Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for asking us back. I thought that after the first time we were here you took a look at us and said we shouldn't ask those guys back. That's quite an honour for us for you to extend the invitation again.
I'm very happy to introduce to you our heavy hitters at the International Joint Commission: our secretary, Camille Mageau, and Dr. Bill Taylor, who is the co-chair of our science advisory board and a professor at the University of Waterloo. He serves on these institutional bodies in his professional capacity. As you know, when we bring people into the IJC, they come with their credentials, and it's not necessarily always the dictum of the person who's attending to put the IJC's position forward. They have their own responsibilities.
For some of you who may not know, the International Joint Commission resolves disputes or is supposed to resolve disputes between the United States of America and Canada. Ms. Mageau will provide an overview of our work.
We work under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. If any of you studied law at any time, you'd read that document and realize that the people who structured the 1909 agreement had a lot of wisdom. They foresaw so many of the events that we face today. It's quite an impressive document. It became part of the Statutes of Canada in 1937. The treaty itself was attached to the document for clarification.
When you do those things, Mr. Chairman, it's not always easy, and it wasn't easy to try to convince some of the people who had been ingrained with the IJC philosophy to realize that they were subject to all the rules that most of us who have served in the House of Commons or ministries were subject to, the rules of the governance of Canada. What I'm talking about is subject to the Financial Administration Act and the Public Service Employment Act. Those are areas that, when you accept this responsibility, I hope—and we're having a difficult time sometimes convincing people of this—we're accepting the responsibilities that all of us have if we try to serve the public in Canada.
We pride ourselves on being able to offer the best science available. We have a staff that works very hard at trying to get to the facts and taking the facts and applying them to the problems at hand. We're involved in settling disputes between the countries on the quantity of water. You don't hear a lot about this, and the reason you don't hear about it is it's really running very well and there are no disputes. There might be the odd dispute in Montana, with some water going across, but very few disputes. When you get two countries of this size, and the border we have between Canada and the United States, and you don't have problems with water, that goes to the success of these structures and the institutions that are in place to avoid these serious problems that sometimes cause wars.
So I think we've got something admirable, and we work at it to make sure it continues to be so. We also do it with.... I'll let Camille talk about the quality of the water. But it's working out very well. We have our problems, as all governmental agencies do, but we try to correct them.
Camille.