Thank you so much, Ms. Collins. That's a fabulous question.
I'm going to just summarize in three simple points.
Investing locally creates solutions, innovation and gets you a payback in the range of seven to one, to 10 to one. They've demonstrated that in numerous places. I draw the attention of this fine committee to the healthy watersheds initiative as one example.
The second piece is that a lot of the work has to happen locally. That's partnering with provinces that are seeing the sort of challenge ahead in dealing with the four horsemen kind of approach. That means building up natural infrastructure like wetlands, aquifer protection and healthy riparian areas.
These are the cheapest and best forms of infrastructure, but you need the funds to flow through those key partners—those people on the ground who can leverage it—so every dollar spent, because you have local expertise, local capacity and first nation engagement, is very high.
Therefore, the federal government needs to invest in those working models that exist all across the country. B.C. is the leading example.
The third point is that this model that British Columbia is undertaking with the watershed security fund is worth replicating. It's not only worth replicating federally, but it's worth investing in for a number of different pockets and different regions, including the north, the Prairies, the central and the east coast.
B.C. will show us how to do it because they have a leg up. It's partially because we faced some big challenges and partially because we saw some very creative investments post-COVID that have really yielded not only good ecological outcomes, but really significant business and community outcomes that have demonstrated, when the storms hit, that we have a bigger buffer, we have less impact, we lose less infrastructure and we avoid future costs.