Hello again! After a wonderful year spent on secondment to Environment Canada, I will be re-activating my FrogBlog. I’ve missed the conversations generated by this blog greatly, and so I am looking forward to re-engaging with many of you over the coming months.
Before I get back to writing more regularly, I do want to make you aware that I will be operating under some conditions resulting from my time at Environment Canada; some personal and some imposed as a consequence of the nature of my role in the department.
First and foremost, I am bound by the conditions of my security clearance and by general confidentiality requirements associated with work in Government.
Second, since the majority of my work involved implementation of the Government’s sector-by-sector regulatory approach in the oil and gas sector, I will not engage in public commentary on any federal initiatives in that area for at least 6 months. My formal conditions restrict my public commentary on federal GHG policies in the oil and gas sector for 6 months. Beyond these formal limits, my engagement on these issues will depend on whether I feel I can provide objective commentary, or whether I remain too close to the files.
Finally, I will likely wait a while before engaging on other topics connected to my work at Environment Canada, or which could be perceived to be so. You have, I hope, come to trust my commentary to be objective and free of conflicts of interest. If I feel that I can’t comment objectively on something based on publicly available information, or if it’s likely my comments will not be interpreted as such, I likely won’t comment.
So, now that those cards are on the table, I look forward to being back on the FrogBlog. I have more than a year’s worth of thoughts to share on a variety of issues and I look forward to your feedback.
Andrew