Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Toronto—Davenport for his intervention. He is of course on the record as trying to spearhead a national drinking water committee. I think it would be very important to do that. I think it should be an all party committee. I think it must confer with the provincial ministers, the Federation of Municipalities and so on.
It is time for the drinking water concerns to be addressed in a systematic fashion, not an ad hoc series of programs. We need to look at the big picture, break it down into components and address each one of those: the sewer, the water distribution system and so on, and it needs to be done through research and development. It is also very important to stress the co-operation and conditions that would be placed on provincial jurisdictions. This is their area of expertise and they really need to be brought to the fore. I know my colleagues from Quebec will certainly stress that issue, and I fully support that. The federal government is really trampling on provincial jurisdiction in doing this but let us take a look at it in a systematic way.
The member mentioned the snow storm in Toronto and the help it received. A couple of years ago, when an ice storm hit this region, lower Quebec and so on, the federal government was there. If we look at the floods in Manitoba and other areas of the country, we see that the federal government had a role to play.
I would ask the members opposite today to keep crisis and disaster in mind as my community of North Battleford applies for extra funding to get its water back under control.
A new sewage plant has been committed for the year 2003. We would like to bring that forward by a year or a year and a half. The problem we are seeing is that the green funds that have been announced are a little tough to access when the forms are not out yet. They are a little tough to administer when the guidelines say that anything planned needs to have the planning done, the site selection done, the environmental assessment done, the contract let and the building built and tied into the system in less than a year. That is physically impossible when we look at all of the concerns that have to be addressed.
Let us have a look at those regulations. North Battleford sits in the middle of a large agricultural area. It is certainly aware of federal government programs, such as AIDA, and how difficult they are to manage and maintain. It is also aware of the green funding. However, when it looks at the funding it sees it as a public relations spin that really does not address the issue in a practical or common sense way.
We need to get beyond the partisanship and the politics and address this across the country. We have a lightning rod in North Battleford. We had one in Walkerton. We need to seriously look at this issue.