Environment Committee on March 10th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Committee members, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are going to be briefed on the work of the University of Saskatchewan's Global Institute for Water Security. Before us, we have witnesses Mr. Jay Famiglietti, David Rudolph and Amina Stoddart.

You each have five to seven minutes, because it's a 45-minute round and everybody wants to ask you a question. Who is starting off?

Mr. Famiglietti.

[Jay Famiglietti]

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Ratansi, vice-chairs Findlay and Pauzé, and members of the committee. My name is Jay Famiglietti. I'm the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where I hold the Canada 150 Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. I'm also the lead organizer of today's Water Day on the Hill for which we brought 24 water scientists from 14 universities and seven different provinces to Ottawa to talk with you about our science, that is, the science of water.

We're here today to directly communicate our science to you because it's compelling and also because it's our responsibility to keep you informed and because we want you to know that we are here for you. When you need information on a certain water topic, please do not hesitate to reach out.

In my research, I use satellites and I develop computer models to track how freshwater availability is changing all over the world. The maps shown on the screen were produced by my team and our collaborators using a NASA satellite called GRACE, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The GRACE mission, which flew from 2002 through 2017, behaved more like a scale than a typical satellite, which we might think of as a space-borne camera. Instead, GRACE literally weighed the regions of the world that were gaining water—shown in blue—and that were losing water—shown in red.

Broadly speaking, the map has a background pattern in which the high and low latitude regions of the world, the already wet regions, are getting wetter—shown by the light blue background colours—and the mid-latitude regions of the world in between, that is the already dry areas, are getting drier—shown by the lighter red and orange background colours. The map is then dotted with what I call “hot spots for water insecurity”. These are places where there is too much water—shown by the deeper blue spots—for example, due to flooding becoming more extreme, or places where there is too little water—shown by the deeper red spots—due to more pronounced draught or due to the over-exploitation of groundwater.

The map paints a picture of humans, then, as the driving force of a very rapidly changing freshwater landscape, for example, due to climate change, which is causing the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and Alpine glaciers, like those in Alaska and British Columbia, to melt, contributing to sea level rise and impacting the source of stream-flow in our rivers.

You can also see a number of deep red spots across the mid-latitudes of the world, including those in California, Texas, the Middle East, India, Bangladesh, Beijing and several more. These represent primarily the disappearance of groundwater from the world's major aquifers. In most regions around the world, the groundwater in these aquifers is being massively overpumped to provide irrigation water to fuel global food production. A profound lack of governance and management the world over allows this over-exploitation to continue largely unabated. The upshot of this map is that not only is our global water security at risk but so too is our global food security.

Canada is not immune to these issues. It, too, is less water-secure than is generally appreciated. Looking at the GRACE map, we can see the impact of melting ice across the Canadian west, the north and the northeast, and the cumulative impact of flooding across Alberta and western Saskatchewan. This is consistent with climate model predictions of how climate change will impact Canada through melting ice and permafrost, shorter snow seasons, and more liquid rain rather than snowfall in the mountains, all of which will lead to changes in the timing of stream-flow and freshwater availability for people, for agriculture and for the environment, and to greater oscillations between flooding and draught.

Except that it's already happening now, and it's happening at rates that are quicker than our models project. It's happening at rates that are so quick that we are unable to prepare for them. Canadian water scientists like me and my colleagues are working on continuing these observations and developing new ones, and we'll be talking with you about them today. We're thinking about their implications and about how best to prepare Canada for its more complicated water future and therefore its more complicated food and energy futures. We're thinking about things like integrated river basin planning, the need for national-scale flood, groundwater and water availability forecasting, and the need for new governance paradigms for global groundwater or for a Canada water agency that can circumvent the fractured nature of water management that is so common in developed countries and yet stands in the way of the urgent need to address the many issues that are becoming visible on this map.

I will close by saying that the rapid pace of change of our freshwater landscape certainly presents many challenges, but it also presents an opportunity to show how a nation such as Canada can lead the world towards managing the way through to sustainable national and global water futures.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

If anybody is recording, please don't do that. Security doesn't like it.

Is somebody recording? No? Okay, thank you.

Mr. Rudolph.

[David Rudolph]

Thank you very much. I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here with the committee today.

My name is Dave Rudolph. I'm a groundwater hydrologist at the University of Waterloo. Today I'd like to talk about three main points associated with Canada's subsurface water resources, or groundwater.

Groundwater is rapidly emerging as one of Canada's most strategic natural resources, influencing current topics related to the environment and sustainable development, yet it probably is the nation's most poorly understood resource. Part of it is because it tends to be out of sight and out of mind.

