Let me deal with human rights first, because I don't want to get into a discussion of human rights—but it is not an irrelevant subject. I think it is probably worth saying clearly and unequivocally that there is no international or United Nations declaration of a human right to water; it does not exist. There have been statements in various committees and there are things that imply it, but it is just a myth that there is such a thing.
Rather than getting into a discussion on wrong or right, I would be very glad to forward to you a chapter in a forthcoming book on human rights to water in the Middle East. If it applies in the Middle East, it'll be easier here, and I will deal with it.
The area where most people think of a human right is the right to drinking water and household water. Again, one of the hardest things to get across is that the amount of water you need for drinking, cooking, and human sanitation is almost a trivial quantity. It's not trivial, of course, if you're sitting in the desert, so there are a lot of qualifications to that, but quantitatively, it is a relatively small amount of water, particularly compared with what we use in industry for cooling, and it's certainly tiny compared with what we use in irrigation to grow food.
Let me go back. I did not mean to imply that we have lots of water. In fact, the whole first part of some of our work is to disabuse people of the notion that Canada has lots of water. Of course, if you divide population by water, we come out about eighth, ninth or tenth in the world. Unfortunately, much of that water flows to the Arctic Ocean, or is a non-renewable stock in the Great Lakes. If you take just renewable water, it's much less.
What can we do about it, and how do we disabuse people of the notion? There are two strong forces. As you need to invest in new water, it turns out to be quite expensive. It is no small matter for a municipality, or even a province, to increase the supply of water at a point where it needs to be consumed; so simply speaking, cost is a factor.
The other factor is that invariably the environment and environmental protection remain a very high value for Canadians. It cuts across all of the normal groupings and stays about third or fourth on people's list. If you ask people what is their most important political issue, the environment is never at the top—and I don't think it should be. The state of the economy and health obviously have more of an immediate impact, but it's always down there third or fourth; it never drops off the table.
When I was director of the Office of Energy Conservation, we used to argue to the effect that you'll save money—and, by the way, it'll be good for the environment. By the time I left that position in 1977, I decided we should have reversed the emphasis. I think Canadians respond better to a good human value, so I would have said, we've got to do this to protect the ecology of Canada—and by the way, you'll save money too. So that's how I would approach it now; there are a lot of things we can do while waiting for the longer-term analysis. There is so much that we have right in front of us in terms of more efficient irrigation, closing up of leaks. I've forgotten how much is lost just because of leaky toilets. Forget about how wasteful they are to start with, they just leak so much.
There are a dozen things we could talk about right off the bat, which could be influenced, and I would do it with a strong campaign on environment and on economics.