The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Water Infrastructure for Rural Ontario a Pipe Dream?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

With a growing population and rising demand for housing, municipalities take on the task of setting up the infrastructure to service their residents. Roads, community centres, and, of course, pipes for water and sewage. But with aging assets and the need to build more, municipalities, big and small, are feeling the pressure. At the Rural Ontario Municipalities Association conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities for rural Ontario, are: Michele Grenier, Executive Director of the Ontario Water Works Association; Craig Dyer, Chair of the Local Area Services Water Utility Feasibility Study expert panel and former Chief Financial Officer of Waterloo Region; and Patrick McManus, Executive Director, Ontario Sewer and Watermain Construction Association. They join Steve Paikin.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Municipalities take on the task of setting up the infrastructure to service their residents, roads, community centers, and of course, water and wastewater infrastructure. But with aging assets and the need to build more homes to serve a growing population,

municipalities big and small are feeling the pressure. With aging assets and the need to build more homes to serve a growing population, municipalities big and small are feeling the pressure. Here to discuss the issues for rural Ontario, we welcome Michelle Grenier, Executive Director of the Ontario Water Works Association, Craig Dyer, Chair of the Water Utility Feasibility Study Expert Panel and a former Chief Financial Officer of Waterloo Region and Patrick McManus, executive director of Ontario Sewer and Watermain Construction Association. And as we like to do, can you please welcome our guest to the stage here today? Thank you everybody. I, you know, I was about to say I'm willing to bet, Michelle, that we are sitting in a fancy hotel in downtown Toronto. I'm thinking

that I was going to say I bet nobody in this room except you three think at all about the water that comes out of the tap but that might not be for the case for this room because they are kind of nerdy here so maybe they do think about that stuff. How important is the infrastructure to the lives we live? Well, you heard from the panel earlier on health care and really safe drinking water and handling of sewage is underpinning of our health care system. Without clean water we're not healthy. How is the building of water and wastewater infrastructure typically financed?

Let's go there next. So I think it depends a little bit on the municipality and the order of magnitude of the project. Larger projects to a great extent are debt financed. And then the question becomes, okay, once we've built the project, we've issued the debt, how do we pay the debt servicing costs? And that's typically some combination of development charges and water and wastewater user rates. And with development charges being one of the enemies

that people look at nowadays because they don't like to pay them, because it raises the price of a cost of a home, what do we do then? Well, I think the issue of a cost of a home, what do we do then? Well, I think the issue of development charges needs a lot more conversation. Personally, I think development charges have been unfairly singled out as the problem and the cause of the housing crisis.

And so then the answer is, if you don't have a development charge, then you have to look at the question of who's going to pay for the infrastructure. And so if it's not growth, then it's going to be your existing water and wastewater users. And that's why some municipalities have started to look at different solutions such as municipal service corporations. More on that in a bit. Where do you come down on this issue of how we're going to pay for all this stuff? Water and wastewater is a tricky one. It has been, especially for the last 25 years, I think that over the long term we really need to look at mandated cost recovery for this utility. We know that only about 50% of municipalities in the province operate on cost recovery basis.

And we know that somewhere between 30 and 40% of this infrastructure is actually rated in fair to poor condition and towards the end of its life cycle. So we really have to figure our way through how do we get appropriate funding. We know Ontario maintains some of the lowest average water rates in the country, and we know that Canada as a country maintains some of the lowest average water rates in all of the OECD. So in Ontario, we're actually maintaining some of the lowest water rates in the developed world. We like it that way. We do like it that way but we were doing it at a time when our infrastructure assets are in a state that needs significant renewal and we have to figure our way through increasing

the rates either through development charges, through user rates. I mean, we have to get this infrastructure renewed, and we have to get this infrastructure expanded. We have this double whammy investment, and it's very significant. Michelle, is there a difference in the strain that smaller or more remote municipalities will be feeling on this issue compared to the bigger ones?

Absolutely. It's obviously much harder to attract development on the industrial commercial side in some of the smaller settings. So the access to those development charges isn't always the same. Population base may be declining in a lot of these regions, which leads to obviously fewer users.

