Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, it's our view that this is a process of governments being responsible and also giving the municipal taxation authorities some tools in their toolkit to be able to collect outstanding arrears in the area of water and sewer and other services.
I want to apologize to the members of the committee. During our discussion, there was concern raised about what could qualify and we had to go back and do some research to really spell out the specifics. We have been able to do so, and we've been able to define what falls under this category. It's only services that can be transferred over; arrears for services rendered by the community. We had talked about parking tickets and apparently this does not qualify. We have clarification on that. So this is something I wanted to clear up.
There is really no other mechanism for a municipal government to collect, failing this being in place; I guess a collection agency or just plainly cutting off the service. The communities wanted to be able to resort to a system that will allow them to put this as part of their property tax and get them a lot stronger way of collecting arrears.