Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Thompson.
I've been reading chapter 7, which is on areas of concern in the Great Lakes Basin. I'm quite intrigued by that.
I'm wondering why the performance of these agreements appears to have been so dismal. I'm really pondering the issue. Is there something in these kinds of federal-provincial agreements—I think there were other partners, but actually, it was mainly federal-provincial—that makes it very hard to be specific and to inject accountability? It seems to be almost endemic to those kinds of agreements, especially in our federal system. The minute the federal government wants to impose conditions, the provinces say we shouldn't do that; it's not right. As a matter of fact, when the environment minister came, he said--just as an aside, and I'm not being partisan here--that when it came to the environmental trust, there's one taxpayer, and it's not for the federal government to tell the provinces what to do. So I'm wondering if there is something endemic in those agreements that makes it very hard to achieve goals.
Second, are there too many extraneous factors when you're talking about the Great Lakes? Perhaps, despite best efforts, we don't get the results because of pollution coming from the United States. Maybe this would be the case with contaminated sediments, for example.
Would a third explanation, perhaps, have something to do with the scientific capacity of the government to analyze these agreements? In other words, if you take economic analysts and have them create these agreements, you're not going to have the scientific input that might tighten the agreements a bit. I don't know.
Fourth, is one of the reasons we don't reach our goals that there isn't enough funding? For example, you say that municipal waste water infrastructure is inadequate. That's sort of outside the scope of the agreement. It depends on how much money the federal government, the provincial governments, and the municipal governments are injecting into plant requirements.
Those are my questions.