Thank you, committee members and Mr. Casey, for providing me this opportunity today to talk about Canada and drinking water.
I’m presently the Director of the Centre for Water Resources Studies, a professor, and NSERC Industrial Research Chair at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In our lab I supervise and engage with students and research projects that touch drinking water research across Canadian communities. In particular, our work focuses on some of our partners, such as Halifax Water and Cape Breton Regional Municipality, but I also have the opportunity to work with many municipalities across Canada. Last week I was dealing with a project in Regina, Saskatchewan, and an emerging issue that folks in Regina are addressing.
As the director for the centre, I've also had the opportunity to work with the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nation Chiefs, headquartered in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. The chiefs in my region are adamantly concerned about drinking water, and one of their approaches is to develop a first nation water authority, an innovative approach to address drinking water challenges they face in the region through aggregation, combined services, and management structures that are truly innovative within the paradigm of Indigenous Services Canada.
As the centre director, I've also had the opportunity to work with many of our provincial and federal agencies. I finished a project recently with Health Canada; I'm working on a project with the Government of Nunavut, a project with Nova Scotia Environment, and Ontario and Alberta as well. Throughout that work, and through the work with municipalities, there is clearly a need, particularly in the municipality group, to strive for best-in-class information. Many of our municipality units across Canada are members of an organization called the American Water Works Association. AWWA is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. As you might imagine, many of our large metropolitan cities reach out to AWWA to find best-in-class information. The proposed bill to look for best-in-class information for the federal government through the OECD annual review would be something that I could see would be welcomed by municipalities from the standpoint that many of the them are already doing this; and to push the envelope and think about new ways and new innovation to manage drinking water would only be welcomed by many municipalities.
In addition, I work with a number of clean tech companies. The clean tech economy in Canada and Atlantic Canada is robust for drinking water. One of the companies I work with regularly is a company called LuminUltra. It's based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and it's a leading biotech company that is striving to develop new assays to measure bacteriological quality in drinking water. Much of its work is pushed by offshore needs, as many Canadian clients don't necessarily see the value of the business case. However, looking at other instruments for regulatory paradigms or regulatory regimes in Canada would strive to find new ways to measure bacteriological quality and engage biotech companies like LuminUltra.
However, within the context of Canada, developing policy on drinking water requires both a local and a regional perspective. In Canada, the Canadian government uses the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Committee on Drinking Water, or the FPT, as a collaborative approach by federal agencies and provincial partners to achieve drinking water safety. However, one voice is critically missing from this committee, and that is an indigenous voice. While I recognize that Indigenous Services Canada serves on the FPT, this is not the same as a technical expert or a community member from a first nation community. Consistent with what my colleague Mr. Odjick said, I think the representation and views of a community member are critical for this type of federal agency or this type of federal committee. Many of our provincial partners live and breathe and raise families in the provinces they represent when they attend as a committee member. A first nation representative would provide that sense of place that doesn't exist right now on the FPT. It would provide an Inuit voice, a Métis voice, or a first nation voice that would be critical in understanding drinking water issues in communities.
I would strongly urge the present committee members to think about this as they reflect on the current policy and Bill C-326. Ask yourselves how this would affect first nation communities and whether an indigenous voice in particular would be welcome on the federal-provincial-territorial committee.
Thank you very much for providing me this opportunity. I welcome any questions today.