Thank you, Madam Chair.
Welcome to our witnesses.
I am very pleased that you are here this morning.
This is my first visit to this committee, and what an interesting topic we have here. I feel very uninformed, though.
There are a couple of things. I guess sometimes when you look at something fresh, you see things that maybe stand out. One of the things that blew me away is that we're talking about this problem with lead pipes, and we don't know how big or how small the problem is. There's no inventory of the issue. I wonder, just as a novice, maybe we should step back and say that if we're going to address this problem, we should know what it is and how bad it is. That's just a comment I'd like to make.
The other thing is budgeting. There's really no idea about the budgeting. I guess it depends on how much the province or the municipalities ask for. It goes up and then you, at the federal level, will decide what programs are worthy or not. I think if you had the inventory, then you could look after the budgeting, and we could attack this issue. What I'm saying is that there's no strategic plan here.
As Mr. Bratina said, there seems to be a very serious issue. I have infant grandkids. We need to eradicate this problem. Time is of the essence. We should be, first of all, making an inventory of all the problems, and then deciding how much of a budget we need to address them and develop a strategic plan to look after them.
Having said that, one thing comes to my mind. I represent the riding of Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, which borders the St. Lawrence River. I have a municipality of 45,000 people in Cornwall, who access the water from the St. Lawrence River. It's filtered, of course, and distributed to them. Actually, they distribute it to parts of the rural area as well. The St. Lawrence River has a high incidence of lead in it. Now, does the filtration system remove the lead from the water that they take in? The lead is so bad that some of the fish can't be eaten. When you take the water in and you put it through the filtration plant, is the product that comes out the other end lead-free? Health Canada might be able to answer this. Does anyone know that, or could you answer that?