But it doesn't reduce the amount of infrastructure that those utilities have to maintain. And last but not least, we have a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime in Ontario when it comes to water and wastewater. And the burden on smaller municipalities is significant. The one-size-fits-all, do you think that's the way to go? No, absolutely not. What would you do?

I think we need to look at a regulatory framework that sets the objectives in terms of safety and in terms of the product that you're providing to your consumers, but how we get there needs to have more flexibility. What do you say? Oh, two people applauded on that one, Michelle. That's pretty good. Greg, where would you be on that? Well, I think, you know, I think the issues that are being felt at smaller municipalities

and rural municipalities do differ from some of the larger urban ones. A lot of those municipalities are really looking to encourage growth of any kind and so are reluctant for example to put a development charge in place. And so that puts, as Patrick has indicated, significant pressure on water and wastewater rates. And we've seen in addition to some fairly significant tax increases over the last few years, lots of pressure on water and wastewater rates. And we've seen, in addition to some fairly significant tax increases over the last few years, lots of pressure on water and wastewater rates to deal with capital cost escalation, higher chemical

costs, the infrastructure needed from both a growth and a renewal perspective, conservation demand management, climate change, all kinds of pressures that are leading, I think, inevitably to some higher water and wastewater rates. What are you seeing in terms of the strain on bigger versus smaller municipalities? Certainly smaller municipalities and that user base that's shrinking is creating that financial pressure and perhaps it's one of these things that we have to look at grouping municipalities together and how they're managing their infrastructure,

look at regionalizing some of these smaller systems in order to create greater economies of scale, to get the chemical purchases down, to create larger contracts, to centralize expertise. You know, we have over a thousand water systems and 444 municipalities. We really should look at grouping some of these together in order to centralize management. That sounds reasonable on the face of it.

Can you imagine, Craig, a downside in any of that? Well, I think the challenge always, when I think municipalities try to come together to come up with a different kind of solution is they may have different interests, they may have different, the state of their infrastructure may be different, their capacity and ability to increase rates may be different.

And so one of the risks, which is also one of the opportunities, is that we need municipalities that will come together and have that open conversation about what would it look like if we pooled our resources and put something together to come up with a solution that's going to meet maybe not 100% of everybody's needs. But if it can get 75% or 80% of the way there,

that would have to be seen as a success. So you are recommending to the people in this room that they do that? Well, actually, I'm not. What I'm saying is every municipality in this room needs to understand and clearly articulate the problems that they're trying to solve. Before we jump to the solution, make

sure you really understand the problem and how it's playing out in your municipality. And once you know that, then you can start leaping to the solutions. OK, Michelle, where are you on that? We agree. I agree. Justice O'Connor, in his recommendations

following the Walkerton inquiry, did include regionalization of water systems as a path forward. There are economies of scales to be achieved, but there's also capacity building that can happen, whether it's in-house engineering, access to trained operators. Again, the procurement side of things is so complex.

And we have evidence of regional water systems, particularly in southwestern Ontario, that have been very successful. And for some of the smaller communities served on those systems, it's really been the only sustainable solution. Again, it's not a one size fits all. And there's a lot of issues around autonomy

and independence and sometimes preference among consumers. If you have a groundwater-based system, and you're telling them you're going to put them on a Great Lakes pipeline, there can be a lot of pushback, unless that's really well communicated and unless the need is really well demonstrated. If memory serves, Walkerton happened a quarter of a century ago.

