Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To briefly introduce myself, I've been a professor at the Polytechnique since 2004, co‑chairing a drinking water research chair, and the director of CREDEAU, the Centre for research, development and validation of water technologies. Given my background, I would like to share with the committee my views on major water processing concerns in Canada.
When I was studying in the 1990s at the Polytechnique Montréal, water treatment projects consisted of attempting to meet the standards and coming up with projects that cost as little as possible. Today, we have new performance criteria for projects, which must not only be resilient, but also sustainable.
What do we mean by resilience? It's the capacity of infrastructure to continue to perform under unexpected conditions, whether in terms of the quality or flow of water.
Sustainability requires solutions that go beyond cost to factor in other aspects, like social acceptability and permanence. It also needs to take pollution into account, because one of the great paradoxes of my work is that in order to remove pollution from water, I have to pollute it, consume energy, use chemicals, and factor in all the side effects of my solutions.
These days, it's particularly difficult to achieve all these goals, because the system has too many limitations.
Among other things, I'd like to speak to you briefly about the challenges of climate change, and the challenges of emerging contaminants.
Climate change is, of course, a subject that you have heard about. Extreme climate events are becoming increasingly frequent. What you may not know is that historically, when there are extreme events, the risks of an epidemic caused by drinking water are higher.
Historically, we've seen what has happened in the past when water-related infrastructures have been designed without enough consideration given to the future. In Canada, we need to start reviewing our design criteria, with due regard not only for past information, but also by preparing for the future, which is admittedly difficult.
Canada is experiencing droughts and water shortages. Even in Quebec, which has 500,000 lakes, I am working on projects for municipalities that are having trouble getting access to water.
This summer, there were major forest fires that will have an impact on surface water quality by affecting the flows of nutrients and requiring cleaning up all the ash that will ultimately make its way into our waterways.
We heard about another issue this morning, the huge challenge of emerging micro-pollutants of concern. I would focus particularly on perfluorinated compounds, which have been getting a lot of attention in the media. The industry has been overwhelmed as a result of the new recommended thresholds for the concentration of perfluorinated compounds in drinking water, because it it involves a major change in the paradigm. Unfortunately, eliminating these compounds from drinking water or wastewater is not easy. The existing infrastructures for treating drinking water and wastewater can't effectively eliminate perfluorinated compounds.
The important question for us is whether we should address this problem by improving wastewater treatment, enhancing drinking water treatment, or both at the same time, with due regard, of course, to the costs involved. The bad news for you this morning, unfortunately, is that the major investments currently set aside in Canada to enhance wastewater treatment does not address the challenges of emerging micro-pollutants of concern, including perfluorinated compounds.
Canada is lagging so far behind that there is still a lot to do in other areas, such as eliminating nutrients. We have not yet got…