Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to everyone who's come here today to provide information to us.
I'd like to ask some questions for Environment Canada, so I'll direct them to Mr. Martin. I'd like to focus on the Great Lakes.
As you may know, my riding is Kitchener Centre. It's smack dab in the middle of southern Ontario and equidistant from the Great Lakes. We are millions of people dependent upon the water in the Great Lakes, so I initiated a study some time ago in this committee on Great Lakes water quality. We learned about the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the renewals since that time, and the advances that have been made in restoring and protecting Great Lakes water quality and ecosystem health. We had evidence about the 2012 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and how, as the point source pollution has been mastered over these many years, new items such as algae growth, aquatic invasive species, chemicals, and microbeads are now moving to the fore in our examination. I was very pleased to see the Government of Canada is on top of these issues and investigating them.
I did notice in the estimates a decrease in funding of $1.6 million related to the Great Lakes nutrient initiative. I didn't know if that was a sunsetting issue that is going to be restored or not, but I'd like to hear about that. I'd also like to hear about what else the government is doing to protect the Great Lakes and how it is working in collaboration with the United States in order to achieve that protection.