Have any steps been taken to follow through on those particular recommendations of Judge O'Connor's? Yes, at one point, all of the recommendations had been implemented by the province. There's some concern that some of the enforcement has scaled back, and some of the diligence that he had recommended has been scaled back. But essentially, the framework we have now

is entirely built on the recommendations of the inquiry. I think now we're ready for some tweaks. Tweaks. That's all we need are tweaks? Yeah, I think now we're ready for some tweaks. Tweaks. That's all we need are tweaks? Yeah, I think fundamentally the framework is sound. We have one of the most advanced regulatory frameworks in the country, in the world, you might say. I think most Ontarians have access

to excellent quality drinking water and extremely reliable wastewater servicing. And that's a testament to the hard work that the folks in this room do. And that doesn't mean it can't get better. Got it. Let's talk about who's going to do all of what needs doing. Do we have Patrick adequate labour out there to make the improvements that we're going to hear about? Yes is the answer and I think that there's a big narrative out there about the construction

industry and capacity issues. And I think that that is a narrative that's overblown. It looks at the industry as a whole across the country, and it doesn't get into the regional and sectoral differences that exist. In the last year, we actually saw a scale back of about 20% of the hours worked across Ontario in our construction sector. We actually didn't have enough work for the people that are working in the sector. And so we do believe with all the work that the province is doing with skilled

trades, Ontario skills, Ontario, with the work that we're doing and OWA is doing with educators and guidance counsellors, we think that we're going to be able to grow sustainably as the demand for these services grows. But that comes with a caveat, and that caveat is that we need municipalities to be spending according to their infrastructure plans. We need them to spend their capital budgets in their entirety every year, because we build our businesses around those infrastructure plans. That's how we plan. That's how we develop and train and recruit people into the industry. And when those projects get delayed or funding gets cut

or revenue that's generated from these assets get diverted into other areas of the municipal budget that causes significant strain on the industry to retain the talent that we're developing and so over the long term what we need really need to do is see sustainable and consistent project tendering to make sure that the men and women that rely on this industry for a paycheck have a consistent paycheck because in the absence of that we'll see a departure into other skilled trades where the demand is also extremely high and where they can get that consistency. Craig, you're a former CFO of a big region in this province.

When you hear that kind of remark, do you take umbrage at it at all? Well, I think there are often challenges that municipalities face in getting all of their capital programs completed, one of which I would say relates to funding uncertainty. And so you've heard over the course of the conference and even over the course of the day about additional funding programs

that are being put in place for water and wastewater. And municipalities, I think it's fair to say, are very grateful for that kind of funding. The way it plays out makes it extremely difficult for municipalities to plan. If they're dealing with, let's say, short-term, unpredictable funding programs that are application-based, it makes it very difficult to plan ahead for a service that's as infrastructure-intensive as water and wastewater. Projects take years to plan, locate, design, build, and finance.

And so a shorter term, unpredictable funding program just doesn't fit well with water and wastewater. And if the approach could be more of a long-term, predictable, understandable way of funding water and wastewater, it would certainly make it a lot easier for municipalities to ensure that they're building the right infrastructure in the right place at the right time at the right size for the planned development. How does that answer sit with you?

Yes, agreed. Agreed. But we talked about Walkerton. And one of the major recommendations in Walkerton was around financing. And I think we've learned a lot from Walkerton and the Commission report, but we haven't learned that full lesson. Because in those years immediately following

that crisis, we saw budget shifted away from wastewater infrastructure and towards water infrastructure, rightfully so. But that created a deficit in that wastewater infrastructure that we've never caught back up on. And Justice O'Connor in that report said, without adequate financing, corners are inevitably going to be cut, whether that is in your day-to-day

maintenance or in your long-term infrastructure renewal. But regardless, safety is going to get compromised. And he said that, and yet we still know 25 years later, we still don't have we only have half the municipalities in Ontario operating on a cost recovery basis so in my mind you know while grant programs are important and development charges are important it is really hyper focused on getting as many municipalities specifically the ones over with populations greater than 10,000 on to a full cost recovery mandated program for their water systems.

Where are you on that? I agree. We've had two attempts at full cost pricing for water and sewer in the last 20 years and both acts have died in the legislature. What happened? There was a lack of political willingness to push them through. There are complications. Obviously, it's not easy. It's hard to draw a box around what costs should be included and what costs shouldn't be. But nonetheless, to Patrick's point, we call it a multi-barrier approach to safe drinking water.

