Thank you.
I think that part of the problem I've seen, not just with Canada's first nations communities but elsewhere around the world, is that the models we have been using for both water and wastewater, particularly wastewater, basically date back to the early part of the 20th century.
Our basic waste-water technology, which uses an activated sludge process, a bacterial process, was patented in 1913. It really hasn't changed very much since then, but technology has advanced, and we have the ability to embrace newer technologies. Mr. Mitchell mentioned membrane solutions. They've been around for roughly five decades now, but they have evolved, and the solutions that were implemented 20 years ago and 30 years ago have been superseded by new innovations.
Part of the problem I find across Canada and in many other parts of the world is that we have models that were developed decades ago and we're still designing systems the way we did decades ago. We have engineering offices that are quite happy to continue to do the same things that they did years ago. We have a mindset that we have one model, whether it's for water or wastewater, that fits all applications, and you can't take the technology that works in Regina and put it into a first nations community that is 2,000 kilometres north of there.
I think the other problem we have related to being stuck in old thinking and old engineering practices is that we still continue to look at water and wastewater as two distinct issues, but basically we find problems around the world when we don't have waste-water people and water people talking to each other. We look at them as two different concepts—