Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for coming to help us better understand the challenges related to water.
My question is for Merrell-Ann Phare, from the International Joint Commission.
Ms. Phare, I think you do extremely important work, which must not always be easy when it comes to working with the Americans.
I'm going to go back in time. In 2002, Le Devoir published an article on the 11th report of the International Joint Commission. It said that:
the International Joint Commission was no longer merely providing a picture of the evolution of pollution in ecosystems. The article stated that, in its report, the commission was proposing an action plan on two priority areas for the health of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence ecosystems: cleaning up contaminated sediments and stopping biological pollution caused by the introduction of […] invasive alien species.
The article also talked about hundreds of thousands of kilograms of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and other pollutants. The article reported that, according to the IJC:
[…] over a decade of research irrefutably showed the subtle but severe harms that exposure to persistent toxic substances causes to the health of basin residents. Yet delays were piling up, the restoration of the Great Lakes ecosystem was not moving forward and public health was continuing to be affected in areas of concern, according to the article.
The situation was already not easy in 2002. Since that report was published, can you say with confidence that governments have been promoting the protection of transboundary waters, as well as the quality not only of the resource, but also of the monitoring?