Thank you very much, Mr. Scarpaleggia. Let me address them briefly and then talk a little bit about this proposed hearing that I suggested a moment ago.
I think whenever you have a need to have the federal government liaise and interact with and deal with the provinces and the municipalities and perhaps other stakeholders, by definition that's a complicated exercise, and nobody would undersell how difficult that can be. But that is the situation we're faced with, and we're not persuaded that it's an impossible task. What we've concluded, looking at this chapter, is that despite all of the commitments and agreements that have been made over the years, there has been a lot of talk but not very much action.
Our concern is that we don't think there has been enough federal leadership, frankly, in order to pursue the partnerships—and I'll call them partnerships—that need to be created between the different levels of government in Canada, to pursue aggressively the funding that would need to be coming in from all three sources, perhaps four sources, and to set out a management approach to dealing with this.
That's why we suggested, in terms of the second hearing, that perhaps the committee might want to hear from government officials who have dealt with contaminated sites, because there the government has put in place quite a good management structure, quite a good sense of direction from the top, realistic objectives—at least they seem realistic to us—and of course some funding, and they're moving forward. Now if the government can do it over there on contaminated sites, is it not possible to do at least some of that over here in looking at aquatic invasives?
So to your question about how difficult it is and whether there are endemic problems in getting at these issues, I think it would be very helpful to the committee to have the affected government departments sitting here and for you to ask them. I think they need to say that.
About extraneous factors, I think I may have mentioned that. It's difficult to deal with other levels of government and other levels of funding, but not impossible.
On scientific capacity, again I would want to hear from the departments that are faced with managing this file. We didn't really audit scientific capacity, Mr. Scarpaleggia, but certainly that's an issue. You don't just need money; you need expertise and ability to clean up these sites, and I'd like you to hear from the departments.
Funding is an issue, but in terms of the dollars that are put in our chapter, you should remember that those are the total dollars to clean up these two different kinds of contamination. The federal share would be about a third of that, which is not inconsequential but not the whole thing either.