I would agree 100%. I was involved with a number of things over the years related to community development. I remember being part of the national rural infrastructure committee as well as the cities and communities initiative under Paul Martin. We looked at a lot of these things, as a group of people from across the country.
There just doesn't seem to be any justifiable reason in Canada why people don't have good-quality basic infrastructure like good drinking water, basic human needs. Considering the wealth that is generated in many of the regions where these communities are, they really don't have good drinking water. There is a community and right next door maybe there's a mine that has generated $450 million in one year or whatever, but what did the local community get out of it?
I'll tell you what they get here, or have historically got. The public purse ends up paying for all the reclamation work and for ongoing remediation that is required to contain the contamination that threatens the water quality, which is already not good enough. They're not only trying to deal with the fact that their water is not good enough; they are also trying to make sure it doesn't get worse.
If we are compelling proponents of major projects in this country to make contributions, then the federal crown plays a big role in whether that can happen or not through its legislation and regulations. In my mind, we should make sure that local communities, regardless of ethnicity, have good-quality infrastructure as a direct benefit of the activity that is happening right next door. Canada has the ability to impose that in many ways.