Let me pick up on a couple of points.
It's hard enough finding a role in water for government. Once I have said I'm going to put the focus on demand, I've made my job of finding a federal role even worse, because of the nature of demand--it's enormously decentralized, it's inherently local, and so forth. It really does fall in the areas mainly of leadership.
We do very well in Canada with federal guidance, as opposed to federal mandating of things. A good example is the building code. The building code people, of course, want to focus on safety. As a few of you may remember, I was the first director of Canada's office of energy conservation back in the 1970s, and I argued with the building code people then about getting energy conservation into the code—not entirely successfully, but we've made some gains—and now I'm trying to get them to consider water conservation.
When you consider that a third of all the water used inside a house goes down the toilet, the quantity of water used to flush makes a huge difference. This is easily mandated in a building code. But whereas most other places have gone to mandatory dual-flow, six- and three-litre dual mechanism toilets, we have no such thing, even in the model code.
As a result, by the way, it means that manufacturers who can't sell in other markets are now dumping their wasteful toilets in Canada. I don't use “dumping” in the legal trade sense, but they're doing what any sensible person with excess capacity would do: they're going where there is still a market.
There are other areas where I think we could move. We have water quality guidelines. They can be adapted to be much more focused on conservation, in terms of linking outputs and inputs of water.
I think it would be entirely appropriate to do something.... For example, Ralph mentioned the annex to the Great Lakes thing, where some communities that straddle the border—they're half in and half out—can request extra water because they have a water shortage. There are a number of qualifications, but one of the most important is that they have to demonstrate they have a real need for that water. A real need is not that their lawns are going brown because it's a drought year. A lawn is not a need in the sense that justifies taking water out of the Great Lakes and dumping it some place else.
I think in codes where there is a federal involvement, there can be a strong conservation requirement. Before you say, as Mr. McGuinty mentioned, that there's a deficit in water infrastructure, how big should the new infrastructure be? It makes a huge difference when in the summertime half of the water is used for gardens, lawns, washing sidewalks, washing cars. How much of that should be supplied by a major new infrastructure? How much should you be encouraging people to plant things that don't require regular watering?
There's a whole set of things. They fall into the area of leadership, and leading by both example—government buildings are an obvious place, for example—but also setting up model codes, model directives.