I am going to provide a bit of an overview of current groundwater use in Canada, just to give an idea of how Canadians use it. Then I'll go through a variety of questions related to emerging issues that are environmentally impacting groundwater at a national scale and will have social and economic impacts on a wide range of issues, and I'll provide a couple of examples of that. Finally, I have a couple of recommendations that might help us ensure that we stay proactive as we manage groundwater resources moving forward.

As Professor Famiglietti presented just a moment ago, at a global scale, groundwater represents an enormous component of our accessible fresh water. Approximately 95% to 98% of accessible fresh water is in the groundwater reserve. It's available throughout the world and it is depended on significantly.

In Canada, between the years 1970 and 2015, our dependence on groundwater went from about 10% to about 33%. In that short time period, we've been progressively turning towards groundwater as a substantial resource. That's about 10 million Canadians using groundwater on a daily basis. We expect this dependency to grow, yet it's quite variable across Canada.

For instance, in Prince Edward Island and the Yukon Territory, it is 100% of the supply that's used. Across the prairie provinces, it is about 30%; and in Ontario, maybe 30% to 40%. That gives you an idea of how substantial it is across Canada.

As illustrated by part of what you saw just a moment ago, there is clear evidence now that groundwater will be a crucial component in helping us mitigating against climate change because of climate warming. It will help us maintain the economic growth that we are looking for and a standard of living for our future Canadians, but there are challenges coming forward and I'll mention just a few.

The first relates to the decades of land use management and resource development that has resulted in slow and chronic degradation of groundwater quality. That is now beginning to threaten municipal water supplies and ecosystem health across Canada. It's slow moving but arriving now at our doorstep.

Particularly challenging are examples you may know of: urban road de-icers, which are particularly difficult; agricultural nutrient management; and retired metal and petroleum mining operations across Canada.

The second point I'll refer to is the emergence of new contaminants of concern, ones that we may never have anticipated before. One that is particularly prevalent these days is a series of substances referred to as per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. You may have heard the term. They are being widely detected in the environment, tend to be bioaccumulating, and as yet we don't know how to deal with them and what the health effects are. This is something that is changing very quickly. Recently, just in the last few months, the U.S. Department of Defense invested $100 million in PFAS research. Groundwater appears to be one of the most substantial vectors of movement.

The third issue I'll point to just for this morning is the identification of hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells across Canada, all of which are indicating a potential impact in terms of groundwater threats. Right here in Ontario, we have 25,000 of these abandoned wells, something that's really not well known. They are under the Great Lakes, around them, and all through Ontario. That type of threat is not understood very well. The overall environmental economic legacy of it is still under consideration.

One of the biggest challenges, of course, in groundwater management is that jurisdictional responsibility is divided between municipal, provincial and federal governments, which makes it challenging to manage it in the long run. However, because of the strategic significance of the nation's groundwater and how it's changing so rapidly, federal leadership is critical, moving forward.

To that light, I will point out two major, substantial documents that the federal government has developed over the last few years.

In 2003, NRCan initiated a national committee to develop a Canadian framework for collaboration on groundwater. That document provides a really good road map for governance. It's as timely now as it was then, and it has gained international attention. It is being used in lots of parts of the world. It's something that's available, and I tried to bring a bilingual version of it for you today. I've only found the English version, but it's online on the NRCan website.

The second one is a document that the federal government commissioned from the Council of Canadian Academies in 2009, and it is referred to as “The Sustainable Management of Groundwater in Canada”. It's an excellent reference. I've brought the both French and English versions of it for you today. I'll leave it with the chair at the end of the day. Again, CCA developed that document.

Both of them are totally relevant now, with a lot of great information. As a result of the changes I mentioned, we need to revisit some of the topics going forward.

To close, moving forward, I have some recommendations.

I think groundwater needs to be fully integrated into all of our conversations regarding the environment and sustainable development in Canada, particularly as we consider the creation of a new Canada water agency. It plays a substantial role.

One of the opportunities for us now, I think, is another national-scale committee to evaluate the current status of groundwater in Canada and to provide advice to the federal and provincial government authorities in developing the Canadian water agency, building on the excellence that's already come out with those two documents I mentioned—they're a great way to start—and engaging Canada's groundwater and hydrogeology expertise in academia, government and private business. It's recognized worldwide.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Madam Stoddart.

[Amina Stoddart, Assistant Professor, Dalhousie University, Global Institute for Water Security]

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for providing me with the opportunity to address the committee today.

