Transport committee  Thank you for the question. I love trees. Norfolk County loves trees. We'd take the trees, but we have 25% tree coverage already, and we struggle to preserve what we have due to high development booms, maintenance requirements and resources to plant the trees, water the trees and check on the trees.

Transport committee  One plan, one funding stream.... Can you comment on consolidating funding streams?

Transport committee  If I may, FCM typically opens up loan funding envelopes, and our debt limits are extremely high. In the next 25 years we'll be over the 25% provincial allocation. In the next four years, we will be at our 15% internal debt limit, so the loans aren't always applicable.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. I would agree with that statement. When I answered earlier about payment and dissolved companies and so on, I was referencing the private specific wells, not giving consideration to a broader industry at large. You raise an excellent point. We see many farms that have used these wells to heat their homes and to work on various initiatives across the farm, and now these private landowners have these wells.

Transport committee  I'm going to go really high level, and then I might pass it over to Sydney. You're more in her wheelhouse. With regard to your first question—how does the federal government help—again, it's funding, and I know that we've beaten that to death. It's maybe taking a look at a comprehensive insurance plan and taking an active approach on that instead of leaving it with the provincial level.

Transport committee  Yes, Long Point Region Conservation Authority is excellent, as we heard from one of the other speakers, with data, with presenting us with information, with presenting the community with warnings about high-water risk, high-flood risk, high winds. There's a lot of ongoing communication that happens between the conservation authority and the municipalities.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. The answer is yes. However, in our experience, we have a very difficult time tracking down those private landowners. Those businesses have closed. They've gone bankrupt. The members who were associated with that business have passed. That is when we see the deterioration of the infrastructure that occurred in the capping of the well.

Transport committee  To my knowledge, the federal participation currently on gas wells is limited. We have seen provincial funding come through, but I know that it's not enough and I know that it's not sustainable. It's a knee-jerk reaction to a problem. It's not a proactive approach to how we're going to handle them in the future and our planning for the next stages.

Transport committee  I would just suggest, if there was any flow-through funding to the province, maybe a partnership on how it's sent down to us. However, yes, I understand. Thank you.

Transport committee  Yes. Thank you for your comments. I couldn't agree more. It's $390 million and growing every day just to upgrade our five waste-water and water treatment plants and to try to amalgamate them into one facility that is state-of-the-art and that has high-end technology that helps us if there's a flood.

Transport committee  Thank you. Yes, I skirted that first part of your question. Absolutely. As I said, we were put into a basket where we're competing with the greater Toronto area, but we're massive. We're a small municipality and we have “county” in our name, but that's more of a branding strategy than representative of what we are.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. In my opinion, no. Otherwise, we would be regularly applying into those funding streams, and we would have a plan to further adapt to the level of flooding that we're seeing in our communities. If I may just piggyback on that, the other issue is that a lot of private property ownership is mixed in with the municipal lands.

Transport committee  Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. I didn't have enough time to fit that into my testimony. Ontario alone has 26,000—that we know of—abandoned gas wells. That doesn't mean all of them are leaking or are erupting, but it does mean that we don't know when they're going to leak and to erupt.

Transport committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before the standing committee to provide testimony on the critical infrastructure needs as they relate to climate change in my home community. My name is Amy Martin, and I am the mayor of Norfolk County, a single-tier municipality of close to 70,000 people located in southwestern Ontario.