We can certainly follow up with more information.
First of all, thank you for having us here. It's a genuine pleasure for me to be here to talk about our work. I really appreciate the opportunity.
In terms of northern communities, one of the projects we're working on proactively is the kind of thing that doesn't hit the news. You hear about the reactive stuff because it is splashy. It hits the news. There's a major incident to which we're responding.
You don't hear about the proactive work, because there are things we're working on over a long period of time, often with other partners. They may or may not end in prosecutions. The goal isn't necessarily to chase after a prosecution; the goal is to find a big environmental problem and solve it. I'm really happy that you mentioned northern communities and indigenous communities.
One of the issues faced by those communities is storage tanks. Especially in the North, there are a lot of people who are using storage tanks for fuel. Some of these tanks are old and unregistered. No one even knows they're there. The owners of the properties may not know they have a storage tank. Some of these tanks are leaking.
Some of them have inadequate secondary containment or product transfer areas. That's important in the North, because if you're filling up a fuel tank and it's really, really cold, you're probably going to go inside. You're not watching the fuel as it's being deposited into the storage tanks. If anything goes wrong, you're not there to stop it and clean it up.
We have a project that has actually been going on for a few years now, focusing specifically on storage tanks, looking for unregistered storage tanks, and the ones that are registered, making sure they've been inspected, making sure that there's follow-up, and dealing with the tanks that have issues.
Sometimes you're going to see prosecutions on that, and recently, there have been a few in Saskatchewan, for example, involving first nations groups. In those cases, it's not that we're targeting those populations for severe enforcement, it's that we recognize that a leaking storage tank in that community can cause real environmental and human health problems, and can lead to increased amounts of contaminated sites in those areas.
By increasing enforcement there, we're really trying to stop environmental harm. Sometimes you'll see prosecutions. More likely, what you're going to see is an EPCO, an environmental protection compliance order. Again, that's not the kind of thing that makes the news, but we issue quite a lot of EPCOs on storage tanks, and we're trying to compel the regulatee to come into compliance and deal with those environmental issues before they cause harm.
I hope that is helpful, and we can also provide some more data.