the other thing that struck us, especially in the Northwest Territories, was the necessity for there to be a sustained commitment or a sustained attention. Once decisions are made and a strategy is unveiled or developed, it’s incumbent upon the department or the government to follow up on that strategy, on a continual basis, to make sure that commitments are being met and to be reporting back to the assembly and to residents in terms of progress. It’s not enough to construct a strategy and set it aside and then come back to it five years later. You really do need that sustained leadership and sustained commitment.

What I was going to add to all of this conversation is just I think what the participants in this webinar can see is what I think about this collaborative audit, almost beyond the actual report that we’re releasing today. Carol and Michael and Glenn as Auditors often – not always, but often thinking about the financial aspects of climate change, so Carol actually talked about how much diking is going to cost and how much is it going to cost if there’s a flood and to think about the value of having Auditors Generals across the country and their staff thinking about climate change, thinking about the costs of adaptation, the costs of not adapting, what are – what is it going to cost to deal with forest fires and floods and rising sea levels? To me, that’s one of the huge values of us working together and getting all the Auditors Generals across the country or most of them to think about – to think about climate change. What will it cost or are our governments ready to deal with this huge issue that we’re facing?

Thank you and speaking of what specific governments are doing, this is a question for Julie. What I have here is do you believe the Ontario cap and trade program will be effective in reducing emissions in Ontario?

So many jurisdictions have decided, most jurisdictions in Canada, most Canadians live in a jurisdiction where there is a price on carbon and there – we’ve done it in different ways across the country. In British Columbia, there’s – there’s a carbon price and in Ontario and Quebec, we’ve implemented a cap and trade system. We’ve not yet audited, I don’t believe our Auditors Generals have yet audited the – the efficacy? The efficacy, the ability of these prices on carbon to drive down emissions, but that would be a future audit that we could look at. Anybody else?

Moving on to a –

I wouldn’t add anything to what Julie said.

I have a question here at the municipal level. Climate risk assessment is an area of active works at the city level in Canada. Do you have recommendations for networking the results of that work that’s taking place, that assessment risk – that assessment of risk work that is taking place at the level of cities? How to share that information with senior levels of government so that we can achieve a cohesive national risk inventory and action plan?

So let me first start by saying I audit at the – only the federal government. My colleagues here audit the provincial governments. However, the provincial governments or the territories are much closer to the municipalities. So I think it would be best to allow the provinces. I know Nova Scotia has done some community assessments, but I think we should start – Glenn, do you want to start with that?

Sure. That’s actually something we looked at in our audit of the Northwest Territories. The department of the Environment and Natural Resources, one of its responsibilities is to provide to communities and NGOs and other interested parties the information on climate change that they can then take and use to prepare themselves for the effects of climate change and of course, in the north, those effects are much more, I could say, real. People are dealing with them now, especially in isolated communities, it’s impacting on their – their traditional way of life, their ability to hunt, to fish. So it’s very important, especially in the north.

What we found is that the communities across the territories were asking for this information, but unfortunately the territorial government didn’t have the information or didn’t have it in a way that could be of use to communities. So that’s something that came across loud and clear in our audit and to its credit, the territorial government in the Northwest Territories has committed to, as part of its climate change, to a strategic framework which it’s going to be unveiling this year, which is going to include mitigation and adaptation strategies, a way forward in terms of better sharing the information that it already has, that communities could find useful, but also identifying gaps in that information and identifying ways to – what it calls its knowledge agenda, to generate and then disseminate additional information that communities would find of great use and again, in the north, this is very real, especially in indigenous remote communities where climate change is having a very fundamental impact on folks’ way of life.

I remember New Brunswick did some community-based risk assessment. So the Auditor General of New Brunswick did that and I know something was happening in Nova Scotia as well. Michael?

Sure. Let me – let me comment on what we did in Nova Scotia and at the risk of losing webinar participants, I won’t go into a long explanation in terms of mandate as provincial Auditor General, but I would just say that the municipalities are not part of our audit universe if you will. So we’re not out there auditing municipalities. We’re very much auditing the provincial government.

Now having said that, in response to the question, I would like to say that if you’re living in a community on the Atlantic Ocean here in Nova Scotia, I think for the most part, in terms of climate change, you don’t care if it’s a municipal government, provincial government or a federal issue. You care about, you know, whether you’re going to get blown away while you’re looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and what that means to your house. I think, so having said that, in the audit, we asked the provincial government what type of work were they doing with municipalities and what we found was a positive comment. We made two conclusions. One, that the government of Nova Scotia was working with municipalities on plans and that those municipal plans covered many of the same risks and information that was required for the provincial plan.

So that was a fairly positive statement and one I think – I think, as the Auditor General, would make sense to most people sitting at home around their kitchen table, thinking about this, is that, you know, there would be some expectation that it would be considered. So I was very pleased, as the Auditor General, that the provincial government did work with municipalities and we may those two favorable comments. So I know it’s a long answer and I tried not to get into too much of that mandate stuff, but I thought it was important at least to sort of set the stage.

Carol, did you want to add anything?

Yes, please and indeed, when we did the audit in British Columbia, we ended up communicating with 33 of our local governments to ask them if there were any barriers in terms of things that they needed, an additional assistance list and there were three categories that they came back with us and it was pretty consistent right across the board. Now one of it of course is the same problem that the whole system is facing and that’s lack of financial support. So that – that always comes through as one of the considerations, but they were also looking for more reliable date and knowledge to be shared with them as well as clarity around provincial policies. So we were able to bring together the message from them to the provincial government, of course for them, for the province to look into.