And the same is true for wastewater. But in order for it to work, those barriers have to be robust. And right now, with the lack of supportive funding, they're all getting thinner and thinner and thinner. And so the risk that one of those barriers fails is increasing. Lack of supportive funding. Where do you think that support has to come from?

I think it has to come from the feds, and I think it has to come from the province. You know, we talk about the there's only one taxpayer at the end of the day, but the municipality having the least revenue tools available at its disposal, it needs to be supported. And I think in terms of a social construct, if we agree that we want healthy and vibrant rural communities, we all have to agree to support them financially.

Craig, you're the finance guy. Where does the support of money have to come from? Well, the support of money is going to come from a variety of sources. It's going to come, as Michelle has indicated, some of it needs to come from the federal and provincial levels. I think, you know, I agree with both my colleagues in terms of moving as many municipalities as possible towards what I would call a full cost pricing arrangement, where all the costs, operating and capital, are included in the rate structure that's put together,

you know, net of anything that might be received from a growth-related or development charge perspective. I think the more we can move municipalities in that direction And the more we can get where it is happening support for water and wastewater off of the property tax base that has to be a goal and that has to be considered to be you know a best practice that municipalities should aspire to. Two people applauded her. I'll take it. We're going to work on trying to get an answer here where maybe three or four people actually

applaud. Let's see. Am I right in saying the Ontario government recently announced a billion dollars in loans to help move this along? And if so, how helpful do you think that is? I'm caught a bit off guard. I'm not sure I have a good answer to that question. When it comes to, you know, if funding has been provided in the form of loans,

I'm not sure. Well, it's really for municipalities to build more homes. Right. And presumably this is all part of that. Right. And so I think the challenge with that kind of funding is that it's rewarding municipalities for something that they really don't have a lot of control over. Municipalities don't set interest rates.

Municipalities don't determine when projects are going to be delivered. And they have no say about when a developer is going to go ahead with a project, because that is going to be a profit-determined decision that's made. And so to me, the reward approach is just not quite the right way to go. But I think, again, there's an opportunity for the province to sit down with municipalities and design a program that would actually have a tangible impact in terms of being

able to build new houses. Because at the top of the housing-enabling infrastructure list is water and wastewater. And it's hugely expensive. We know that in rural municipalities even, water and wastewater makes up over a third of the value of all of their assets. So it's a significant investment that they've already made in terms of infrastructure that's

in and on the ground and there's a lot more to come to allow for the level of growth that the province is looking for. The province thinks, Michelle, it's got a good story to tell on this. What do you say? It does. I think loans are a part of the solution, but I think sustainable, predictable funding is going to be a better approach. Municipalities are required to develop official plans, master plans, capital plans, asset management plans. We have all these ideas of what we're going to do,

but we don't have concrete tools for funding them. So, oh, there's more than two. That's more than two. Yeah. The announcement by Minister Surma this morning was fantastic that we're going to help utilities catch up on their asset management plans. This is the infrastructure minister, Kinga Surma,

who made this morning, as we sit here today, not by the time you watch this on television, but yes, she made an announcement about that. That's a start, but it's about an order of magnitude too small. More applause for Michelle. What say you on that? We need every tool in the toolbox

to fund this infrastructure. We have a multibillion dollar infrastructure deficit for this class of infrastructure. I mean, in many respects, we're paying for the sins of our parents and our grandparents who under-invested in the long-term maintenance and renewal of these programs. They put it in the ground after World War II, and in the 70s, 80s, 90s, we underfunded. And now we're at this period of time where we have a tremendous amount of infrastructure to replace and a tremendous amount of infrastructure to expand in order

to account for these new homes. And we have to turn over every stone and find every penny in order to fund these things. And historically we've funded these things in one or two ways and we need to open up the tool chest and put every tool on the table, regionalize, full cost recovery, tap into the private sector if that's possible, grant programming. I mean, there are a lot of things that are done well

