I'm happy to do so.
I should point out at the outset that I am not a David Schindler. As my in-laws pointed out, I'm not a real scientist; I'm a political scientist. But I've been fairly heavily involved in water policy work within Alberta, so I would like to take a few minutes to establish some contextual factors that you may want to keep in mind as this conversation unfolds.
First of all, for those of you who are on the committee and not from Alberta, there is a very fundamental divide in the province between north and south when it comes to water issues. In the south, where the bulk of the population is and where the oil sands are gone, water quality is not a big issue, but water supply and potential shortages of supply are in fact very big issues.
We have river basins to the south that are essentially tapped out, and we also have interprovincial issues in the south as the water flows out of Alberta into Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The south is a basin consumed by supply issues, whereas the northern part of the province has few people and lots of water, so it's a different environment.
Supply issues in the north tend to be a seasonal issue, not an overall issue, so when we get into late summer there are issues in terms of the withdrawal of water for oil sands. Unlike the south, water quality is a big issue. A lot of focus is around the potential impact of the oil sands on water quality, and there's more of a concern about downstream communities and the effect on downstream communities. In the south, the impact is on the supply of downstream communities, not on the quality of water. You just want to keep in mind that Alberta has two very distinct water communities.
The second point I will make is that the water issues surrounding the oil sands are, in many ways, easier to deal with than the greenhouse gas issues around the oil sands. The intensity of water use has been going down over time. There's been a lot of technological change. There's a lot of recycling that's used in the oil sands development and the increasing use of brackish water. And finally, on the tailings ponds, which we know so well through ads, here again is a use of water that is probably going to be technologically obsolete within the foreseeable future. The water issues surrounding the oil sands are ones in which there's a lot of activity going on and the problems are less intractable than they are when we come to greenhouse gas issues.
The third point, and next to last point, is that public opinion polling in the province and in the country at large suggests that water issues will trump concern over greenhouse gas issues for the Canadian public. We've seen a waning interest in global warming that has not eroded public interest in environmental issues that we can see, touch, and feel. So water remains a pretty important and sensitive issue on the public policy landscape.
The last point I will make is that within Alberta, water policy has been a matter of intensive development for the past half decade now. Alberta put into place the Water for Life strategy, and we're now working on putting in a land use framework strategy that's built around a lot of water concerns. So although you may not want to argue that we've got everything right in the province, this is not a policy backwater by any means, as Alberta and British Colombia probably have the most aggressive policy approach to water.
So when I look at water issues in the province, I don't see a lot of big holes that other governments might want to step into. This is an area of very active policy creation, of very active policy deliberation, which again is not to say that we necessarily get it right, but it's certainly very much on the table.
With that, I'll pass on to my colleague.