I would like the committee to look at two things. One is the potential for class action lawsuits, such as is happening right now in Flint, Michigan, due to the indifference or inactivity, inadequacies of the United States government's Environmental Protection Agency.
First of all, we're considering what role we have, but in the exact specifics of what you're talking about, the City of Toronto decided not to accept the staff recommendation of creating a fund. Because we have infrastructure money made available, I would think the committee could consider ways that the government could allow a municipality to draw on those funds, to create a revolving loan fund, which wouldn't impact on their revenue, let's say, on a smaller community or even a larger one, like Toronto. If they were concerned about fraud or fiascos, and so on, there could perhaps be a guarantee, a backstop from the federal government saying if Toronto put a loan program in place, the federal government would certainly make sure that it functioned well.
I'm not sure of the direct answer to that, but money is available. Generally, as far as I know, communities have not been focusing their efforts on using that money to address this problem. Perhaps this infrastructure committee could resolve that or there may be a recommendation that we can't find a way to do that, but I would not want to, once again, leave my few days that I have in Parliament saying that's somebody else's problem, knowing what I know through the Hamilton experience and observing problems all across the country.