I would say yes, the federal government does have a role. The climate data, especially, that I showed as an example was from Environment Canada. One of the things I noticed when I was going through the climate data was that starting from the 1970s, going up to the mid-1990s or before that, in many of these monitoring sites there was data going back almost a century; but in the mid-1990s, I can only presume that budget cuts were the reason there began to be bigger and bigger gaps in the data.
For example, regarding the snowpack for much of the prairie, if you look at historical data, it's there, it's regular, it's always there, and it's a great database. Starting in the mid-1990s, for increasingly more and more stations, there was data missing. What I thought was ironic was that in some cases there would be data for the summer for snowpack but not for the winter. So you'd have no data for the winter and then a bunch of zeros for the summer. Is that a monitoring program? Maybe, but ultimately you can't really get to conclusions if you don't have the data.
The currency of scientists is data. Routine monitoring of things such as climate and river flow aren't exciting. It's a constant cost, and I assume there are bean-counters in bureaucracies who wonder if we're getting a bang for our buck with this. So in many cases that's the first thing that gets cut.
I showed the data on the river flows. You'll notice that the data for the Sunwapta River stopped around 1995-96. Again, that was because that station was pulled. It's the only station from which we had substantial data for glacial meltwater in the Rockies. After two or three decades, you begin to be able to interpret trends and the data becomes more and more valuable. If you cut it off, you're left with a vacuum. That station has since been put back in—two years ago, I think.
At a critical point, all these long-term data sets are becoming more and more valuable. Unfortunately, over the last 10 to 15 years, the data sets have become more and more spotty. So for me in terms of this kind of work, that's the simplest recommendation.
In terms of other things, there has been almost an evisceration of freshwater research capacity in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada. Why is that? I assume it's a budgetary thing, but I don't know.