Good afternoon to the committee.
In this era of collaborative governance with indigenous communities and when climate change is having a significant impact on the way in which our communities are able to interact with water as a fundamental piece of our economic and ecological infrastructure, the federal government will now be required to take a larger role in issues around flow and also water pollution.
In our constitutional makeup in Canada so far, we've assumed that water is largely the responsibility of the provincial governments. It's now quite clear, given the interprovincial impacts, the impacts on federal lands and the impacts on indigenous communities and collaborative governance, that the federal government has a much larger role to play. The renewal of the Canada Water Act is a perfect opportunity to figure out what that is.
There are a couple of long-standing water quality issues that the federal government will need to address very quickly. These include applying a strict non-degradation standard to the effluent released from tailings ponds from the tar sands upstream of Wood Buffalo National Park, to examine the responsibility of the federal government and the failure to control coal mine pollution emanating from the Elk Valley and to refer the international cross-border pollution from coal mining in the Kootenay River watershed to the International Joint Commission.
Thank you.