At the federal level, I’ve done other audits that were not part of this report, where we did look at the tools that the federal government provides to municipalities. So we looked at things that I had never heard of before and they were IDF curves, (so intensity, duration, frequency) and this is of storms and whether or not the federal government was providing that information to municipalities in the way that they use to or even to the provinces.

We also looked at flood playing mapping which was something that the federal government used to do and we found that they were very old. So we have looked at some of the tools that do affect municipalities but the federal government is sort of a whole step away from the municipalities. So it’s a bit more difficult from my perspective to do that which is really what’s awesome about having the provincial and territorial representatives here today.

Thank you. I just want to remind everyone listening in that we are still taking questions, so keep submitting them, they’re good. I have one here form someone who is obviously familiar with our reports because they’re pointing out that we’ve provided in this report questions for readers to ask of legislatures or Canadians, for Canadians to ask and that this person doesn’t recall seeing this sort of thing in the previous auditor generalAG reports. So they’re asking if this is a new practice for our office, to provide readers with questions to hold governments to account and the second part of that is why did you all decide to go this route?

So let me start by answering and my colleagues can add. Remember that each territory and province already submitted a climate change audit with specific recommendations to their legislatures and I presented audits on mitigation and adaptation to my – to the federal parliament. In those reports, we had recommendations, we all did. What we decided in the wrap-up report was that we weren’t even sure who we would be writing recommendations for because we were sending this to all of Canada and all of Canadians governments.

So what we decided to instead was provide this tool which are questions that Canadians and legislatures can use to ask their government and to hold them to account. So we’re really pleased that somebody noticed that and we hope that you use those questions at the federal level. You can always send in a petition. We have a petition process which requires one signature, one letter and you can ask all those questions and the government must answer you within 120 days. So that’s – that’s my preliminary answer to that question. I’ll pass it over to Glenn.

I don’t want to sound offensive, but I would hope that our audits always suggest questions that either citizens or members of the Legislative AssemblyMLAs or Members of Parliament can ask of the departments. So in this particular exercise, in both the Yukon and in the Northwest Territories, we’ve had standing committee hearings on our – on our reports and in both cases, MLAs asked pointed questions to representatives from the government and in the case of the Northwest Territories, the standing committee on government operations has requested that the department of Environment and Natural Resources come back to it within a number of months with an updated action plan on what it has done explicitly to address the recommendations we made in our report. So at least, from the territorial perspective, there’s – there’s a mechanism built in for those sorts of questions to be asked and to be followed up in the subsequent months and years.

Carol, did you want to add anything?

Yes, I was going to also mention that the report that we issued in British Columbia, as similar with all of the other provinces across Canada and federally, will go to our public accounts committee meeting and they will also hold hearings on it. In British Columbia, the ministries are required to produce an action plan in response to the recommendations included in our report.

So today, we circulated the, this collaborative project to our legislature and, and they will have the opportunity to include that in the discussion. So beyond the recommendations, they’ve also got those questions available to them to answer so it’ll be an interesting process here as well, a new one, to have something that’s at a national level.

So I don’t see Michael anymore, but maybe we could hear you?

Sure. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can.

Yes, we can.

So on the issue of having questions in audits, so what we did is we started last year in 2017 on all of our audits to, to leave the reader, to leave the viewer of our videos with a few questions they may wish to ask now of their members of the legislature, of the Public Accounts Committee to their government. So we started that before this one, and it really, for me it came out of the video process we do. So for all of our audits, we do a two-minute video. And it just seemed natural to leave a few questions there that, things people could do with what we gave them.

So this is very much, you know, Julie wanted to, including this in the summer report. Made a lot of sense for us because we had started doing this and had good take-up in Nova Scotia on this last year when we began doing this.

And just to wrap up on this question, I mean, we mustn’t forget that this really is a historic report. It is the first time that all the Auditors Generals have worked together, so many of them, across the country. And so I think if people like the fact that we had questions, we can think about including that in our methodology, but please use those questions when you are asking questions of your, of your government.

Thank you. I have a question here for Glenn on the North. One of our viewers is pointing out that challenges remain in the Northwest Territories and in Nunavut in finding alternatives to using diesel fuel for heating and for power. It’s almost an impossible task for us to address this. The viewer’s wondering did the Auditors General make any recommendations back to Canada on how to help address this with infrastructure or in other ways?

There’s no way around it. Trying to find alternative fuel sources in the North is a, is a very difficult, difficult task. I know some of the territories are experimenting with solar power and other alternative forms of energy, even hydroelec-, hydroelectricity.

There’s a wind farm at the Diavik Mine. Right?

That’s, that’s right. That’s the private sector ---

Yeah, exactly.

--- that’s actually doing some very innovative work. But having said that, you’re dealing with a reality where it can be minus 40 degrees Celsius in the middle of winter and it’s not a place where you’re going to experiment with alternative heating sources unless you’re, you know, very clear that they’re going to work. That’s a bit of a long-winded answer to saying no, we didn’t make any, any suggestions to governments in terms of, of what they could be doing to more forcefully explore alternative energy sources.

But as departments across the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut are doing work to identify risk, so I would hope that they would be thinking, at least thinking about, you know, alternatives that could exist in the area of, of energy.

Carol, does any of this ring true for Northern British Columbia? I don’t know if you looked at that or not.

So, I mean, certainly alternative energy sources is a conversation in British Columbia. One of the, the northern issues in British Columbia was some gaps in the data. The, what we had found in our audit was the international standards for station density was missing in the northern regions and at high elevations.

