Thank you very much.
It's an honour to be here as a University of Saskatchewan professor who does his work on Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 lands in the home of the Métis. We honour them.
I'm here representing the knowledge of over 200 professors at 23 universities across Canada, over 500 collaborators, and over 2,000 researchers and students who are finding solutions to water problems through their work in the Global Water Futures Programme, a federally funded study. It's the largest in the world led by universities, the most scientifically productive in the world, and it's in Canada. This is funded by the Canada first research excellence fund. It is ramping up right now. We are carrying on the observations of this with the global water futures observatories project, funded partially by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
I want to note the contributions to modelling that professors Clark and Pietroniro made. They were key leads in the modelling program with the Global Water Futures Programme and made tremendous advances that are being used around the world in water and in environmental prediction.
I want to talk a bit about history. I was an Environment Canada scientist in the previous century. In 1996 I was asked to work with other scientists in the department to summarize the impacts of climate change on fresh water in Canada—exactly the question I've been asked to address here.
I found my slides the other day. They're kind of old-fashioned. Everything we mentioned in there had not happened yet, and everything we mentioned in there is now happening: the floods, the droughts being worse, the loss of glaciers, the loss of snowpack, lake ice, algae blooms, water contamination, and other problems. We're seeing it all. I guess the lesson from that is that science can be helpful.
Over 25 years ago, there was a good appreciation of what was coming if we didn't take action. Now we have to take action. The year 2023 was the hottest year on the planet since instrumented records began—and possibly in 120,000 years, which is most of humanity's history.
In Canada, this melted show and ice thawed permafrost, burned our forests and intensified the flow of water through the landscape. Floods were worse and droughts were worse. They were outside of anything in which the species in our country and in our natural environment have ever evolved. This is hurtling us into a dangerous and unfamiliar world where our experience and traditional approaches no longer provide adequate guidance.
Canada has an unprecedented number of water-related disasters. By my estimates, I'd say that they've exceeded $40 billion in costs since the turn of the century. Even worse, I say that those water disasters have broken the trust that Canadians once had in their government to manage their water competently.
There is international concern about these changes. The United Nations has instituted an international year of glaciers' preservation, which looks at the loss of snow and ice around the world. This is, of course, defining for Canadian water.
In 2023, the snow drought was the prompt to the wildfires, the prairie drought, the hydroelectric shortages, and now the depleted groundwater and the restricted water for municipalities that have been endemic across the country. It's from B.C. to Labrador, from the Prairies up into the Arctic.
The drought situation this year is looking dire. I operate observation stations in the Canadian Rockies. We have a snowpack that's 70% abnormal. Last year, we had record glacier melt. Our groundwater levels are at record low levels right now. Water reservoirs in the Rockies are five metres below where they should be at this time of year, and some reservoirs are so low that municipalities can't withdraw water through their pipes and have to get water trucked in to southern Alberta.
Lake Diefenbaker in southern Saskatchewan, which provides water for 70% of the population, received only 28% of its normal inflows last year, something absolutely unprecedented.
We need to pick up our game on fresh water. We need leadership on how to deal with these climate change and drought impacts.
Here's a list of things to consider:
We need national coordination, new investment, and novel technology—such as the environmental prediction mentioned—to help predict floods, water quality and droughts and to identify properties and infrastructure at risk in the future.
We need to identify the vulnerabilities of communities and focus on mitigating vulnerability, not just flood damages. It's not just money; it's people's lives.
We need to integrate our planning on river basins—something we don't do in this country—to help with disaster mitigation and adaptation, flood and drought recovery, pollution abatement, transboundary allocations, our American water relationships, and the use of natural infrastructure, such as lakes, wetlands and forests.
We need the leading-edge research and science capacity to inform wise water decisions and build state-of-the-art water prediction management systems to support our decision-making so we know in advance what's going to be happening.