Executive summary

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This performance report represents the final year of implementing the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency's Sustainable Development (SD) Strategy 2001-2004. The Strategy had four goals for contributing to SD: preparing managers, enabling employees, greening operations, and enhancing the programs we deliver to the public.

Performance for 2003-2004
For the current reporting period, we had a total of 46 targets due. We completed 36 (78%), progressed on 8 (17%), dropped 1 (2%), and did not start 1 (2%).

Overall strategy performance for 2001-2004
There were a total of 83 targets in the three-year strategy. We completed 72 (87%), while 9 (11%) were not completed and 2 (2%) were dropped.

Goal 1- Prepare managers to contribute to SD:
completed 75% (9 of 12) of targets
Goal 2 - Enable employees to contribute to SD:
completed 100% (4 of 4) of targets
Goal 3 - Green operations to contribute to SD:
completed 88% (38 of 43) of targets
Goal 4 - Enhance programs to contribute to SD:
completed 88% (21of 24) of targets

During this third year of implementing our strategy, we worked with our program branches to explore SD opportunities in the services we deliver to the public. Our emphasis was on identifying short-term opportunities for action during the year, while at the same time looking for long-term solutions to become targets in the next SD strategy. We explored improving our electronic services delivery to be more efficient and reduce paper consumption, increasing our leadership and capacity building role with local and international partners, and communicating our SD commitment to clients through e-commerce activities.

We learned that our program areas needed more tools and support to be able to recognize their SD impacts and opportunities. Although Goal 4 recorded commendable achievements, as indicated by the high completion level, SD was not the main driver of these results. Our next strategy will go deeper into exploring and measuring the vast opportunities for SD innovation and change in program delivery. For Goal 3, we dedicated resources, provided support, and developed tools for greening operations. This approach enabled us to meet and in some cases exceed our plans. We feel that a similar approach with the programs will deliver more substantive results for SD.

We made great strides in greening our internal operations and managing our environmental risks and responsibilities as custodians of property. A highlight of our achievements was our partnership with Natural Resources Canada to incorporate ground-source heat pump technology at the new Canada/U.S. border-crossing facility at Osoyoos, British Columbia. This technology solution will be replicated at other border-crossing facilities, where feasible. We also partnered with Environment Canada to become one of the first two federal entities to accept the Leadership Challenge by committing to a plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

We matured our Environmental Management System (EMS) by completing an EMS manual and a second round of Environmental Management Programs (EMPs) to guide our priorities. The scope of these EMP targets ranged from baselines and inventories and environmental compliance, to training and communications. These EMPs effectively moved the Agency from ad-hoc to systematic environmental management. We established a consultation framework by which all strategic sourcing procurement documents undergo an SD assessment, and we increased the number of hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles within the Agency. We continued efforts to reduce internal paper consumption, and we completed an extensive assessment of solid waste management practices in our custodial buildings.

With the departure of our customs operations during the year, the Agency is no longer the custodian of border crossing properties, so its environmental responsibilities in property management were reduced. The environmental responsibilities that remain with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) are solid and hazardous waste management, procurement, paper consumption, fleet management, outside emissions, and to a lesser significance, storage tank management and halocarbons.

We continued to strengthen our management framework for SD by finalizing the online performance reporting system (PR-Tool), supporting the SD Network, implementing the learning strategy for SD, and delivering SD awareness sessions to employees (particularly in the regions). While we have been successful over the past three years in building a stable management framework (e.g., strategies, plans, policies, systems, and committees) and in making our internal processes more sustainable, we did not succeed in recognizing SD as a corporate value (by integrating it into the mission, vision, and values statements) nor in integrating SD into key corporate management tools to the extent planned. We recognize that accounting for commitments not achieved is just as important as those that were achieved, and that this can help to indicate key barriers. Making SD a corporate value and integrating it into the CRA's annual planning and reporting activities will be brought forward as long-term outcomes in the next SD strategy.

We completed an internal audit on the SD program, which provided timely guidance for developing our third SD strategy for 2004-2007. The audit findings concluded that the management framework for administering SD was working well and that good progress was made on our SD commitments. However, the audit recommended areas of improvement, such as strengthening SD objective setting and planning, monitoring and reporting on commitments, and integrating SD concepts into the Agency's corporate culture.

We spent a significant amount of time developing our third strategy and national action plan for SD. We consulted with stakeholders on a strategic direction for SD, and we worked with our SD Network to finalize individual branch and regional action plans. We used the Treasury Board Secretariat's Results-based Management and Accountability Framework to ensure that we had a solid logic chain of activities leading directly to the long-term outcomes of the strategy.

In conclusion, we are on our path of continual improvement. In the first strategy, we completed 56% of targets. In this second strategy, we improved our results with 87% of targets completed ¹ . Our assessment is that we were more successful in this strategy than the previous strategy, as a direct result of assigning resources, building systems and tools, educating employees and management on their SD responsibilities, and encouraging grassroots action toward SD in our branches and regions. The lessons we learned for the reporting period were not new - leadership remains key. We must continue to support and provide guidance to the SD Network, provide employees with useful and consistent messages about SD best practices in the workplace, provide better tools to enable SD integration into the Agency's operations and program development and delivery, and sharpen SD targets and performance measures in our next SD strategy.

¹ See appendix 3 for performance summary.

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