So I mean, there are, there are different issues. I mean, the, one of the, the British Columbia aspects, and we bring it out in our B.C. report is the diversity of the province and that in itself brings a number of – you’ve got flight issues along, you know, you mentioned the floodplain maps, they are largely outdated in British Columbia and you’ve got the diking issues around, around – the Fraser River issue is different from a northern issue.

So the, it’s quite varied and certainly doesn’t, there are, we don’t make any recommendations in terms of where the energy should come from, but most certainly, it’s a conversation here.

Thank you. I have a question for federal Commissioner. In 2015, Minister McKenna encouraged global leaders to adopt a (inaudible) of limited global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, yet she has since established a target that falls short, far short of this temperature goal, which it looks like we’re very unlikely to meet. What within your findings might help us in civil society make the case for much more far reaching actions such as ending subsidies to the fossil fuels?

So, the federal target right now I think it’s too soon to say whether or not we’re going to reach that target. There are still 12 years between now and 2030. There is a new plan called the Pan-Canadian Framework. We really, you know, we’re looking to see the action plans and how that will be implemented and I think we need to give the government some time to implement some of those actions and we will be auditing this in the future.

We have already done an audit on reducing inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, which is another commitment that the federal government made on, in the area of climate change, and due to a variety of access issues, it was actually the Auditor General of Canada who released this report, we will be doing a follow-up on that report, and I believe that’ll come out in the next year or two. So, you know, we audit against federal, we audit against government commitments.

It’s not our job to tell the government what those commitments should be. That is really up to civil society. If civil society feels that the target is still too high, that’s your job, in a sense, to, to advocate for changes to policy. As Auditors and as Commissioner, all I can do is audit against whatever the government has said it will do and right now, that’s the existing 2030 target. We have audited in the past against the 2020 targets and previous targets, and rest assured our office will continue to audit against the 2030 target.

I also hope that the Auditors Generals, probably future ones because they all have time limited terms, but I do hope that in the future, say, in 2023 or 2024, that another collaborative audit on climate change is done again to give a pan-Canadian look on where we’re at, still within enough time to try to reach the 2030 target.

Thank you. We’ve lost our – oh, he’s back. Never mind. I have a question just in time for Mr. Pickup out of Nova Scotia. In your jurisdiction of Nova Scotia, what evidence was there that the province overmet their greenhouse gasGHG reduction target due to economic reasons versus the reduction seen being due to the use of greenhouse gas reduction strategies being implemented?

That’s a really, really good question because this is a complex area and of course, attribution of a reduction like 18%, that actually happened ahead of the planned 10%. Attributing that down and disaggregating that to this was because of action A, this was because of action B would be very challenging, I think, to do. And of course, we reported that that wasn’t done. We did report in our audit that the government acknowledged that in fact that would be difficult to do, but that likely that 18% reduction was the result of a number of things, and part of that would have been their action, but part of that would have been other things as well, including actions that may have happened in the private sector.

For example, if you have key certain industries that might have changed how they operate or if they operate in Nova Scotia at all, that may have impacted that as well. So there was no attempt to take that 18% and try and break that reduction down to 10, 15 key items, and there was acknowledgement by the government and we refer to it in our report that, that all of these factors would have played a role, but which one account for which was not ascertained as part of the audit or by the government.

Just a follow ---

It’s a great question.

--- just a follow-up question. Is that something that you could consider doing? For example, parsing out how much of meetings target is due to reductions in population, deindustrialization and how much is due to government actions to increase renewables in energy efficiency?

Well, I think, you know, it’s something that the government itself may look to consider as it updates, okay, what are the key actions they want to take and what do they intend as part of those key actions, to resolve? So we often talk about accountability for our action and accountability for our action, of course, is always easier when there’s some sort of measurable thing at the end of it to say we expect to do A, B and C, and as a result of A, B and C, we expect these things to happen, i.e. certain percentage reductions or things to go in a certain way.

So you know, we’ll leave it to see what happens as the government takes our recommendations from the audit and they look at updating the risk assessment and they look at updating a new plan and what that actually means, and, and we’ll stay tuned. We’ll be back. We did this audit in 2017, we’ll be back to follow it up for reporting in 2020 to see what has actually happened with what we recommended.

What I wanted to say on this issue though is that this is something that we found across all the reports, all the audits, were that governments had not clearly identified for action A, how many greenhouse gas, you know, greenhouse gas tons, megatons, would be reduced. They had not actually done that calculation. So it’s really government’s work to do that work and then we can audit against it.

But the other thing that we’ve heard we need to be concerned about, or that governments need to be concerned about is making sure that the, that the different actions that they take are coherent amongst each other so that you don’t have one action and then another action that kind of contradicts it. So that’s the analysis work that the government has to do and then we can go in and audit against it.

Can or did the Auditor General look at the impact of carbon pricing on decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth?

We did not look at that specifically. Again, what we looked at in our report, we looked at four areas. We looked at how they were going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Did they have a plan? Did they have a strategy? We looked at did they have a plan to adapt? Had they assessed their risks around climate change? We looked at coordination within each government and we looked at reporting out to Canadians. So we did not look at that in particular.

And remember that again, we were working with Auditors Generals from across the country. Some are very large offices and do many performance audits. Some audit offices are very small. And so we had to pick questions that would be common across all the, the audit offices and that everybody could participate in. So that level of detail unfortunately, we did not do.

Thank you. I have a sector-specific question here. The first one, you’re being asked please talk about your findings on adaptation and mitigation in the agriculture sector across provinces. In particular, are there special protections and supports for families of farmers who are (inaudible) the most vulnerable climate change and the burdens associated with a transition to a low emissions production?

