Brian Emmett, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Mr. Chairman, I welcome this opportunity to meet your Committee to discuss the management of federal contaminated sites.
Contaminated sites can lead to contamination of ground water, they can take valuable land out of more productive use, and they can threaten human and environmental health. They can also lead to potentially significant financial liabilities for the government. First, the government will ultimately have to come up with the money to discharge these liabilities by either remediating or otherwise managing the risks posed by these sites. Further, the ability to develop a comprehensive and credible estimate is a good test of whether the government is really serious about managing its portfolio of contaminated sites, thereby preventing future contamination of federal lands.
This is not a new problem. The government has known for a least a decade that it has a serious problem that requires a comprehensive solution. The first and critical step in implementing such a comprehensive solution was the creation of a complete inventory of federal contaminated sites. The government recognized this need as part of the National Contaminated Sites Remediation Program (NCSRP/1989-1995). Environment Canada started to compile an inventory of federal sites. In 1995, our Office reported that the initial list of some potentially 1,200 contaminated sites was incomplete.
Ten years after the start of this Program (NCSRP), the federal government still does not have a complete picture of the potential risks to health, safety and the environment associated with its approximately 5,000 contaminated federal sites. As a result, it is unable to assure Parliament and the people of Canada that it can address these risks. It also does not have an accurate picture of the related liabilities.
An underlying reason for this situation is the way the government has chosen to manage its contaminated sites portfolio. In our view, federal contaminated sites should be managed as a whole; that is, the government should establish priorities for action beginning with the most hazardous sites first, then proceeding to relatively less problematic areas.
The government has disagreed with this approach. It argues that each department has the responsibility to manage its own sites as part of the department’s overall mandate. While I understand the basis for this approach, in practice it results in fragmentation. This means that the government’s contaminated sites policy is captive to each department’s priorities, level of interest and expertise. Furthermore, it does not guarantee that the worst problems are dealt with first. What is missing here is the sustained, central leadership necessary to ensure individual departments work to the same set of priorities and the same timetable.
At the hearings held by this Committee on 17 February 1998, Environment Canada described its previous work with the National Contaminated Sites Remediation Program and its involvement with interdepartmental working groups. The Treasury Board Secretariat described the Board’s commitment to implement an accounting policy that, if followed, could result in a consolidated estimate of the government’s environmental costs and liabilities, as at 31 March 1999. Clearly, these are worthwhile initiatives. Today, there are no commitments to provide the sustained, central leadership necessary to develop a coherent and consistent government-wide approach to managing federal contaminated sites.
In December 1998, I reported the results of my follow-up work on the initial recommendations in Chapter 22 Federal Contaminated Sites – Management Information on Environmental Costs and Liabilities. The December 1998 follow-up chapter reported that during the months subsequent to your Committee’s hearing on the management of federal contaminated sites, the required central leadership had not been forthcoming from either Environment Canada or the Treasury Board Secretariat. The government continued to be unwilling to develop and implement a government-wide timetable. No one organization believed it had overall accountability for providing central direction required to establish a government-wide timetable that had any real teeth. A comprehensive environmental policy had yet to be implemented in a consistent way across government. Minimum standards of due diligence had yet to be defined and put into use across all departments.
There was, however, some sign of movement on the central leadership issue. The Treasury Board Secretariat, in its official response to the follow-up work, made a commitment to effective government-wide management of all aspects of real property, including contaminated sites. At the completion of our work, what remained to be seen was how this commitment would be translated into the sustained central leadership required to solve the problem of the management of federal contaminated sites.
Today, after a decade of intermittent and fragmented effort, Canada’s largest landlord is still far away from being able to provide Canadians with a clear, unambiguous statement on when all the potential risks to health, safety and the environment posed by federal contaminated sites will be properly managed. But this problem is solvable. There is broad agreement about what has to be done and the final desired outcomes. The techniques and the tools are well established.
What remains to be seen is the sustained central leadership necessary to develop a consistent government wide approach to its contaminated sites.
Thank you Mr. Chairman.