With respect, you're concerned we “may” want to. That's little better than fear-mongering. We may do this or we may do that when there's no reasonable evidence anywhere to prove that.
I'll give you an example. You talked about the government losing its right to regulate because of investor-state provisions. It's exactly the opposite of that. The government absolutely has the right to regulate. The municipalities absolutely have the right to regulate. The Province of Quebec regulated pesticides. It was as simple as that. They may have lost the case, but they won the right to regulate pesticides. That's over. They're not going to pay ever again. It's said and done.
So they absolutely do have the right to regulate. Actually, investor-state provisions backed it up.
You're talking about water. Well, water's not a commodity, and water's not an issue. If a local region wants to privatize its water supply, that's up to that local region. Democratically elected councillors would decide on this and vote on this, and they'd make a decision to move into it.
The example you use is that France actually brought their water services back in-house. To me, then, the system's working. You have the right to privatize it if you wish. That's up to the local region. We don't have any examples of that in Nova Scotia. Your reason for not doing it is exactly the reason to show that the system actually did work. If they privatized, if they weren't happy, if they weren't getting a good water supply or the price was too high, or whatever the issue was, they were able to reverse that.
So, with respect, I think the system itself works.
Finally, we met with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We had the chairman of their trade committee on conference call. As is the case for any group.... And I'm sure every NDP person is not against free, fair, and open trade. Most of them seem to be, but I'm sure there are some who are not. There are probably members of my own caucus who don't agree with everything that I say, but you have reasonable debate. So of course there will be some members of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities who don't agree. You just can't make blanket statements like that, with respect.