Wow, great question. What I can say is that I know certain provinces did look at agriculture in the sense that their governments had said that they were going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions coming from the agricultural sector, and the one that comes to mind is Manitoba. But the Manitoba Auditor General was not able to find any more detailed information on how that was going to occur. But that is the level of detail that I’m aware of that we did in terms of our audits.

Anybody else? Carol?

Just that we, we did include, we did look at some activities within that ministry and our audit. That one of the examples we included in our report is something, it’s the Farm Adaptation Innovator Program. It was a $1.7 million program in British Columbia and it was looking at farm practices approaches, technologies around weather risk. So that was an example we include in our report.

I would add in our adaptation audit, we looked at 19 federal departments and whether they had assessed their climate change risks, and what we found was that Agriculture Canada was, and Agri-Food Canada was one of the departments that had not looked at their risks.

An interesting question here. Someone is asking about the cost of inaction and specifically, what kind of analysis, both either in terms of mitigation or adaptation, did you happen to come across in the course of the audit work? Was it actuarial analysis, insurance industry? And also, what level did you see this, federal, provincial, municipal, neighbourhood? Is anybody looking at what it’s costing to do nothing?

You want to start?

Sure. I’ve got a bit of an example from the Northwest Territories. I guess it was about 10 years ago when the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources was asking questions about how it could lead in climate change. One of the issues it was bumping up against was trying to cost inaction versus, versus action. And it committed at the time to doing some analysis in that vein. But that was about 10 years ago, and unfortunately, 10 years later when we were finishing up the audit, they still hadn’t done any work in that area.

But they were making noises as we were finishing to, to trying to do some basic analysis in terms of the cost of action, cost of inaction and I think that, it’s a good development from the point of view that the government has to make some difficult decisions about where they’re going to be focusing their, their limited resources and more, the more information they have, the better in terms of making those decisions.

That’s not easy work to do, but I think the, the Government of the Northwest Territories deserves some credit for at least starting to turn its mind to trying to quantify some of those, some of those issues.

I would add that that’s one of the real important reasons why you have to identify your risks.

Yeah. Yeah.

You need to know what the risks are before you can figure out what, what, what out of those risks is going to cost us in fact if we don’t do anything?

That’s right.

And what are the risks going to cost us if we do try to adapt and deal with them? So it actually is, it screams for the reason why we need to know what those risks are and the fact that at the federal level, 14 out of 19 departments had not assessed their risks at a, across their mandate to me is a weakness at the federal level.

Carol or Michael?

Well just, I mentioned before that we did have the information in our report around the flood risks. It was the Fraser River flood was costing – I already gave these numbers – but between $19.23 billion and the diking along Metro Vancouver shore and Fraser River shore would be about $9.5 billion. So there is information in, in pockets, but certainly we would agree that that costing out of the risk is an important one.

So in, in Nova Scotia, to directly answer the question, we didn’t get into the issue of costing inaction in this audit, but I would point out, and why I think that climate change or any environmental matter are important beyond this climate change audit is that just before we did our climate change audit here, we did another audit called Critical Infrastructure Resiliency in Nova Scotia. And for webinar participants who have been fortunate enough to travel to Nova Scotia and through Nova Scotia would know, you know, a couple of key pieces of our infrastructure that we pointed out in that audit that hadn’t been considered from a climate change risk perspective.

It was the link that joined the way you go from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia. Essentially, if you’re driving, there’s one piece of land that you would go through, and also then our link between Cape Breton Island and the mainland of Nova Scotia. And we said in this Critical Infrastructure Resiliency Audit that the climate change risks around those two key pieces had not been considered.

So if we say okay, what is the cost? Well, you could imagine the cost to life, including the economy and day to day living if something eventually happens to those pieces of infrastructure that impacts not only a direct cost to fix it and do something about it, but also the opportunity cost, the loss cost of what happens if those things were not fully available. And we gave those two examples in the Critical Infrastructure Resiliency Audit that we did. And that is another benefit I see of doing this collaborative piece, that is, as an Auditor General and as a team here, we can think of these issues beyond this standalone audit that we’re doing here cause it impacts so much of how we live.

I was going to add that earlier, another audit that we did was on municipal, on the funding of municipal infrastructure. So there was a gas tax fund that was at the federal level that was supposed to be given to provinces and territories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, clean water and clean air, and when we talked at the time to Infrastructure Canada, they told us that in fact, climate change wasn’t even part of their mandate.

So we are, you know, we, we made the recommendation that they should think about that, particularly now when we’re looking at major investments in infrastructure.

Well then you know Julie, it’s interesting, there’s almost a pay me now versus pay me later aspect to some of this, and actually an example of that is in the Northwest Territories and in Nunavut where the government has put in place thermosiphons around buildings to try to prevent the thawing of permafrost. There, it’s quite an expensive technology not only to install but also to monitor. But if they don’t do that now, buildings will further degrade and it’ll be additional issues and it may very well cost, you know, exponentially more to, to retrofit or otherwise fix those buildings down the road.

So there’s an example where, you know, the, the costs are significant in terms of installing thermosiphons and maintaining them that maybe you’re saving money in the longer term. I mean, those are difficult calculations to do, but I think in the environment that we’re dealing in, I think those, that’s the sort of thinking that has to be done.

Why it’s great to have accountants helping us out. (laughter)

Oh Carol, Carol had something.

