Thank you for the question. I really appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts on this with you.
When I think of water security, I think of having enough water to do all the things that we want to do. That could be a city. It could be a province. It could be the whole country. Those are things that you just talked about: water for people, water for the environment, water to produce food, water for economic growth and water to produce energy. These are priorities that must be decided nationally and must be decided by province and, again, town by town and city by city.
It's not the kind of thing that I can weigh in on. What I can do is show you—and we can follow up after this meeting with even more detail—what's happening across Canada and share that information with you, as decision-makers.
My experience in looking at the disappearance of groundwater around the world is one that really points to a need for joint surface and groundwater management and for using groundwater far more efficiently. I think that within Canada we will see increasing demand for groundwater because of climate change, because of the increasing variability and, as one of the other witnesses said, because of the very likely need to probably have to expand irrigation infrastructure to maintain sustainable food production.
There's no one solution. I'll just close by saying that I always think in terms of a portfolio of agricultural efficiency, water use efficiency, industry efficiency and accounting of water use by industry—all industries, not just agriculture and not just oil production.