That is correct, Mr. Bell. We're looking for parliamentary direction in this area to make it part of policy.
As far as the requirements go, Mr. Rienas, at the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, and I, at the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission, presently work with Ontario's and New York's safety standards. They are similar in many respects, but in any instance when one is more stringent than the other, we automatically adopt the more stringent standard. This goes for things such as bridge inspection. We have to give our inspection teams specific guidelines to follow in inspecting the structures to make sure that they are safe.
I might add, too, that usually the provincial and the state standards would be for “every other year” inspection. I can tell you, at least in our case, and I think in the case of a number of other operators, we do annual inspection.
Our point here is that we would encourage the minister to look at the language of existing regulation out there, rather than to immediately proceed to create new federal regulation that could be redundant. If there's a compelling interest on the part of the Government of Canada, clearly that has to be addressed, but we're just asking that we take a look at what is existing.