Why, thank you, Mr. Chair.
I certainly appreciate having an opportunity to ask some questions of our panel here. I certainly appreciate the testimony I've heard so far. It's been quite enlightening.
I worked for a number of years for Environment Canada. I also worked for Alberta Environment in a different capacity. Basically, I was one of the cogs in the wheel who was constantly doing surface water samples and so on. So we do have lots of those inventories. I was taking samples, whether it was potable water at a park or water from a lake that I happened to be working near, and so on.
You made reference to Alberta's “Water for Life” strategy, which is the one that started in 2007 and goes out for 10 years. I was on a municipal council in Alberta, and when you look at Alberta, there's a large move to go away from groundwater or aquifer use to regional water and waste water systems. The town I live in, for example, along with several other partnering communities, is now using or drawing water from the Red Deer River, which is a non-glacier-fed river. We found immediately that the aquifers we were drawing down—we would notice a steady decline—have now almost completely recharged within a year and a half, or much faster than we had anticipated or the engineers had suggested the aquifers would recharge. So I thought that was quite interesting.
When you take something like that, where make a best guess, and we apply it to what's happening in, let's say, the oil sands.... You guys know what the geology is. We know where the formations are. We know where the water is and, to a certain degree, how that water moves through there. So when we're going through that whole process, what are the unknowns that we need to know? We're going to go through this study—Ms. Duncan referred to it—and I think it's going to take time to tackle these things.
Now, I've heard stories. I've talked to people who have gone out into the Paskapoo area, where they've actually put dyes in the water. They monitored where the dyes ended up, so they could trace where these waters moved through the aquifers, and so on.
How much more do we need to know, in your opinion, before we can at least be comfortable knowing that when we issue permits or licences for development, we can be relatively sure we're doing the right thing? How far away are we from that?