I think what the assessment tells you—and it's a very candid snapshot of the state of water and waste water facilities across the country—is what is the upper bound of what it could cost. It makes some assumptions about what kinds of solutions...they tend to be the high-end ones, the “we will extend piped water solutions”, in communities that are highly distributed. These are not compact subdivisions and are spread out.
The technology on water is evolving very, very rapidly, so that there are solutions now emerging in the marketplace whereby filtration and treatment can be delivered and installed basically under your kitchen sink in your own home. There are all kinds of different approaches being developed across the world. What we're trying to do, which is not easy, because we don't actually do the contracting and the building—the first nations do—is speed up the process of the adaptation of those new technologies.
I think the stats are always a little hard to read, because you may have a community in which almost everybody is hooked up, but there may be a back part of the reserve that is not hooked up. I'm not always sure whether they're counted properly. The other thing is that communities can vary from 10,000 people to 100, and so if you count by communities, you may not be getting the picture of population.
We've made a lot of progress on the percentage of population that is now served by low-risk facilities. The low-and-medium category is well over 75%. It is going to be hard to get that last piece, and we're hoping that some of the innovation and technology will help with this.
I would like to get on the record that boil-water advisories are not a good indicator, because they can be a very temporary phenomenon; sometimes one happens because of a break in the pipe or because of lake runoff in the spring. The City of Vancouver had a boil-water advisory. That doesn't mean that people in Vancouver don't have safe drinking water. We do feel that the risk assessment methodology that's in that statement is a better measure.