In his observations on the contaminated sites, the Auditor General has already touched on it. When you look at the contaminated sites inventory, changes in evaluation are to be expected. As you clean up sites and further assess things, estimates go up or down. There are roughly 6,600 that we have yet to assess. Understand that we book a liability once we have done an assessment to a certain point where we have some confidence in the number, and that will change over time. If you think about Giant Mine or Faro Mine, that is a very complicated cleanup. As time goes on, the liabilities go up and down.
The final point I will leave you with is that the vast majority of our environmental liability really relates to a handful of sites: Faro Mine, Giant Mine, Esquimalt Harbour. I have forgotten their names off the top of my head, but there is one or two more. I think about 65% or 70% of our liability probably relates to four or five sites. For the new members here, you will see changes in the environmental liabilities of the government as further assessments get done and as greater experience happens in terms of cleaning up. Generally, they trend upwards, but sometimes you have an initial assessment of a site where a very comprehensive cleanup is required. Then they look at the environmental standards and go, “You know what? Maybe we don't have to do that much; maybe we can do something different.” In other cases, it goes down. Every year, we ask departments to update their estimates based on current information.
As the Auditor General mentioned, there is a new accounting standard in place. That drove some of the change, for sure, because we had to change our practices a bit. It is quite normal for these estimates to change year to year.