Well, now that you’re on the infrastructure conversation, it was another example of good practice that we included in our report was within the Ministry of Transportation and they were taking a proactive approach and we did see that they had estimated and ranked their risks that we reviewed. They were incorporating the requirement that climate change be considered in all of the design work. So there was a lot of work being done there that was good.

I have a question here from someone who’s in the North who’s pointing out that part of the challenge in the North is that climate change is not driven by the actions of people who reside in the North, it’s coming from the rest of the world. So all the information territorial governments provide local residents on local emissions doesn’t help with climate change. Have the auditors generalAGs identified this as an area in which the territories need help?

That’s one of the things we, we noted in our audit of the climate change in the Northwest Territories. The Northwest Territories is responsible for only 0.2% of total emissions in Canada. So they’re really a major – a minor emitter. But they suffer disproportionately from the, the effects of climate change. So what we try to say in our report is that, that it’s important for them to focus on both areas. Yes, of course, on the mitigation side, but given the reality of the North and given the potential and, you know, I guess, real impacts of, of climate change, they really do have to focus, you know, their resources on adaptation because what’s happening in the North is happening at a much faster rate than, than the rest of Canada, and they don’t have the time, if I could say it that way, to be waiting around.

An interesting, I mean, the question comes at the whole issue of do the Territories maybe need, does the North need support? The area of thawing permafrost is a great example. You know, it’s not a case of where thawing permafrost, that issue stops at the Northwest TerritoriesNWT-Nunavut border. That’s an issue across the North and it’s an initiative that the federal government has identified. NRCan and Transport Canada have identified that as well.

So that might be an area where maybe the federal, provincial and territorial governments need to get together and think about – and this isn’t really in our audit reports, but think about a way that they can address permafrost, thawing permafrost in a more coordinated manner because the impacts are only going to get, you know, larger as we go forward. And the person that asked the question is, you know, is dead right. That may be an issue, thawing permafrost that is greater than any one jurisdiction. And it’s probably in, you know, everybody’s best interest to be thinking about, for some of these fundamental issues, a way that people can act together to, to try and better prepare and adapt for the future.

And we did find that in Natural Resources Canada and Transport Canada in particular when we looked at the adaptation issue.

Yeah. Yeah.

Someone wondering about the transportation sector in Canada, which is a big contributor to the production of Carbon DioxideCO₂. They were wondering whether the provincial Auditors looked at electric vehicles, cars, trucks or buses or any alternatives.

I’ll start by saying one of the examples that we found where we were saying that there wasn’t enough detail was in New Brunswick where the plan to reduce emissions from, greenhouse gas emissions, the plan to reduce those emissions included putting 20,000 new electric vehicles on, on the road. Again, we didn’t see any detail in New Brunswick. There was no detail on how, who, when, how are they going to develop the infrastructure. So we used it in our report as an example of a lack of information on that part.

But are any other, anybody else want to deal with that?

I don’t think so.

Okay. Someone is pointing out that only Ontario, New Brunswick and the Northwest Territories have 2030 targets to reduce emissions. They’re asking how come the other governments are failing for all intents and purposes?

That’s a great question. Why do, I mean, if you read something called the Vancouver Declaration, which was a document that all the federal government, the federal government and all the provincial and territorial governments signed onto, it’s very clear that they’ve all signed onto to the 2030 target. And so we went in to find out if in fact they all had 2030 targets and we found that they didn’t. So that is a great question to ask your government, how are you aiming, it feels like we’re all aiming for different things.

Even if they do have a 2030 target, they may be based on a different baseline year and, they may be based on a different baseline year or sector-specific and/or economy-wide. So the targets are all kind of different. And so it does lead to the question of how are we, how are we as a country, how is Canada as a federal government and provincial and territorial governments going to get to 2030 if the participants, the provinces and territories don’t all have a 2030 target?

I have someone else asking here of B.C. whether using forests as carbon sinks is really a viable way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So that, that certainly included in, in the plan, but it has to be part of the full plan. It can only, it can only be one element of it. So what I, what I get nervous about when I hear some of the, the mechanisms that government is putting in place to reach the target is it becomes too focused on one thing. But certainly, there’s a, there’s an issue there.

The, the other – there are disturbances that are also taking place within those forests, so it’s not as simple as saying the, the sinks can solve the problem and that we found that there wasn’t enough focus on potential change. So there, there are, the other issue within the forestry sector is there are a number of fuel treatments that are required and they’re not taking place within a, consistently across the province or within the highest risk areas.

So the forest sector does have a number of issues, but, but I mean, there is no question that, that there is some potential there as well to contribute to improvements as well as some risks that need to be taken into account.

Thank you. I have a question here that’s addressed to all the Auditors General.

Do you have any examples of audit reports that your offices have done that speak to federal, provincial coordination and that could provide a blueprint or a positive example of how coordination can happen across provincial, territorial, federal jurisdictions in the way that climate change coordination must happen reduction and adaptation targets?

Wow.

I mean, we, at the federal level, we look, we, my remit is to look at the federal government and we did look at funding that the federal government gives in terms of infrastructure spending and how the provinces dealt with that.

It is clear that as a federation, this this is a difficult country to manage and govern, and it’s a difficult country to audit because we all have different legislation and different mandates. But I think that the collaborative audit on climate change gives us a great blueprint for thinking about, together about other issues that we should be auditing in the same way.

So as we need to collaborate more and more on a variety of issues, I think auditors also need to learn– and we’ve learned a lot in this project– we need to learn how to audit collaboratively as well. And I think this gives us a great blueprint.

And I think, Julie, we’ve done it in fits and starts and here in the Office, we’ve done audits where our federal audits complemented provincial audits in the area of child and family services, in the area of treaty implementation in B.C. So we’ve done it on occasion.

