My comments were in terms of the framework, and what it appeared to be based on, and ultimately the implications. My point in saying that we're in trouble was to go back to what is science. The basic assumption of the water framework, when they put it together, was that the amount of water isn't changing in the river, historically. The assumption will be that it won't change in the future. On average, 5% of the time we can expect this limitation or that limitation. My point is that simply by saying what years were the lowest flows, and where are we, and what would that mean in terms of trends.... So a very simple consideration of which years were the lowest flows and which were the highs, to contextualize that ranking of the flows, pretty much skewers the framework as it is.
So my critique on that one was because we've been spending no time or money on figuring out the state of a water resource upon which we are entirely dependent for this activity, we're now stuck with very little knowledge of what's happened, what's going to happen, and what the implications are.
My basic message was that the framework as it is now really isn't of a lot of use. It's very arbitrary. In terms of where we're going, certainly there's a great need for getting sufficient information to produce what I would consider a valid water management framework. We can't go forward in terms of managing the water or development in the basin that's dependent on water if we don't know what the effects are going to be.
I know the Alberta government has come up with an in-stream flow needs water management basin framework technique for southern Alberta and the South Saskatchewan River basin. It involved detailed sampling, detailed studies of things like the effects of flow on riparian communities, effects of flow on fisheries. Ultimately, though, what you need is to determine where the ecological thresholds are. As flow declines, at some point you can expect an ecological effect on whatever it is you're looking at, whether it's the suspended wetlands and lakes that are in the basin.... Periodic flooding of the river results in a recharge of these systems that keeps all of these vast wetlands healthy. At what point, as time goes on, does the river no longer exceed its banks in sufficient frequency to affect those things? At what point in the flow do fisheries start to collapse because of loss of habitat or loss of spawning, that sort of thing? At what point are the hydro-dynamics of the river in terms of sediment changes affected so that you're not getting the channelization and all the other things that are necessary for ecological function in the river?
The framework as it is considers none of that, simply because we have none of that information. My basic point was if we want to create a picture of what's going on in the river that is based on an understanding of what's happening in the river, what's most sensitive in the river, if we don't have that picture, we can't possibly hope to manage the river properly.
In one of the previous questions from the presenters before was something along the lines of, with $120 billion in development planned, and the industry contributing tens of millions of dollars to research, the amount of money being contributed to what I would call valid environmental research is a drop in the bucket of what's going into the industrial research. Provincially, we've seen water sampling for lakes in Alberta get cut 70% or 80% just in the last few weeks. If you're looking at trying to figure out what's going on with a resource that forms a foundation of a $100-billion-plus industry, you'd better start putting some serious thought and money into it.