Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
As you mentioned, my name is Mark Corey and I am assistant deputy minister, Earth Sciences Sector at the Department of Natural Resources. I am accompanied by Mr. David Boerner, director general of the Geological Survey of Canada, and Mr. Alfonso Rivera, who is an expert and program manager of our Ground Water Program.
I'm going to just give you a brief overview, and then David has a deck that he can take you through.
Our focus really is on water as it moves underground in Canada, and particularly larger-scale aquifers. We'd like to give you a brief overview of the NRCan groundwater geoscience program to talk about the context in which we work.
To start off, we believe groundwater is a critical resource. That's our starting point. We understand groundwater. When water moves underground, actually, it's really the geologists who understand it. So that's what we at the Geological Survey do. We study water as it moves underground.
In Canada we've identified 30 major national aquifers. There are a lot of other smaller ones, but those are the critical ones. We've done what we would call a reconnaissance preliminary assessment of all of those aquifers. Now we're doing a much more in-depth, detailed analysis of each one. We've completed the in-depth analysis on 12 of those 30, and we're accelerating the work on the rest.
Just to give you an idea, we were spending about $3 million a year. We've now accelerated that by an internal reallocation of resources and we're spending about $3.9 million a year.
Our goal is to have a comprehensive and consistent evidence base across Canada of how these aquifers work and behave under different conditions and scenarios. We work very closely with the provinces and territories and with all the other provincial actors and academia. It really is a shared responsibility. One of our principal roles is national overview and standards for this.
I would like to introduce you to Mr. David Boerner, who will be making the presentation. First, he will talk to you about groundwater in Canada and then he will give you an overview of our work, particularly in Alberta.