Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses who have joined us today. It's a very important subject.
I'm from the Northwest Territories. In my former life I was a minister with the Government of Northwest Territories, and one of my responsibilities was to provide a review of the drinking water situation in our communities. We don't have reserves, but we have indigenous communities, public communities that are not reserves. When we took a look at 27 of them, we found quite quickly that there were a number of challenges.
First of all, pretty much every water treatment plant was designed and built in a different country, so that made it really challenging to get parts. That also made it very challenging to share parts, because the neighbouring community might have parts but it wasn't the same model as what was in the other community. We saw that there was a need to make sure all the water plants were made through the same company, with the same design, so that we could get and share parts more easily, design a maintenance program with the people who built these facilities, and lock them into contracts with us so that they could provide training for our membership.
It was very difficult. In some cases there were clean sources of water, but the government would still insist on building a well, because a certification for a well operation was less than getting...from the surface water from the lake or a river, so there were all kinds of things happening. In many cases the sources of water were huge distances away. When you're talking 20 or 30 kilometres from the source water to the community, it becomes a challenge. Governments want to just put in a water truck to run back and forth rather than build an expensive pipeline, and that's challenging. To have proper testing training is another area: It was really difficult to find people to do it and to hang on to people who were trained. Many things were brought forward as issues and challenges.
As I was growing up, I lived on the Mackenzie River—I still live on the Mackenzie River—and we'd be able to go out in our canoe and drink water right from the river. You can't do that now. The water's dirty. It's not safe. There are lots of things that are out there, facing indigenous people. The big thing is to have capacity to run your own operation and to have the resources to do that.
The intention of the bill is to ensure that there's access to clean water and an adequate supply. I think the intentions are really what got my attention to this. However, I ask whether all of you feel that the measures in the first nations clean water act could support indigenous communities' ability to build capacity when it comes to operations, maintenance and training for water treatment plants. That's my first question.