More than seven years after it promised to develop a national environmental management plan for the hog industry, Agriculture Canada has not yet delivered, said the federal environment commissioner last week.
And Environment Canada does not have the database or the monitoring system to ensure that its efforts to convince hog farmers to comply with environmental laws are working, Johanne Gélinas said in her annual report to Parliament.
It was part of a scathing report on the federal record on environmental and sustainable development.
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“The consistent message through this year’s audit is that the federal government is chronically unable to sustain initiatives once they are launched,” she wrote. “After five years of auditing government performance, I have often asked myself why the government does not reach the finish line on its environmental and sustainable development commitments.”
An investigation of the government’s response to environmental petitions on the hog manure issue produced more evidence for her.
Gélinas noted that in 1998 at the request of the hog industry, Agriculture Canada committed to develop an environmental strategy for the sector.
“We expected that the department would have developed a … strategy,” she wrote. “In our view, it is still not clear if the department has a comprehensive strategic approach to help farmers reduce the environmental impacts of hog farming and work toward a sustainable hog industry.”
While acknowledging that the agricultural policy framework does contain funding for adoption of voluntary farm environmental plans, the commissioner said the department is doing a poor job communicating details of sound environmental management practices to farmers and monitoring to see if farmers are complying.
Gélinas also complained that Environment Canada still has not identified the highest risk areas so its efforts can be concentrated in the problem areas.
The department told her it is working on it.
“Identification of all hog farms in Canada will be done in fiscal year 2006-07,” said the department. “This will help Environment Canada identify watersheds with the greatest agricultural impacts across Canada and compliance promotion and enforcement efforts regarding hog farming issues will be more easily directed to issues of highest priority.”
But the commissioner said she had heard promises before.
She concluded the government often fails to follow through on commitments because it is prone to announcing initiatives without attaching the resources needed to accomplish them.
Also, senior bureaucrats are not held accountable, departments do not co-operate and Ottawa “keeps reinventing the wheel” by changing staff and program designs without achieving results.
“This is not good news, given the mounting evidence that we are on an unsustainable path,” she said.
