The water issue illustrates the complexity of the environmental and sustainable development challenges we face. Many times these issues that are intractable and long-standing are ones where there is dispersed decision-making authority. This is not only across departments and institutions within one level of government, but also across levels of government—provincial, municipal, indigenous—and across boundaries, international boundaries, which is the case for these three water basins.
As our environmental and sustainable development problems have become more complex and difficult to address through single departments, a one-window approach isn't so.... There is a need for more coordination and more coordination bodies, so long as they focus not just on coordination, but also on real results—on water in this case, on land, on the atmosphere or on wildlife. I would suggest that with many of these issues of a horizontal nature, like water, we need to increase the level of coordination and increase the focus on tangible progress in the form of outcomes.