Environmental employment is cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary. As a result, we employ individuals from a huge number of science, engineering, technology, humanities, and social sciences—from environmental lawyers and environmental physicians, all the way to environmental scientists and engineers. Therefore, to capture that data is exceedingly difficult, and COPS cannot do that. As a result we've created our own language in terms of functional areas of employment, and that is where people work—do they work in air, land, water? We look at those multidisciplinary skills.
To get that data regionally—let alone provincially—and to have statistical significance at the 95% confidence level would be very difficult because of relatively small populations in certain areas. Also, we are so dependent upon regulatory framework that if there is a new project coming out—whether it be a natural resource extraction project, a pipeline, those sorts of things—there's immediately a whole variety of environmental considerations and there's a huge amount of work tied to them. The ongoing activity after that is probably fairly small, so you may employ hundreds of people initially, and then only a few to do the ongoing environmental monitoring.
Canada has two things to deal with environmentally. One is our past sins—contaminated sites—and cleaning up those contaminated sites through the federal program FCSAP, the federal contaminated sites action plan, a $3.5 billion project of the Government of Canada, and Superfund in the U.S. The other is where we're going to go with respect to new energy efficiency and new environmental activities. While those old sins are not going to go away—it's going to take us a while to clean those up—we have to plan for the future to look at what those new activities are, and it's going to be an entirely new language.