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The Assistant Deputy Minister of the Meteorological Service of Canada accepts the audit and its recommendations and has provided a preliminary implementation plan for the recommendations.
In response to Recommendation 1, the Weather and Environmental Services Board will establish a formal, integrated National Contingency Planning Program. We propose that this program be situated in the Business Policy Directorate for the following reasons: The Directorate provides the corporate planning and policy activities to support the Weather and Environmental Services Board. In addition, some of the processes being developed in the Directorate as part of Performance Measurement - such as the processes to support the implementation of International Organization for Standardization standards - are essential to the successful development of contingency plans.
Key to implementing Recommendation 1 is the dedicated staff member proposed in Recommendation 2.
The National Contingency Planning Coordinator position will be established. The coordinator will form and lead a Weather and Environmental Services Board Contingency Planning Working Group. The Working Group will include contingency planning coordinators from the monitoring, production and services components of the Weather Prediction Program, a representative of the Chief Information Officer Branch, a representative from Assets, Contracting and Environmental Management Directorate and the Business Continuity Planning Program Coordinator. The relevant Directors General will be asked to provide the names of qualified staff to serve on this Working Group.
The first task of the Weather and Environmental Services Board Contingency Planning Working Group will be to develop, as suggested in Recommendation 3, formal and approved business impact analyses for each Meteorological Service of Canada component to guide the development of each of their contingency plans, measures and arrangements within the scope of the Service's National Contingency Planning Program. These analyses will be based on a high-level risk assessment for the Meteorological Service of Canada, as suggested in Recommendation 3, and will be scoped by the National Contingency Planning Coordinator, in conjunction with the departmental Business Continuity Planning Coordinator and the three contingency planning coordinators. Operational security standards relating to Business Continuity Planning Program activities, published by the Treasury Board Secretariat, will be taken into account in developing this work.
At the present time, budgetary pressures on the Weather and Environmental Services Board are extreme. This audit represents an additional pressure as outlined in Recommendation 4. Nonetheless, we will implement the recommendations and report back to the Board on progress. The implementation will be done in a staged manner in order to maximize progress while minimizing the budgetary impact.
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