Yeah, and small, like maybe one.

One-offs.

One, or one province or one territory, right?

That’s right. And you know, I think if it’s done right, it has some real potential because then you’re able to, to paint a more, I guess, fulsome picture of what the issues are.

And you put it well, I mean, in Canada, you know, the jurisdictional issues are, are always–

–Messy.

–they’re ever present.

And messy, and messy, that’s right. And it makes auditing them difficult but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to be doing it.

And I think you’re right. This is an example of where, you know, we were able to come together and, and you know, individual legislative audit offices, you know, paint their own pictures, but together, you know, it paints maybe a larger picture of what the issues are. So it can be done.

I think so. Before I pass it to my colleagues, I would say we would have to think about how we even resource it ourselves because we haven’t… it took a lot of horsepower to coordinate, you know, all the jurisdictions and that’s not something that even within our office we’re, we’re necessarily used to doing. And so we would need to think even ourselves about if we continue to coordinate, what’s the resourcing for our own, for the audits that, and for those kind of collaborative audits because it does require more time to do collaborative audits and it requires quite a lot of collaboration and background work that nobody really can see but that Kim Leach, who is our principal responsible for this project and her team just did, you know, yeoman’s work, is how I describe it. They just went above and beyond. But you guys want to add anything?

So, I can start. I think that the, the short answer to the question of can you think of examples in your jurisdiction that may have pointed out good examples of this happening, I’m not recalling that, but I don’t think that is because we have found lots of examples of it.

No, I think it’s because in most cases, it’s not an element of an audit that we would have added.

So if you think of, you know, a province like Nova Scotia, where you know,

60% of the expenditures are probably health care and education, it is very much audits that we do on the delivery of health care and education some that, you know, may have component of a federal element, but not necessarily sort of at that level of delivering the service.

So it doesn’t always come up. So it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just necessarily doesn’t always come up as we pick our, pick our audits.

Now having said that, I would give an example where we pointed out in our Critical Infrastructure Resiliency audit where the province, they really weren’t aware of the national strategy on critical infrastructure that was put in place and that was a fairly significant part of the audit and one that we pointed out to say there needed to be better cooperation.

So it’s not in fact an example of something that happened well, in terms of that, but it was an example of where it was relevant, we considered it and unfortunately in that case, it wasn’t done well.

Carol?

So just reflecting, reflecting back in time, certainly we’ve been talking about doing collaborative audits or elements of collaborative audits right across the country. We meet as legislative auditors, we have an annual conference of legislative auditors and a performance audit symposium where that is a topic of conversation. We did one quite a few years ago now on Pharmacare and it was something– I don’t believe all of the provinces participated but some picked it up a little later. We didn’t do it all together at the same time, and this one, even, even with climate change, there was an 18-month period from the start to the finish. So I think we’re getting that, we’re getting the time band narrowed and getting things out closer together, which is, I think, has, it has a great impact.

But as pointed out, there are a number of times where we’ve done audits, not all of us, but some relevant jurisdictions have worked together. There’s been a lot of work in child welfare. Certainly, as provincial auditor and not just here but also in Manitoba, we all often look to what were the implications and what was the coordination with the federal government and we did one on treaty land entitlements there and I believe one was done in British Columbia where it was a joint effort by more than one office. So it’s done from time to time.

The other aspect of it that I, that I wouldn’t minimize is we often look to do comparisons of what is going on in other jurisdictions when we write a report on our own. And so we can take in some facts from those other jurisdictions. But I agree that looking for opportunities to do a joint audit that we can all do together is, is, that is very powerful.

A bit of a follow-up question here, and to segue us back into the topic of climate change: You say that all jurisdictions are sort of pointing in different directions when it comes to climate change. The question is have they ever shown that they can point in the same direction?

Well, this is the first time we’ve audited collaboratively, so we, we don’t have another benchmark in terms of the past. We’ve been auditing climate change at the federal level for many years, and as we indicated earlier, we have yet to meet a target. When we, when we audit adaptation, we find out that most federal departments are not ready. So our history is not great, but we’re hopeful for the future and we’ll continue to audit this topic.

I have a question for you about Alberta. A listener who is concerned about the lack of an explicit plan by Alberta and the federal government to phase down oil and gas extraction as this sector has the fastest growing emissions. Certainly flying blind on oil and gas will undermine other, or overall mitigation efforts. What has the AG recommended to remedy this?

We haven’t looked– well, we haven’t made any specific recommendations on that sector. We had, we did do an audit on the environmental monitoring of the oil sands. We did that collaboratively with the Alberta government. But again, we don’t set the policy. Our job is to audit against the policy. So if the government decides it’s going to build a pipeline or if it decides it’s not going to build a pipeline, if it decides it’s going to support the oil industry or it’s not going to support, our audits can only go up against what they say they’re going to do.

So we’ve audited, inefficient fossil fuels are supposed to be taken out of the system by 2025. It’s a commitment the government made. We can audit against it. The government has made commitments to reach targets in the past, 2020 and now 2030, and we can audit against it. So unfortunately, the audit tool can’t do everything. The Commissioner can’t do everything. She’s restricted by the audit tool and the audit tool can only audit up against government commitments.

Just want to point out to our folks listening in, we have about 15 minutes left. So if you have a pressing question, now is the time to submit it. This next one is someone– I like this question because it’s someone who’s action oriented– they’re asking how can civil society drive the various jurisdictions to collaborate? What can people do to move this?