My name is Dr. Amina Stoddart. I am an assistant professor in the Centre for Water Resources Studies in the Department of Civil and Resource Engineering at Dalhousie University.

Together with my colleagues in the Centre for Water Resources Studies, I work closely with communities, water and wastewater utilities, engineering consultants and technology providers within the water sector to investigate and provide solutions to water and wastewater treatment challenges.

For example, I'm currently leading a research partnership with water and wastewater utility Halifax Water to optimize wastewater treatment approaches to ensure compliance with federal regulations on systems for wastewater effluent and investigate and address emerging priorities for wastewater treatment. This wastewater research builds on a long-term partnership in research on drinking water treatment between Dalhousie University and Halifax Water, which I had the opportunity to be a part of as a researcher.

It is well known and accepted that climate change affects water quantity. We see threats to the availability of water through drought conditions as well as scenarios such as flooding and sea-level rise, where we simply have too much water. While water quantity is a concern, one less-visible and poorly understood challenge is the impact that climate change has on water quality.

Historically, the design of plants for water and wastewater treatment has been based on a regulatory compliance approach, where the focus is on ensuring that treated drinking water or waste water is below specific concentrations for various water-quality parameters at the drinking-water tap or at the end of the wastewater effluent pipe. This approach is based on periodic sampling, log books and a narrow view of water quality, as I will describe.

With this approach, there is a notable absence of consideration for the changes in water quality that may occur over time due to climate change. The water quality of our drinking-water source, such as a lake or a groundwater well, plays a pivotal role in the performance of water-treatment plants and ultimately impacts the water quality at our tap. While seasonality is recognized and accounted for in design, long-term changes that subtly transform a drinking-water source are simply not accounted for under present design paradigms. But this is what is happening to our water quality.

In 2017, our team published research that demonstrated an increased operational burden on water-treatment utilities as a result of regional climate changes impacting the water quality at the source over a 15-year period. Our work showed that, because of climate-driven increases in water pH and natural organic matter concentrations, one drinking-water-treatment plant required nearly a quadrupling in treatment chemical dose over a period of 15 years in order to continue to achieve drinking-water-quality standards. These additional chemical costs required more trucks to ship chemical agents and waste from the plant. To put it another way, climate change resulted in poorer water quality in the lake source and increased greenhouse-gas emissions.

To be clear, these water quality changes were subtle on a day-to-day time scale, but when we observed them retrospectively over more than a decade, we observed a large, impactful change in water quality that we do not see reversing but rather accelerating. We are now studying this on a larger scale with Halifax Water and other utilities, including the New York Department of Environmental Protection and Tampa Bay Water as well as academic colleagues in the U.K. The broad consensus is that we have an imminent challenge that exists for both water and wastewater facilities.

To adapt to climate change, utilities will ultimately need to consider modularity in design, and draw from robust data streams to inform operations.

In light of this, our research team has been working toward modular design solutions that can be employed during times of challenging water quality to assist utilities in achieving water-quality goals.

With respect to data streams, conventionally, regulatory compliance is determined on a very low number of water-quality measurements, considering that millions of litres of water may be produced each day. In this framework, a boil water advisory, for example, is often reduced to a few coliform measurements.

As an answer to this, our research team has looked closely into artificial intelligence as a means to provide robust decision-support data to help improve water quality through a risk management approach.

Ultimately, this is not a small task in front of us; however, the potential of a national water agency creates a strong signal that acknowledges the challenge and the need to prioritize water quality for Canadians.

In closing, I want to inform you that as an assistant professor, I am in the very early days of my research career. However, it is clear that the impact that climate change is having on water quality is already profound and will undoubtedly shape and inform my research career.

Thank you again for the invitation. I look forward to future dialogue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much. I know you had to speed through your presentation.

We'll start off with Mr. Redekopp.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you.

I'm sure everybody is chomping at the bit; there are lots of things to ask questions about.

Following up a little bit on this, I want to ask about sewage. You do study that. You probably are aware of the report that came out a couple of weeks ago. Environment Canada posted information about raw sewage being dumped into Canada's freshwater system. In 2018 alone, under the current government, the raw sewage output is up 44% from 2013 when the Conservatives were in power.

What comments would you make about that and about jurisdictions that are putting raw sewage into our water systems?

[Amina Stoddart]

The wastewater systems effluent regulations have been implemented. These require that wastewater systems meet a requirement for different effluent quality. This is resulting in a response from many utilities to improve the quality of the water that is coming out of their water treatment plants.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Yet it still continues, right? We have a lot of this in different areas, do we not?