in other countries that we need to look at and take a cautious approach, but open up the toolbox. Is it a given Patrick that most of the money, most of the labour, most of the attention will go to bigger municipalities leaving the smaller and more northern ones out in the cold? I mean, if we typically operate on these programs on a grant basis, and it's done by users of the system. And so, yes, typically it's going to go to the major population centers and those major

areas where there is housing growth expected. So yeah, perhaps that needs a rethink as well. We need to focus in on those areas where growth is happening because those become the economic drivers of the province and I think that's long been why we've focused these type of grant programs to the big urban centers. But I think over time if you move again towards cost recoveries to the big urban centers that frees up all of this grant money for the smaller municipalities that don't have the user base in order to pay for their systems. That's why we really want to see these, you know, mid-sized municipalities really, you know, attach as many of these, as many of these costs into their user fees as possible to then free up that money for the smaller municipalities who actually really need it.

You got some advice for the people in this room as to how they can ensure they get their piece of the pie? Well you know one of the solutions that's potentially out there, I started to mention earlier, is the municipal service corporation approach. And so we spent some time over the course of 2024 looking at municipal services corporations for water and wastewater. And was there the feasibility of the viability of a joint municipal services corporation?

So this is where municipalities, a group of municipalities, would come together under a construct that exists under the Municipal Act, a municipal services corporation, simply put, a corporation put together to deliver a municipal service that in theory, and I think in practice, can operate perhaps in a more nimble way than a municipality can under the Municipal Act.

It has the potential to achieve, let's say, some economies of scale that these individual municipalities wouldn't otherwise be able to achieve. So there's about 225 municipalities with a population less than 25,000. And water and wastewater, a service that, A, all of them use, and that, as we've already discussed, is under great a more positive rate, for lack of a better term. And this is something that AMO is going to be, AMO and their business arm, Local Authority Services,

is going to be pursuing over the course of 2025. It's a potential solution that people should be looking at. How does it happen, Michelle? There has to be willingness among the various communities to come together. If it's one municipality looking to explore the model, there's going to be a political will to do something different. There are balance sheet implications

that not everybody is really ready to consider. But I think the main advantage is you can regionalize the system across political boundaries, ideally along a watershed boundary, where you can look at the water and wastewater in its entirety as an asset. And there are other advantages in terms of reducing burden, reporting compliance, all those types of things.

But I think fundamentally it allows for a more stable funding base and more consistent water quality. Is this the kind of thing municipalities can undertake on their own? Or do they need some leadership from a different order of government to help them create these units? Well, I think this LAS expert panel that Craig chaired

so proficiently has done an extremely deep dive into what that might look like, and perhaps what some of the pitfalls are, because we have public utility corporations in Ontario. We have had them in the past. And there are pros and cons associated with that model that are very similar to the Municipal Services Corporation model.

So there are some guideposts there, but I think there's a group that will be working on establishing a governance model and providing some best practices to municipalities. That is a very thick report. I took a look at it. And what do you think? How does this happen, in essence?

So I think there is a role here for the province to play as AMO and AMO-LAS goes through the process of putting a business case together. So the rules around the Municipal Services Corp exist in the act and in the reg. But there are some conversations with the province that I know would be helpful going forward around access to development charges, for example, around access to funding programs,

ensuring that if municipalities were to come together, that they would still be eligible for some of these funding programs that are being put out there for municipalities. So there's definitely a role here to play, and I think we'll be, by the end of this year, we should be in a much better position to understand what this could look like,

who some of the interested municipalities are out there, and whether the business case process proves out that, yes, this is something that could work, and deal with some of the many challenges that we've talked about in the last half hour. Do you have a view, Patrick, on who ultimately, at the end of the day, has to drive the bus to make sure this happens? It's the municipalities. The province has to make gentle recommendations.

