Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of FLOW. I'll be covering topics around water monitoring today, so let's get right at it here.
Water monitoring and the data it produces are fundamental and key to addressing a myriad of environmental issues, contributing to water research, supporting water management, creating sound water policy and underpinning the economic prosperity of Canada. Climate change adaptation and resilience strategies also will require improved and integrated water monitoring to ensure future prosperity for Canadians.
We know that Environment and Climate Change Canada, through its national hydrological service, conducts hydrometric water quantity monitoring across Canada. This national network is comanaged with all the provinces and territories through a cost-sharing agreement that dates back to 1975. This arrangement ensures consistent and standardized data collection across Canada, data that are quality-assured and readily available in real time as well as maintained in a historical archive. This comanagement approach allows for federal and provincial network operators to work together in a collaborative framework and is an ideal model for other national monitoring programs to follow.
That said, the network of hydrometric monitoring stations has not recovered to the level it was at in the early 1990s, and it's well recognized that more stations are required to effectively address Canada's current and evolving water information needs, particularly as we know that the impacts of climate change are being realized through accelerations in the water cycle, affecting floods, droughts and ecosystems. Although provincial investments in expanding the network have increased substantially—largely as a response to floods and water management challenges at the local level—overall, the number of stations has slightly decreased. This has been largely due to federally funded stations within the network being reduced substantially in the mid-1990s.
There was a significant increase in the federal monitoring budget in 2017, but that funding was focused on fixing a long-standing and significant infrastructure and technical debt in the program. The new funding focused on the modernization of the network, managing inflationary operating costs and addressing loss of infrastructure from fire and floods, leaving very little for network expansion. More funding needs to be allocated for targeted network expansion.
One case for expansion is to address the lack of monitoring on indigenous lands, which comprise a substantial area of Canada. Past external audits have identified indigenous lands as a federal priority for hydrometric monitoring, and this issue was recently reinforced in an internal program audit in 2023, which highlighted this concern and identified a course of action for moving forward with this by 2025. This will require additional funding and extensive indigenous consultations. An indigenous partnership culminating in a water monitoring agreement should be the goal of this effort.
ECCC also houses the water quality monitoring program. It has been recognized that water quality and quantity monitoring need to be more integrated. However, fragmentation of water programs in ECCC has impeded the integration efforts. A report produced by a blue ribbon panel in 2017 identified this, along with other issues related to water monitoring requirements within ECCC.
Another important water monitoring program that deserves more attention is groundwater monitoring. This program is carried out largely by the provinces and through rural municipalities in Canada, but national scoping and data collation resides at Natural Resources Canada. There are important linkages between surface water and groundwater, but there is limited to no interaction between ECCC and NRCan monitoring programs.
The Forum for Leadership on Water provides numerous submissions calling for all water monitoring programs to be part the Canada water agency. The motivation for this is based on the co-operative approaches required for successful integrated monitoring among multiple levels of governments and with first nations. The agency would facilitate this co-operative type of approach and allow for multiple levels of government—including first nations, NGOs and industry—to contribute to an integrated approach. No one federal department can achieve this.
FLOW has been made aware that none of these water monitoring programs will be incorporated into the Canadian water agency. However, we hope there is potential for additional water monitoring components to be included in the CWA at a later stage.
Finally, at this point it's not clear how the CWA will provide any oversight, input or vision for water monitoring in Canada. Therefore, FLOW is proposing that, at a minimum, a water monitoring table be established by the CWA to facilitate dialogue and promote coordination among the water monitoring programs housed in different federal departments.