I would agree, very much so. Canada had adopted a voluntary ballast water and saltwater exchange program long before that, as had other countries. This is not a leading-edge activity that was done by Canada.
It was back about 10 or 12 years ago that the IMO, as a global organization, decided that they needed to look at this. They needed to find a solution, and they too recognized that saltwater exchange is not good enough. That's what led them down the path to say let's set standards that would be high enough, from a water quality point of view, to deal with what they hoped were most of the invasive species that would be found in ballast water. They started that, setting the standards, working with different crating companies around the world, as well as many companies....
We have a company in London, Ontario, Trojan Technologies, that has developed a tremendous product that is going to be used in vessels, and it's being tested on ocean-going vessels right now, to treat ballast water.
The world has been moving for ten years to get to this point. Maybe part of it is the justification of the U.S. Coast Guard in also implementing these ballast water standards and the need for technology. Neither the International Marine Organization nor the U.S. EPA nor the U.S. Coast Guard believe that saltwater exchange is good enough to prevent invasive species from getting into freshwater.
On the other side, the statement that they haven't found an invasive species in five years is always a very tough one. There has never been a way of determining this is the day in which an invasive species arrived in the Great Lakes. There is a day when it's found. An invasive species may be deposited in one port on the Great Lakes, but what will happen is that we have all of these lakers that move freight between the various ports on each of the Great Lakes, and they become one of the major conduits for moving the invasive species further. A zebra mussel that's let go in Toronto would take 50 years to get up into Lake Michigan, but the lake freighters, because they're constantly moving freight and moving ballast water around the Great Lakes, are a conduit to move it effectively around.
If you wanted to look at a precautionary principle, if we felt that the cheap way of exchanging saltwater with ballast water was sufficient, none of these organizations would be putting in the need for ballast water technology. Ballast water technology is about a $2.6 billion industry. It's a brand-new industry with large global players that have developed and are testing and are now installing ballast water technology in ships. I would tend to rely on that, that there is a need for this technology. It's not something that's a wish and a prayer, but an actual need.