[Amina Stoddart]

Yes.

The wastewater systems effluent regulations allow water treatment plants to apply for transitional authorization, which allows them to have until 2020 or 2040 to meet the wastewater systems effluent regulations. It takes time for utilities to gather the resources and study the systems that are appropriate for them to meet the regulations.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Do you think that's a reasonable amount of time for getting that under control?

[Amina Stoddart]

I think so. The timelines that have been applied take into account a risk-based framework for how the receiving body will respond. That risk-based approach applies this idea of having until 2020 or 2040 to meet the regulations.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Do you folks work on the ocean side of it as well?

[David Rudolph]

It's all the freshwater world.

The other thing is that as climate change is changing the hydrologic balance in so many different aspects of our system, the stream flow that we depend on for assimilating waste going into rivers and streams is more variable now. We don't quite understand what happens at different times. Different seasonalities are causing this type of uncertainty.

As we move forward, taking into account how stream flow will be impacted by climate change and how we use it as an assimilating component is something we need to keep in mind.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Along similar lines, another area is indigenous drinking water. Obviously, that's an issue in our country. There's still a lot of bad drinking water.

Have you done research in that area? Do you have any comments about that?

[Amina Stoddart]

I have colleagues in the Centre for Water Resources Studies who have been working with first nations communities on drinking water issues, particularly with the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs. In terms of technology, I've had the chance to work with my colleagues on a few projects with these communities.

One technology we're looking at and that I talked about in my statement is a risk-based approach. This is water safety planning to support communities as they seek to improve their water quality.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Do you see challenges in that area?

Are there enough resources, funding and those types of things?

[Amina Stoddart]

Resources are always a challenge. There certainly is always opportunity for more support. I think investigating new technologies like water safety plans is a good approach.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Right.

[Jay Famiglietti]

May I follow up on that?

At the Global Institute for Water Security, we have several scientists who work with indigenous populations. A couple of issues come to mind.

Often, our indigenous partners are not even at the table when we are having, for example, basin-wide discussions on the Saskatchewan River basin. That certainly has to change.

I recently read an article about the unevenness of the water treatment plants across the various indigenous and first nations populations. There's a lack of training of facility operators. Sometimes the facilities are built in the wrong place. They're maybe built upstream of an intake valve or something like that.

We have a long way to go.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Let's talk a little bit about the Canada water agency, which you mentioned a few times.

Can you tell me a bit more about what that would look like and what the challenges would be in putting that together?

[Jay Famiglietti]

First of all, I think it's very impressive that we're talking about something like this in Canada. A lot of nations talk about it. As many of you know, I'm from the United States, and we haven't had those sorts of discussions.

One of the big problems is the fractured nature of water management. I think I mentioned that at the end of my talk. That makes it very difficult to get coordinated policy on all of the things that we were just talking about. Dave was talking about groundwater. Amina was talking about drinking water, treatment and some of these indigenous issues. There's a real need to bring things together.

In my opinion, it should allow for various levels of government to come together as well as universities and researchers, maybe through the agency or a centre where the agency is housed.

We've sort of summarized the really important topics. The way we set up our talks gives a full spectrum of what's happening with water. There are some major issues we need to deal with, and one is integrated and collaborative river basin management. The collaborative part is bringing the different groups together. The integrated part is thinking about the surface water, the groundwater on both the industrial side and the managed side. We need to be bringing these things together both observationally—.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I have to stop you there. I even gave him a grace of one more minute. You can answer it when somebody else asks you the question.

Mr. Scarpaleggia.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I would like to continue along the lines of Mr. Redekopp's questioning.

In terms of what, to your mind, the Canada water agency would look like, is it something that should be comprehensive? The process of its coming into being, I guess, is what I'm really more concerned about.

In your view, is it something that should be quite comprehensive from the start? You were saying that we need to bring together universities and provinces and integrate all of these players and conduct studies. Is that the approach that should be taken? In that case, the next question becomes how much we integrate, because, as you know, water issues move so fast that we could continue to expand the scope of the agency. Is the better approach to focus on a couple of bite-sized problematic areas like climate forecasting or flood forecasting?

Last Thursday I went to a briefing at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, and I thought there was plenty of subject matter there to occupy the Canada water agency for quite awhile with some practical outputs, if you will.

I guess I'm trying to get your sense as to what the Canada water agency would look like and how we get there. Do we start small or do we do something comprehensive with a big bang at the start?