Yes, Mr. Chair, I'd be happy to comment.
Environment Canada has been monitoring the major tributaries of Lake Winnipeg for 30 years, so we've been watching the Red River and the Saskatchewan River. That's one of the main reasons why the Province of Manitoba approached the Government of Canada and said, we think we have an issue here in Lake Winnipeg, but we should help clean it up--it was because of Environment Canada data.
That's exactly what monitoring is supposed to do; it's supposed to identify issues. So frankly, what happened is that we used our data—we have a well-designed system to flag a problem—and we launched the Lake Winnipeg basin initiative. It is a $17.7 million initiative over four years.
Mr. Chair, if I may, I will expand a little bit on Mr. Ferguson's comment that the Government of Canada is not in a position to report on national water quality trends. We feel that through our Canadian environmental sustainability indicators we actually do report on trends. We have 153 CESI sites—Canadian environmental sustainability indicator sites—and what we do is take all the data we collect at those sites and synthesize it into a single number, a single parameter, which makes it easy to communicate.
One of the real challenges with monitoring data is that you have all sorts of numbers, but how do you communicate to people in a very simple way, but so that you don't lose the information? Using the CESI, which we report annually—and starting this year we will report as part of our federal sustainable development strategy—we feel that we have quite a good level of knowledge of water quality at the national level. This is exactly what our program was designed to do through CESI.