I suspect that the WMO standards Mr. Ferguson was referring to primarily had to do with water quantity monitoring standards that would be adhered to by the program Ms. Béchard supervises. It's important to adhere to those kinds of standards.
Canada is a significant contributor to the scientific and standard development at the WMO. In fact, Canada is currently the president of the WMO, for a second term.
Water quality obviously has to adhere to generically similar kinds of considerations in order to ensure robustness and continuity over time, but the precise standards would be quite different, because we're looking at quality instead of quantity.