This LAS report is wonderful in what it's proposing, but municipalities have to look at what else is out there and understand that they are the ultimate drivers of their own water systems. These water systems are owned by the municipality. They need to be funded by the municipality. And if we can't get to a point where funding sustainability is part of that local program, well,

then we need to look at other options. And these service corporations are not a new concept. They exist in Canada. They exist here in Ontario. Regulated authorities exist in many of our partner countries, like Ireland, in the UK, and Australia. There are other things that we need to look at and it really falls upon the owners of these systems in order to figure out what is best for their system. We don't want to

hand over control elsewhere but if we can't get to a cost sustainability standpoint then other measures need to be looked at. Michelle, what's your view on who needs to drive the bus here to make sure it gets done? I agree with both my colleagues. I think it's everybody. I think there will be areas where if we do go down the path to regionalization, because when we map this out, the population growth out 30, 50 years, we're going to have to get into some mega pipelines or other typical systems. And where locally there isn't an appetite to undertake that

size of project, I think there's going to be a role for the province. Conversely, I think for some municipalities there are steps they can take now. The MSC might be one of them in terms of accessing the capital they need to deliver on the growth they're expected to support. I want to, if I can, just for a moment here, circle back. Because we did mention Walkerton earlier, but just briefly. And that was such a traumatic moment in the history of the province. Seven people died.

There were thousands who got sick as a result of the problems that took place in Walkerton a quarter of a century ago. And I guess I want to find out, let's go across here. Craig, I'll go to you first. Have we really learned the lessons of all of that all this time later? Well, I think my colleagues will be in a better position

to respond to that, certainly from a regulatory perspective. I think from a financial perspective, the report of the Walkerton Inquiry did speak to the benefits of regionalization. And my former employer, the Region of Waterloo, in their submission talked about economies of scale. They talked about the ability to assemble a team of experts from an operations and from a construction perspective.

They talked about the integration of water and wastewater with public health, which in many municipalities is another department, you know, within the, particularly within the region or a single tier, and the coordinated effort that those two departments can undertake when they're working well together. So I think, you know, if we're starting to see a movement away from that, I think that's a problem. And I think that there's lots of benefits to the regionalization that was discussed in that report. It's a complicated story, of course,

because it's not simply systemic malfeasance. There was, I don't want to libel anybody here but you know there were a couple of people who are running the Public Utility Commission who were inebriated on the job and falsifying records and that turned out to be a very big problem. Okay have we learned Patrick in your view all of the lessons that we needed to learn from what happened in Walkerton 25 years ago? I think we've learned important lessons.

We've learned the public oversight lesson. We've learned the safety of our drinking water. We've learned that lesson. But we haven't learned the financing lesson. Financing is the foundation for all of this. And you know, when we moved money away from wastewater and storm water infrastructure and put it into drinking water in order to bring our systems up to snuff, that came at a cost. And 25

years on, we're seeing the result of that cost. And, and now we're trying to figure out how to catch up on these assets. We're seeing greater instances of flooding, greater sewer backups, more combined sewer overflows. The problem has shifted just to a different portion of the asset class. And ultimately it comes all the way back to this idea of funding. And until we configure the funding, we haven't learned the lessons of Walkerton fully and completely. Michelle, lessons learned?

I think there are a number of lessons learned. Obviously, we've touched on several of them today. But I think my concern is that humans are notoriously complacent. And as you said, it's been nearly 25 years since the outbreak. We think we've done a great job. We think we've implemented all the recommendations.

But truly, it requires constant vigilance. And when the people who are running these systems are being stretched too thin, we talk about new and emerging contaminants every day. We talk about asset renewal. We talk about workforce shortages. At some point, something's going to give. Do you see complacency out there right now? I don't think I not among frontline operators obviously they're you know incredibly

dedicated people they're highly trained but they're being pulled in so many directions that it becomes a challenge. Patrick how about you do you see some complacency out there? I think we just, you know, generally speaking, we have a finite number of resources, human resources, on the municipal side, on the construction side, on the design side, and our budgets are increasing like a rocket ship. And so the pace at which we are growing, that is perhaps become some of the issue. I don't think it's necessary complacency, it's just keeping up with this huge crush of demand

on all of the different bodies that are involved in the construction and operation and maintenance of this infrastructure. We're growing at a half a million people a year, you know, we're growing at a half a million people a year in the province. We're growing at the size of the city of Hamilton in the greater Toronto area, you know, almost every year. And we're not adding the city of Hamilton city staff

worth of new operators. So we're seeing this rapid growth at a time when we're not seeing the commensurate growth of the people that are actually managing, operating, and constructing this. So I've heard the three of you say we need more federal, provincial, municipal leadership as it relates to all of this.

