Thank you. It's wonderful to know your background as a chemical engineer.
The idea of trying to streamline provincial, municipal, and federal usage of water is a true challenge. One of the things I like about looking at other countries is that Canada may find other ways of doing business. One of ways of doing business that I think is highly appropriate is the way that the U.K. goes about it.
Britain, as you may know from your engineering days, takes a risk-based approach. Most of the water companies are privatized—which is neither here nor there. Australia and New Zealand also take a risk-based approach, in much the same way as the airline industry and the banking industry. In fact, Canada and the U.S. are somewhat behind in that we take this paradigm that allows us to get into the trap we're in. What Mr. Leonard talked about the specific parameter that you have to meet. In Canada we have over 80 of those, which makes it very difficult for a resource-strapped small community.
A risk-based management approach says: make a management plan and we, as government, will evaluate that management plan, much like the banking sector evaluates individual spending behaviour and then makes risk decisions on individual spending behaviour. We don't evaluate every single item you buy, but we have a framework. This allows us to think much more flexibly.
About a month ago, I was in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, which is one of Canada's most northern communities. Water there is trucked in, as it is in the majority of Arctic communities. Most of our policy, however, considers the idea that we're going to pipe water from a plant to someone's home. This paradigm in Arctic communities is simply not there.
Most of the regulations we have begin to fall down like a house of cards because we view the world in that manner. A risk-based approach allows us to inherently have some flexibility, to ask questions about a truck, to ask questions about the cleanliness of the truck, which presently we don't.
An OECD approach or review would allow us to ask whether there is another way for us to regulate water, which I think would allow us to maybe look at the very hard question you're asking. Rather than having multiple levels, is there another way we can do business?