So I would start by saying we’ve given some questions that you can use to push each of your jurisdictions to achieving the commitments that they have made.

As well, all, most of the governments across the country have signed on to the pan-Canadian framework. Not all, I think there’s one that’s still an outlier. So as members of civil society, you can ask your governments what are they doing to implement the pan-Canadian framework? How are they working collaboratively with other provincial– provinces and territories? What are they doing to achieve the targets and to get ready to adapt? So really, I, you know, it’s, all we can do as auditors, is audit up against the commitments.

The Pan-Canadian Framework is now a commitment, provincial, territorial and the federal government– federal auditors can audit against those commitments. That’s what we can do. And what you can do is keep asking your government questions about how they’re going to do that. And that’s within, between jurisdictions, within individual jurisdictions–

Yeah, there’s more.

–when the government puts out a mitigation strategy or an adaptation strategy and in those strategies, they commit to reporting periodically to the legislative assembly or to their citizens, and that doesn’t happen, I think that’s an occasion where concerned citizens can say well hey, there was a commitment in that strategy to be reporting annually or biannually or whatever, and we’re not seeing a report. What’s up? We want that information. So maybe that’s a place to start and, and if individual jurisdictions are providing that information, then I think almost by definition, there can be more cross polleni-, pollination between jurisdictions. Any of my provincial colleagues?

I think the only thing I would add to that, and it’s a question, I think, I tend to get asked a lot after an audit, and I would suggest that people look to the members that they elect into their legislatures to say, you know, what are you doing to promote what’s important to me? What are you doing to hold the government accountable?

A key aspect of that in most of our jurisdictions would be the Public Accounts Committees. These are in many of our jurisdictions and in other, in some places, it’s different, it’s a different committee, but for many of us, particularly in smaller jurisdictions, it’s the Public Accounts Committee who look at the auditor general reports and hold the government accountable

Call in the government folks to say "what are you going to do with this?" To me, that is a key aspect of our democracy. It is so important and I think people can engage with the members who are on the Public Accounts Committee, or similar committees to see if they’re bringing these things forward. So if for example, in my view, this type of stuff like collaborative report, other environmental reports, never end up, you know, in front of these key committees, then people have questions to ask why. Why aren’t the committees considering it?

So happily here in Nova Scotia tomorrow, our Deputy Minister of the Environment will be before our Public Accounts Committee at a two-hour televised public session to talk to the results of our climate change audit and three other pieces of environmental work we did, to talk about what her department and government is going to do to address these things. And I think that is so, so important on any of the work we do, including this environmental work.

Carol?

So I’ll just, it’s a bit of a repeat from what was already raised earlier in the teleconference. The questions that are included in the report are good ones. They’re on pa– oh, I’m not sure I’ve got the final version of the report in front of me, I think it’s on page 25. And a lot of questions do, do end up speaking directly to the collaboration efforts. The other thing that I would point people to in, in terms of the report itself is the response from the Deputy Ministers of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, and it was a joint response which in and of itself does point to the collaboration, and there’s a lot of references within their response to their commitments to coordination and collaboration. So those are the areas that I would, I would recommend that anyone looking to what questions should they be asking of their government members. But that’s a good guide for what to look for.

Thank you. Down to last couple of questions here and we’ll let you guys off the hook. But I have somebody who’s interested in knowing what it was like to work together across the country? (laughter) Can you tell us a little bit about your experience?

Yeah. Sure. It was, it was not quite herding cats, but pretty close. (laughter) You’re great cats. So I would say overall, the spirit was positive. Generally, it was easy. The collaboration was quite good. Remembering though that we had offices at different levels and different capacities, so as the coordinating office, we had some expertise in-house. We’ve done this before so we were able to provide key documents to help everybody else and everybody else helped each other as well. So generally, I would say the experience was positive. Now, as a classic Auditor General thing, we are going to be doing a very formal lessons learned, which is something that Auditors Generals encourage departments to do and we do it ourselves. So we will be having an organization come in and interview everybody involved and providing us with lessons learned so that when we do this again, say, in 2023 or 24, we will be able to learn from the good things that we did and any of the things that we can improve. Anybody else want to add?

Maybe just to add that, that in some ways, working collaboratively makes the audit process a bit more difficult or it takes longer to do the work. But on the other hand, I think we sort of fed off each other and that when one jurisdiction would ask a, sort of a different or off the wall question that the others hadn’t thought about, it sometimes gave us pause and made us go back to look at our, in our individual audit work and see if maybe we had fully addressed that particular question for that particular issue in a, an adequate way.

So I think maybe sort of the, that interplay between audit offices was helpful in terms of making individual audit products that much better. So I think, you know, it was a net, a net gain even though it was a lot of work. (laughter)

Michael?

I would add, I would add that when we started this 18 months ago, you know, I had a full head of hair like Julie and Carol. (laughter) and, but now I don’t. So that should be a sign. No, not really. Two key things that are important to me from this. One is just, you know, sort of putting on my Nova Scotian and Canadian hat is to say you know, I’m now in a small office. I mean, we are in Auditor General’s office of 35 people, one of the smaller ones in the country. I came from an office, I spent 25 years at the Auditor General of Canada with some 600 people. To me, you know, it didn’t matter because the issue was so important, climate change. It crosses the whole country. It’s important to us all. And while we may be a small jurisdiction in Nova Scotia in terms of our office or in terms of the number of people we have, certainly being on the Atlantic Ocean, climate change is very important to us. So this issue to me, was that important that we had to find a way. The other thing is that it demonstrated to the people in smaller audit offices in the legislative audit community that we can work, you know, with bigger offices and that it can be a two-way street and where our folks can learn from others, but also some bigger offices can learn some of the economies of approach that smaller offices have in terms of being able to get things done. And coming from Atlantic Canada, where all of the audit offices are smaller, I found it was important for all of us and our teams to be able to see that and then to build lasting relationships so that environment, environmental matters are an issue that are on our mind, even as we finish these audits and we move onto other things. And I think we’re going to benefit from that in Atlantic Canada.

