Thank you, Mr. Chair. I hope my sound is coming through well.
There are two aspects to fresh water in Canada: water quality and water quantity. Quality relates to the relative purity of water with regard to human use and ecosystem function. Water quantity relates to the amount of water flowing or being used over a period of time. Water can be overabundant due to floods but scarce during droughts, creating significant water allocation conflicts. As Mark Twain once said, “Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over.”
The most significant water issues are in the settled parts of Canada where most Canadians live and work, sometimes referred to as the southern working landscape. Water in this area is either surface water or groundwater.
There was a 2009 report entitled “The Sustainable Management of Groundwater in Canada”, which noted:
Nearly a third of Canada's population, some 10 million people, depends on groundwater for safe drinking water and more than 80% of Canada's rural population depends on groundwater.... Canada's groundwater, however, is increasingly under threat from factors such as urbanization, climate change, burgeoning energy production, intensification of agriculture and contamination.
This report provides a useful blueprint for the management of Canada's groundwater resources, and I urge the committee to prioritize groundwater issues.
Regarding surface water quality from a human use perspective, water quality is affected by point-source and non-point-source pollution. Point-source pollution is effluent from a single point, such as industrial and urban facilities. However, non-point-source pollution is diffused and results from land runoff, precipitation, land drainage or hydrological modification. The most prominent result of non-point-source pollution is phosphorus runoff into water bodies, often causing algal bloom, such as in Lake Erie. Such blooms lead to degraded water quality and fish kills and can affect local economies.
Point-source pollution is largely under control or well managed up to a certain point, although I know there are issues still. The 1989 pulp and paper effluent regulations mandated the treatment of toxic effluence from mills, and almost all cities have waste-water treatment plants.
Mitigating non-point-source pollution is difficult and requires landscape-level treatments that are expensive and difficult to implement and may affect local economies.
Regarding water quantity, floods and droughts are the main causes of water quantity issues. Canada's infrastructure needs to be hardened against flooding, as was done by sainted Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he built the Winnipeg floodway. Built between 1962 and 1968, the floodway cost $63 million and has saved property from damage to the order of $30 billion. That's climate change adaptation at its finest.
The floodway's dikes and dams are examples of hard infrastructure, but natural infrastructure means the creation or the re-creation of lost natural features such as wetlands. This is sometimes referred to as “nature-based solutions”, a concept I strongly support.
A study of the Smith Creek watershed in eastern Saskatchewan estimated that for the 2011 flood, complete restoration of the wetlands to their historic levels decreased the flood peak that year by nearly one-third. Conversely, complete drainage of wetlands increased the 2011 peak by 78%. Constructing small dams has also been shown to protect infrastructure.
Wetlands, whether natural or constructed, also improve water quality and sequester carbon. I recommend that all publicly funded infrastructure programs include the creation of natural infrastructure and support nature-based solutions in addition to the hard engineering.
The best example of drought adaptation is modern agriculture, through which new crop varieties and tillage practices conserve water for crops during droughts. Agriculture is a special case, since farmed land is privately owned, and all of the economic signals incentivize farmers to maximize production.
The miracle of modern agriculture is that people on modest incomes, at least until now, were able to eat well. The current vigorous debates on high food prices are instructive. However, farmers are being asked to conserve public resources on their private lands, such as wetlands, that provide only public benefits and only increase the farmer's costs. Providing incentives to private farmers to deliver non-market public goods will settle this impasse. Public goods include flood control, water quality improvement, biodiversity, conservation, and carbon sequestration. This could be very significant, since much of the southern working landscape is farmed and in private hands.
There are many examples in North America, but one I'm most familiar with is Manitoba's growth program, which provides financial incentives for producers to conserve wetlands. Alberta has developed a similar approach, but these programs need to be scaled up significantly.
Canada has been very late to the game of incentive-based conservation on private lands, and we are behind the U.S. and Europe, where the Farm Bill and the common agricultural policy, respectively, support large-scale private land conservation as a high priority.
I hope the committee will provide strong recommendations to the government to establish private land conservation programs on a scale similar to those in the United States and Europe.
Thank you very much.