Thank you, Mr. Miller, for being here today.
I'm quite concerned again with the Great Lakes. I think this is a great bill going forward. I know where you are on this. I do have property on Lake Huron, and I've watched the water level go down about three and a half feet over the last number of years. I know it's more prevalent in Georgian Bay, because you can almost pace it off as you see the edge of the water moving out.
I know there has been a proposal put forward many times to divert water from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi River, and that's to keep the water flow up in the Mississippi so commerce can work that way. I think this bill works very well to stop something like that. That is probably some of the overview that's here. I do have concern about water taken from the Great Lakes and border waters. I look at the St. Clair River and the Detroit River that separate us. Those are the flowing boundary rivers, I think, which were of concern to Mr. Scarpaleggia.
I've always had this concern, and it's just a theory of my own. When you talk about water basins, I look at water coming out of Lake Huron and feeding into London, and then being discharged into the Thames River, which then empties into Lake Saint Clair, which doesn't divert the water back into the same basin it came out of.
Relatively, Lake Ontario and Lake Erie have kept their water levels somewhere close to where they were. Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, and Lake Michigan have all gone down. Chicago takes a lot of water that way. If Chicago doesn't divert that back, if it diverts it into the Mississippi, it goes down into the Gulf of Mexico.
Again, I think that's the main gist of this, to stop that big exodus of some of those waters. I would hope that in this bill, where it says, “by any other means by which more than 50 000 L of water are taken outside the water basin per day”, it might pertain to sometimes the taking out of water from one water basin and discharging into another.
My theory, my understanding, is that on this earth we have so much water, and it's been that much water forever. It evaporates and turns into clouds. When it rains, it comes back down, maybe in the form of snow or whatever. I feel that your bill does cover those things. Is the intent to stop big bulk water diversion that might go into the Mississippi, or something like that?