Carol?

Thank you. I think there are a number of dimensions to where we were able to both share and contribute, but also learn. And, and there was, the level of the Auditors General themselves and a group of us were part of a small committee that discussed some of the matters that came up and you learn about what’s going on in other jurisdictions in other ways. And Michael, I’ll throw out kudos to you. You do a lot of great work in communicating the results of your audits in, in Nova Scotia.

And, and on the, the next level, I’d say, you know, the staff that were working on the audit itself and developing the framework for the audit and then working it through and then at the tail end, working on the final report, it’s been – I’ll speak for them – it’s been a great opportunity for them to again both share and learn in the process. And, and as we go forward, I think there are going to be a huge number of benefits to seeing how we can use parts of the model to apply them to other audits.

I’m not sure that any of us are ready tomorrow to get that report out again. (laughter) We’ll need a little bit of healing time and then, and then we’ll be ready to go again.

Yeah, what I can say as I know we’re wrapping up is that I’ve been working in the area of environment and sustainability for 30 odd years, more than that, both in the government, in the private sector, in civil society and now as an Auditor, and I did send everybody an email at one point just thanking everybody for their contribution to this really important and significant issue.

And one of the lines I used at the end is that future generations, this is important for future generations. And so to the staff of all your audit offices, recognize that this work was really important, historic and future generations will thank all of you.

Thank you. As we have, we’re wrapping up here. We’re down to about our last few minutes, so I’m going to ask each one of you quickly to give us a few last parting words. What’s your big take-away on all this?

Michael, do you want to start?

Oh sure. Okay. So firstly, thank you to everybody, and I think, you know, what the two main take-aways I take out of all of this work is the, the great story that is told in terms of getting a sense of where we have been across the country. So what has happened to get us to where we are and where do we currently stand, but even more importantly, I think is what that means for the future. And I think, you know, Julie referred to it in her opening and I think it really is the key, as to say what happens now?

You know, I like to say, you know, on all of our audits here in Nova Scotia that, you know, that’s great that we did this audit, we made these recommendations, or we came up with things and government may have accepted them but that is really only the starting point and it’s really, you know, what really is important is what comes through after that and the follow, the follow-up after that.

So that’s why it’s important here. I know in Nova Scotia, that we’ll be back in two years to follow-up the commitments that the government has made here in Nova Scotia to, to our recommendations, the three of them. So I look forward to that as well, but mainly I want to say it was a, it was an exciting process. It was a very worthwhile process and I’m even closer to my colleagues today than I was 18 months ago, and, and that’s a good thing. Thank you.

Carol?

So yes, thank you to everybody and for, for leading us through this, Julie, to you and your team.

The, and, and as Michael pointed out, and there’s that starting point that it’s now, you know, we actually also look to the process that we, that the whole audit undertook. In, in British Columbia, we were working with six ministries, so it was a, it was a complex undertaking from coordinating it from that perspective. But it was certainly a very positive experience between our staff and the staff of those ministries. And we’ll be, we’ll be watching that going forward.

We speak truth to power, but we also appreciate that change can only really take place by those public servants who are, who are committed to making that happen. And so we work very carefully to, to maintain our independence, but at the same time, to appreciate that we can help them with the facts that we’ve derived, the way that we bring it together. It will be going to our Public Accounts Committee meeting as well in British Columbia, not this week. This week, they’re covering grizzly bear management and rural nursing at our Public Accounts Committee meeting, but climate change, I believe, is the next one on the list.

And so both, it’s a real collaborative effort in seeing change happen amongst the elected officials, the public service and then the audit function. So, so this has been a fabulous extension of that, as you add in the complication of all of the various jurisdictions. So thank you for, for allowing us to participate.

A couple of minutes.

And I think maybe just to add to that, Julie, from the perspective of those of us here at the office that audit the Territories, we’re used to auditing social programs, health, education, income support, child and family services, all which are very, you know, serious issues in the North that, you know, require attention.

I think what my colleagues and myself took from these three audits we did in the Territories, they did the climate change, is just the, the, how critical the issues are and how urgent the issues are, and, and how it’s important that territorial governments act now in order to address the impacts of climate change for a multitude of reasons, but in particular, for those individuals living in remote isolated communities, often indigenous communities who are the forefront of dealing with climate change.

I think they would say it’s about time that maybe the rest of us understood what it is that they’re dealing with. And I know having spoken to several MLAs in the Northwest Territories that represent indigenous communities and who are indigenous, we had a standing committee hearing in Yellowknife on, in January on our audit in the Northwest Territories. You know, the sentiment they expressed was it’s about time that everybody took this issue as seriously.

So I think for we Auditors in the office here that do the Northern audits, I think that was the biggest take-away.

Awesome.

I feel like I’ve already made my final statements, but so on behalf of all of us, thank you very much to all the participants. This is the first time we’ve ever done anything like this. If you have any feedback, please provide it to us. I’m not sure of the mechanism, but you can always send the Office of the Auditor General of Canada an email. Tell us whether you liked it, whether we should do this more often, etc.

So thank you to everyone for participating and for the whole team here, all your teams across the country. Thank you. Merci.