Let me skate around the Athabasca River, which is probably the wrong metaphor right now.
You asked about putting environmental protection first. Five or ten years ago, the library bookshelf on how much water is required to keep ecosystems healthy was small indeed. The field has exploded in the last 10 years. I think it would be very useful if this committee were to survey the literature. I'm not sure what authorities a committee has, and so forth, but you could request Environment Canada to look over the various books and articles that have been published by highly qualified people, and ask them to apply those methods to a sample of Canadian rivers and lakes to find out what is needed and how the water has to be available. It's no longer enough to say, well, it needs a flow rate of so many cubic metres per second, but it's also a case of how much water the flow pattern needs.
They've come up with some results that are initially strange, that rivers in arid parts of Canada are actually more resilient than those in temperate parts of the climate, because they have had millennia to get used to wild swings of rainfall, whereas those in, say, Ontario and Quebec have been used to a relatively stable climate, and they haven't learned to adapt their ecology.
But there are no methods that are available; they're not going to give it to you down to the last 10 cubic metres, or patterns, but I think it would be very instructive to have that. I don't know of any researcher who is working on this in Canada, but activity is flourishing in Europe and the United States.