Thank you for the question.
I think I'll answer it in reverse, because I do think that this bill.... You and I both have a background in public health, so prevention is our first love.
This bill actually does set the table so that we never go back to a place where communities don't have the appropriate financial resources, the technical support or the inherent rights to regulate water, which has led to so many of these intractable situations.
The government has spent in the billions of dollars to lift boil water advisories, which was an amount that built up over years of neglect and years of inequitable funding for first nations infrastructure, including water infrastructure.
One important piece of this bill is the co-development of funding models. As you know, and as parliamentarians know, the process for which first nations receive allotments for water provision, water operation, has always been decided by Ottawa, by the Finance Minister, by the Prime Minister, and although we've seen tremendous increases in appropriate operating expenses provided to first nations communities under the Liberal government, you could easily see it slipping back under another government. This bill says that this can no longer be an arbitrary decision by Canada, but rather it has to be co-developed with first nations so that they can set the appropriate regulations and then can have comfort that they will have long-term, sustained funding that will allow for the development of expertise in their communities, that will allow for a certainty for operator salaries and that will allow for the capacity of the community to grow in its own ability to monitor and, in some cases, to design their water operating systems.
The number of stories I've heard about communities that have received contractors that build these plants that then don't resolve the water safety issue is appalling. What we're trying to do through this legislation, at least in part, is to restore the self-determination to communities to be able to develop their own expertise and, in some cases, to build on the existing expertise so that we never return to those situations again.