Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable committee members. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today.
My name is Dr. Scott Higgins. I am a senior research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area. I'm pleased to be speaking to you today from Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of Anishinabe, Cree, Ojibwa-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis nation.
I am very honoured to provide testimony to this committee on behalf of my organization. This is a very important topic that affects all sectors and peoples of Canada. The IISD Experimental Lakes Area has played an important role in understanding and providing scientific guidance for policy-makers, managers, industry and the public for over 50 years, first within the federal government and now as a non-profit research-based organization. As our name implies, we focus on freshwater issues that affect Canadians. We have years of experience in research, monitoring and data, which is what I will speak about today.
With respect to the federal responsibility for water, we recommend that a priority of the Canada water agency is to develop a national water strategy that would include facilitating collaboration across jurisdictions and sectors, improving access to national freshwater data and facilitating priority areas of research. Given the importance of water to all sectors and peoples of Canada, a national water strategy is of strong national interest.
With respect to research, I would like to start by highlighting that Canada is recognized as a world leader in freshwater science. Our research at the IISD Experimental Lakes Area and that of our colleagues at Canadian academic and government institutions has made significant global contributions to understanding the impacts and risks to freshwater systems and providing science-based management and policy solutions.
An important driver of my organization's success has been the highly collaborative nature of our research, which includes academic and government researchers, indigenous peoples, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders. We have found that this collaborative model helps break down barriers, is highly cost effective and leads to strong management and policy outcomes. For this reason, we feel that a key role of the Canada water agency should be to facilitate collaboration between government departments at all levels and the many stakeholders in the water sector to undertake activities required for managing the complex nature of Canada's water systems.
We recommend that the federal government, through the Canada water agency, should take a leadership role in identifying issues at the regional and national scales that require further research and facilitate the creation of national collaborative teams to tackle them. This would require coordination of funding from government, private sources and programs, many of which already exist but are fragmented across different agencies.
With respect to monitoring, we recommend that a national water strategy include routine national assessments of lake and stream water and groundwater. Routine national water assessments are an issue of national security and importance. Without them, we are not able to understand the state of our freshwater systems and to identify risks to the public, to our ecosystems and to all sectors of our economy. Further, a national monitoring program would help identify emerging issues of regional and national importance where management and policy interventions, or further research, are needed.
This brings me to my final points, which are about data. Currently, water quality data in Canada is widely dispersed across different levels of government and sectors. It's very challenging to access. Millions and millions of dollars are spent on collecting data, and yet it often sits on shelves gathering dust. Canada needs a national database that is open and accessible to everyone.
In our experience, the public wants to know about water issues where they live. This knowledge can help drive effective stewardship. There are examples from other countries on how this has been achieved. There are also great examples from Canada—DataStream, for one—that bring in data from disparate sources like governments, academics, first nations and community groups and provide it in an accessible way to scientists, managers and the public.
Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to answering your questions.