I work with communities all over the world, basically from Singapore to New Zealand, and I have worked on projects all over the world. Canada used to have the number one expertise in water and wastewater. We had the Wastewater Technology Centre in Burlington and we had the Canada Centre for Inland Waters. We've lost that capability. I don't think we have the right type of dialogue going on between operators and communities and across the engineering community. We're not training people appropriately.
I think we do need a mechanism within Canada that looks at what's happening around the world in terms of decentralized technologies like minimum liquid discharge and zero liquid discharge for waste-water operations. Wastewater is 99.9% water, with a small amount of contaminants in there. We have the technologies to deal with that now. We just have to look at what technologies are most appropriate for communities that are not the size of Toronto, which has the Ashbridges Bay wastewater plant, which is probably the worst example we could use, because you never should treat wastewater at the end of the pipe. You should treat it at the source.
That is changing. In the same way that we've moved from centralized power and centralized communications to decentralized systems, we need to look at bringing that into the water space. We're starting to have a dialogue around that as we start to look at how to manage 6.5 million new people coming into Ontario. We're not going to do it by using the same models that we used in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We have to start looking at different models and what's happening in other parts of the world.
I work with the U.S. EPA, and they have a complete group that's working on remote operations, whether it's with indigenous or non-indigenous communities in the middle of Arkansas, in the middle of Nebraska or in Alaska. We need to get a community dialogue going in Canada on how to identify technologies that are appropriate for the community, for the people who live in that community and for the problems they face in that community.