Jul. 28, 2010 - Issue #771: Young at Heart

Vuepoint

Disappearing act

Eighteen months, over 60 witnesses, 300 pages of testimony, trips to Edmonton, Calgary and Fort McMurray—it's a lot of research to simply shut down with no conclusion. The destruction of the draft final report of the oil sands and water resources study by the Parliamentary standing committee on the environment is coming under some much-deserved criticism as members of the committee voted behind closed doors last month to halt the production of the final report and destroy draft copies. And no one is saying why.

If no effective information could be gained from this investigation the standing committee would have figured that out earlier than what is now a year later. Testimony finished in March, and the committee has been meeting in private since that time to finalize a report. If the problem were the testimony being unpublishable or unusable in a report, the issue would have been closed four months ago, so the problem lies with the final report and consensus on a conclusion. Either committee members cannot agree what to publish, or they do not want to publish it.

David Schindler declared it a cover up in the Hill Times this week. Francis Scarpagellia, a Liberal MP and member of the standing committee declared on June 15 in a press release that Conservative members of the committee were holding up the report. Two days later the committee voted to destroy the draft report, leaving a single copy in the committee clerk's office.

Scarpagellia has stated that he will be working on a final report, and that since the testimony is public, advocacy groups and other parties are free to do the same. But a final report from a political party or an advocacy group means a very different thing to Parliament and the Canadian public than a full report from an official all-party committee of Parliament. The job of standing committees is to bring to light laws that are not being implemented, policy areas that need improvement and issues that need further research. The only thing that's clear in this situation is that this committee will not fulfil its job and so Canadians have to do theirs and start asking some tough questions about why this resolution was shut down. V

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