A vision for a monitoring plan.... Well, monitoring is critical. It's complicated, but it's critical because we can't really say anything about how well we are doing, and to do what I referred to as this term “adaptive management”, which really means that you commit to a process, you do it, and then you look at it in a way that you can actually say, “I got what I thought I was going to get, or something different, and I'm going to change my actions because of that.” It's a monitoring framework that allows you to do that. It also allows this connection to determine what the farm community needs are, what the goods and services or the ecology needs are. You need a monitoring program that ideally serves both of those needs.
In terms of vision, one of the things that we're doing right now, I mentioned that we have a national research consortium. It is called the Canadian Watershed Research Consortium. We're working with six, hopefully soon to be seven watersheds across Canada. The focus on each of those watersheds is we ask the end users to come around to the desire to have our research funds invested there. So it wasn't to the research community. The first ask was, “If you're a watershed that really wants this, and your collective users and industry investors want us to put our money here, put up your hand.”
Each of those six watersheds is working on how to develop what is referred to as a cumulative effects monitoring framework. Basically it's a monitoring framework that makes sense to land use planner questions, to stewardship council questions, and to local or provincial regulatory questions. Basically, what's the canary in the mine shaft, if we're in Tobacco Creek, and it's an agriculturally dominated watershed, or if we work with the Muskoka watershed, where they're looking at a basin where it doesn't actually look like phosphorus is a target, but they're actually looking at calcium levels. So in each case they are customizing what it is that needs to be looked at in their systems, but they're developing a monitoring system that would better inform those land use planning decisions and all the decisions around them.
Going back to Ms. Leslie's question, there really isn't a simple answer to it, other than trying to create structures in which you're clear about the questions you want to ask and trying to get the players around the table who can design it. We are actually looking at a vision of cumulative effects monitoring frameworks that have the same strategic purpose and the same philosophy across Canada, but they're each developed within those local settings. Frankly, the phosphorus-loading actions in the Red River aren't going to affect the Great Lakes basin, and they may be different systems, but they both want to look at whether nutrients are the driver there, what the impacts are that they can see in the ecosystem, so they are all following the same kind of questioning and developing those.
My vision is that more watersheds across Canada join forces to develop a common approach to cumulative effects monitoring, but yes, it's critical because they can't decide what they need to do and they can't decide how well they're doing until they have a monitoring framework they can rely on.