There are cases in Italy and other places that are in fact holding companies liable for the damage that they've done, or the climate disasters that will be coming our way. This bill doesn't touch any of that. In fact, it kind of strays from being very direct in that the liability for the damage and death caused by development is not in there.
I'll give you one example, Nestlé, one of the biggest companies in the world. They're taking our aquifer water. It's blue gold. It's worth more than oil, and for some reason our governments are giving it away at $500 per permit. Then our people go without water and have to go up to Caledonia to buy Nestlé bottled water. It's insanity, from where I sit as a Mohawk woman but also as researcher.
We evaluated how much they take. It's 3.6 million litres a day, every single day, for the last eight years. If you look at one dollar per litre, which we all know is not what it costs, they've made almost $1 trillion.
What have we received out of that $1 trillion that Nestlé has made on our waters that are on our treaty lands? This is a very low-cost kind of production, and the United Nations has been clear that no aquifer, no groundwater should be touched.
You see what's happening in California; it's on fire. When you drain the veins of Mother Earth, which is an aquifer, you're going to have death and destruction. We're now looking at things happening with the boreal forest because of the fracking and so on. Aquifers should be the most protected water on the planet, which is what the UN wants us to see. I don't see any of those things in this bill. It would be incredible if Canada stood up to be a leader under this first nations water act to demonstrate what we should be doing, not what we're looking at in the past. Thank you.