That's aimed at me.
Thank you for the question.
The government has made a commitment to bring back a bill on the issue of water and waste water standards. I don't know exactly when the minister and the House leader will agree on introduction. We're expecting it to be fairly soon.
In the meantime, we're taking advantage of the hearings that were held in the Senate on the previous version of the bill and trying to discuss with some of the first nations organizations whether we can improve the bill, address some of the concerns they raised, and make it more palatable to them, and hopefully it'll go forward.
I think it's part of that piece that if you have clarity of roles and responsibilities and you know what the standards are, then you know what the engineers have to build to and you know how to train the operators and the inspectors. It just keeps holding everything together. What is holding it together now are funding agreements, and that puts me and my department in the position that if something is going wrong with the operation or construction of a water facility on reserve, my sanction is to take away the funding from the community. How does that work?
What we need is a much clearer sense of who's responsible for what, including the department—it's not an offloading issue—so that everybody knows their part of delivering this service.
We think that standards legislation will anchor further improvements in quality on reserve.