Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Ouellet.
Thank you both for your presentations. They were very thoughtful. It's hard to know where to start.
You will be interested and encouraged to know that there were a number of presentations dealing with the need for the federal government to step up to the plate on water management. The most profound intervention to us on that was from the deputy premier of the Northwest Territories. You've probably been following his work. He definitely called for federal intervention.
As Professor Saunders has stated, it took 25 years to get the Peace-Athabasca, Mackenzie basin delta plan negotiated. Some of my former colleagues were part of that back in the early eighties--twelve years later, one bilateral. So he essentially called on us to recommend to the federal government to step forward to get those agreements negotiated, perhaps make it more trilateral, and have everybody there negotiating multilaterally. Plus he recommended strongly that the first nations governments, which have been completely excluded, should also be at the negotiating table.
So it came before us before, and it's noteworthy that you're raising that again.
There's one statute that neither of you has mentioned that keeps occurring to me--the Canada Water Act. It could be of limited use, but maybe could be expanded. I notice that under the Canada Water Act there is a provision where the federal government can designate special management areas. Do either of you want to speak to that?