Aldergrove sewer--and sustainable development

Mark Warawa and Rich Coleman announced a $6 million federal-provincial grant for Aldergrove sewer upgrades on Firday afternoon. My understanding is that this is the single largest project to be given money through the Canada-B.C. Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund.

In semi-related news, Warawa is quoted in today's Hill Times as saying that a sustainable development strategy is "crucial":

Conservative MP Mark Warawa says it's "crucial" that the Conservative government now come up with a sustainable development strategy and "get the departments accountable" after about 15 years of inaction.

"I think it's crucial to have a strategy. Without a target you're not going to hit anything," Mr. Warawa (Langley, B.C.), Parliamentary secretary to Environment Minister John Baird (Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.), said in a brief interview last week. Mr. Warawa was reacting to federal Environment Commissioner Ron Thompson's report, released last week, which found that for more than 10 years the federal government has been unable to coordinate a sustainable development strategy, and to this day is without a timeline, goals, or even coordinated language toward achieving a federal strategy.

The federal government committed to developing a sustainable development strategy at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and at the 1997 Earth Summit in New York, the government promised to have a national strategy in place by 2002. However, as Mr. Thompson reported, the government has no set of goals, performance indicators or mechanisms to gather and report results, and, as a consequence, has no way to objectively assess progress on a sustainable development strategy.

In short, nothing is coordinated and no common terminology established. Nor does the government have a deputy minister committee dealing with sustainable development, a process that is considered important to coordinating a government-wide policy, says the report, released Oct. 30 with Auditor General Sheila Fraser's annual report.