Craig, what about the private sector? Is there a role for private money in any of this? So I think municipalities have a long history of working with the private sector from a construction perspective, even from an operations perspective. We think we, and when I say we, I'm referring to the panel that worked last year on the water and wastewater

modeling, we came to the unanimous conclusion that water and wastewater has to remain wholly owned in public hands. The implications are just too great. As soon as you introduce a private organization, their duty is going to be to their shareholders. And the interest here has to be safe, reliable, affordable drinking water.

And we can't deviate from that in any way. And so I think that, again, our conclusion was it stays in public hands. And I would also note that the regulation that exists right now, the governing municipal services corporations, it prevents the sale of shares of such a corporation to a private person. So that's already contemplated, in fact,

more than contemplated, specifically set out in the regulation that watering waste water is to remain in public hands. And I think that is crucial as we go forward. Do you see a role for more private involvement in this? No, fundamentally, I don't. I think there's a role to educate the rate payers on the value of the service they're receiving.

You know, most of us pay less for water and waste water than we do for our cell phones. We don't seem to, well, I was going to say, we don't seem to mind paying a lot for our cell phones. We do mind paying a lot for our cell phones. We do mind paying a lot for our cell phones. We make a lot of noise about it, but we still do it. We still do it.

That's exactly right. And you think we need to? I think we need to pay for the service we rely on. And that doesn't mean it's cheap, but I think there are lots of ways to do it better. There is a sense, and it happens even when you go into a restaurant, you sit down at that table, you expect a free glass of water that you will not

see on your bill, but obviously wasn't free to get to your table. No. What do we do about that? Getting back to the full cost pricing, we really need to educate the general public on the value of water and wastewater and that includes You know not stealing from our grandchildren, right and doing it right and doing it right now

Let's I just noticed keeping an eye on the clock here. We're down to our last minute and change So let me get 30 seconds from each of you on one message. You want to leave this audience with today, Patrick When you wake up in the morning and you brush your teeth and you use the washroom and you have a shower and you brew a pot of coffee, all of that is possible because of your water and wastewater infrastructure. This is the most critical public assets that we own and they need to be properly funded. And exploring private sector options, if that's what it comes to, exploring regionalization,

municipal service corporations, there are a lot of opportunities out there to cautiously change what we're doing in order to ensure that all of these services that we take for granted and rely on every single day, they are the life bread of our communities, we need to figure our way forward to proper financing. Craig Dyer. Looking at this from a higher level perspective, I would say, don't try to solve this problem in isolation of all the other issues facing municipalities.

Water and wastewater, homelessness, development charge instability, significant increase in costs. There is a proposal out there, it's been out there for more than a year now from AMO, their social and economic prosperity review. That to me, again, just thinking about it a little more broadly is the conversation that needs to happen. People, municipalities in the province need to get together and talk about who is, who should be accountable and responsible for delivering which services, and then secondly,

what are the appropriate revenue tools in order to fund those services? And if we're gonna... if we're gonna have this conversation about water and wastewater, let's not have it in isolation of some of these other significant issues. Michelle, last word to you.

Thank you. I think it is a utility service. I think there's a lot we can learn from some of the other utilities in terms of the governance models and the rate structures that are valuable. I also want to commend everyone here who's in elected office because every municipal councillor in Ontario is personally liable under the Safe Drinking Water Act to ensure the safety and the sustainability of the system. And so that is not a burden that I think anyone takes on lightly.

And so again, I congratulate you and I express my gratitude for that. And last but not least, I want to say only tap water delivers. And there's value in that. I know this audience wants to join me in thanking these three for a great discussion here this morning at Roma. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks, gang.