There are certainly some really incredibly important societal questions being put in these audit reports today. I want to thank my colleague Mr. Webber for leading out on what I believe to be the most important one. I'm going to have a comment first, and then I'll get into my questions.
I'll share with you that as a Hamilton city councillor, the most rigorous training I had was in water protection—in water regulation and distribution within my municipality—because of the Walkerton crisis. As Ontarians will recall, that crisis demanded immediate action by the government to ensure that the E. coli poisoning, which made children in those communities sick, would never happen again. One way they did that was by putting a greater fiduciary responsibility on municipalities to give them culpability should these outbreaks occur. Out of all the things I learned as a city councillor, nothing struck me as more serious than getting my first orientation in water regulations due to Walkerton.
In these reports, I find a list of deficiencies and highlights that is pages long. I can't help but think, as a member of Parliament, that if we had in our House of Commons a fiduciary responsibility, a culpability, as individual MPs, to ensure that our first nations had clean drinking water, how quickly this would have been resolved.
What I don't want to lose sight of in my opening comments is that behind every statistic and every metric, there is a community and stories and people. I think about Grassy Narrows and the response they got—thanks for the “donation”. I think about the work of my MPP colleague Sol Mamakwa, in calling for help for the 250 people who were evacuated from Neskantaga, who had to leave their community, which has been under a water advisory since 1995. When Mr. Webber says this is a national embarrassment, he's not understating what's before us here today.
This is a damning report, and if it weren't for COVID and all the other things that have been happening, I would hope this would be central to our moral obligations as MPs to take care of.
Ms. Hogan, you identified the outdated funding policy formulas that go back 30 years and the new technologies. In your audit, did you ever come up with an actual figure, a cost analysis? Has the the Parliamentary Budget Officer done so? Is there a number that would give us the cost or scale and scope of this problem, so that if we were to throw $10 billion or $100 billion at it, we could solve it?