Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think we need more white boards around this committee. I strongly encourage that, actually.
I would like to start with Ms. McFadyen, given that the Assiniboine is quite literally in my backyard. Our family farm is almost due south of the Assiniboine River. The Hoop and Holler was cut in 2011. The first field it went onto was one of our fields, so I am acutely aware of the impacts of overland flooding and the potential lack of availability of water.
Obviously, it's critical for irrigation in our area for vegetables, for the value-added processing in my hometown of Portage la Prairie with Simplot, McCain and Roquette, and of course for drinking water to various nearby communities.
One of Manitoba's heroes, I would say, is Duff Roblin. The foresight he had for a relatively small amount of money back in the sixties to build the Portage diversion and a number of other physical water management tools has paid off a thousand times over in terms of protection of farmland, physical structures and entire communities.
I'm of the view that we're going to need a similar round of that as we have a continuation of ebbs and flows in water availability and as we look to seek economic prosperity across our rural areas.
Ms. McFadyen, having looked through the future demand expectations, how do you think we can go about managing the future demand requirements out of the Assiniboine, recognizing the challenges of that? What role does the federal government have to play? What would you recommend in the sense of cost-sharing models that the federal government could step up in order to support the major infrastructure projects that we need to manage our water in your region?