Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here today.
My name is Gordon Lambert. I'm the executive adviser for sustainability and innovation for Suncor. I'm grateful for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Canadian Water Network, with which I've had experience both as a board member and as a partner on research.
We are here to present how a federal investment of $60 million over 10 years would enable application of a successful model to achieve benefits across Canada in areas where buy-in across sectors and decisions based on sound science are critically important.
The CWN's experience has shown significant uptake of its approach of bringing together cross-sector stakeholders around an apolitical table to address key water management issues. Based on that experience, the federal investment is forecast to attract another $120 million in investments from private and public partners, which will generate many times that in socio-economic benefit and lead to self-sustainability of the network within 10 years.
In my role as a senior sustainability professional, I've seen clear evidence that water is critical to Canada's socio-economic fabric, and managing it well provides Canada with a unique competitive advantage. Canada's agriculture and resource industries are valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the global water goods and services sector is valued at over $300 billion. Innovation to optimize these sectors not only sustains quality jobs, but has a multiplier effect in other sectors like energy, infrastructure, and engineering.
Capitalizing on Canada's water opportunities could result in: improving both water use and quality in the Canadian agrifoods sector to more effectively and sustainably supply a growing domestic and global market; finding solutions that fit, both technically and culturally, in ensuring safe drinking water in small communities and for aboriginal Canadians; enabling communities to adopt financing, technical, and social innovations that allow them to deal with infrastructure deficits and increasing costs and uncertainties resulting from events like floods and droughts; and moving decisions forward on water management needs in government and the private sector to unlock the socio-economic benefits of oil and gas development, including hydraulic fracturing and oil sands, in socially acceptable ways.
The CWN is uniquely positioned to empower Canada to take advantage of these water-related opportunities. It cuts across all sectors and stakeholders and is focused on generating practical solutions based on credible science. As a national and apolitical not-for-profit, its fundamental strength lies in its objective science-based approach, not owned by any single government, industry sector, or interest group, but resulting in benefits to all.
The CWN is already a success story for the federal government. It has developed its end-user driven consortium model over 14 years as a federally funded network of centres of excellence, demonstrating the ability to attract partners to collaborate and co-invest, attracting over $45 million during that period. The opportunity for the federal government now is using this model to move key priorities forward, building on our success and the relationships we've achieved to date.
The CWN is already applying this new model successfully. In our municipal water consortium, municipalities, industry, and other levels of government are investing millions in research to advance priority issues. On top of that, municipalities representing over 14 million Canadians see the role of the CWN as being so critical that they've committed over $700,000 in 2014 alone to support its operations.
The CWN is also developing a hydraulic fracturing and water consortium, an area extremely important to Canada's energy development, where advancements in knowledge would significantly move forward both the industry and its provincial oversight. Federal investment through this proposal would support critical research to address questions of groundwater protection, governance, waste water handling, and landscape impacts.
The proposed investment would enable the federal government to apply this model going forward to ensure that innovation leads to success in areas in which it needs most to catalyze progress. Government and industry invest significant funds in important complementary programs to support research and commercialization opportunities, but none fill this critical, cross-cutting, apolitical, national niche to support broad social policy and dialogue linked to economic success through innovation in water management.
I thank you again for your consideration today and look forward to your questions.