Thank you. Ten minutes to cover everything there is to say about water is a pretty tall order, so I'm going to skip through very rapidly.
If you don't mind, I will be speaking mainly in English. However, I will gladly answer your questions in French.
I'm not going to cover in great detail a whole lot of things. I'll say a few words about the Policy Research Initiative, to start with. We're a more or less independent research organization, currently reporting to the Privy Council Office, conducting medium-term horizontal policy research.
We've been working on fresh water in that context for a little over two and a half years, which is getting towards the normal lifespan of a PRI research project. Our current plan would have us moving out of water and into something else, as yet undefined, probably sometime this fall.
Over the course of the summer we'll be trying to decide what that next topic should be. It may well be water phase two, but it'll be a new phase, if that's the case. Otherwise the PRI typically also has projects in things such as North American linkages, various social issues including population aging and life course flexibility, social capital, and others.
I'm going to skip over the two slides in the deck on water facts and water data. I think you can look at those at your leisure, and with the other materials we've provided you have lots of facts about water at your fingertips.
I don't need to belabour the point: Canada's got a lot of water; it's also got a lot of land, and some of that land doesn't have a lot of water. I think that's about the gist of it: we've got a lot of water; it's not always where we want it to be when we want it to be.
Jurisdiction over water in Canada, as with most natural resources, is predominantly provincial, but it is shared. The federal government has the Fisheries Act, navigation, international issues, and a few other hooks into the world of fresh water.
In terms of how the federal government has tried to organize itself and articulate its role in water over the years, there was the Canada Water Act in 1970; there was a policy statement on inland waters in 1978; there was the Federal Water Policy in 1987, which still stands as the official policy document; there was the Federal Water Framework in 2004, which is the product of an interdepartmental collaboration that was aiming essentially at producing a classification and inventory of what federal government departments were doing in the world of fresh water.
We had our conference a couple of weeks ago—a conference on water policy in Canada. Both of the gentlemen with me were there, along with 340-some other people.
One of the key issues that have not been fully explored so far is the issue of aboriginal water rights. It has been suggested that none of the treaties explicitly extinguished rights to water in Canada. Rights to land may have been extinguished, and other rights may have been extinguished, but water rights were never mentioned in any of the treaties, and therefore there may be an issue around aboriginal water rights.
The 1987 Federal Water Policy, as I said, still stands as the most recent formal policy statement from the federal government. It was an excellent document—very far ahead of its time, I think, in a great many ways. But it is almost 20 years old and has reached a point where it could probably withstand a little bit of renovation and a new coat of paint. There are a few things it covered that, when you think back and say, twenty years ago people were actually worried about.... Climate change is in there, preservation of wetlands is in there, and lots of other key issues that are still key issues today were in the 1987 policy.
A few things that were not really in it, or were not very deeply covered in it and would perhaps be given greater importance today, are alien invasive species, which were mentioned in the policy but not given the level of concern that would show if the policy were redone today; some classes of chemical pollutants, particularly pharmaceuticals and personal care products, which include shampoos and other things like them; various persistent organic pollutants. We're hearing a lot of worry, just in terms even of the article in yesterday's Globe and Mail; it had a front-page article about perfluorocarbon compounds. There are various emerging chemicals of concern. Some of these chemicals have been around for a long time, but the concern about them is emerging.
And I think the use of water for fossil fuel extraction, particularly in Alberta, of course, is also an emerging issue of interest. It is not something that was done, or at least not worried about so much 20 years ago, but it's clearly an issue for some people today.
You can look at water issues under a few broad headlines. One of them would be water quality; that's certainly one of the factors that prompted a great deal of interest around water in the past, and it continues to. Lake Winnipeg currently is eutrophicating, that is to say, experiencing algal blooms, in the same way as Lake Erie did 30 years ago when people were talking about the Great Lakes dying. Well, Lake Winnipeg is now in the same condition—not this time due to phosphates and detergents, but to nutrients, largely from agricultural operations and, to a lesser extent, from cities.
There are other issues around water quality. We've done some work on one approach to controlling pollution, which is called water quality trading. There has been a lot of work done on controlling end-of-pipe pollution, where you can actually measure it, and you can attribute it to a particular treatment plant or a particular industry.
The big problem in most watersheds that have problems—though not all watersheds in Canada have a problem—is most often non-point-source pollution, which is agricultural run-off, run-off from roads, run-off from golf courses, and run-off from various non-point sources, which are much harder to measure and much harder to control. And that's where a lot of the concern is today.
Another banner headline would be water allocation, which is what you do with the water you've got. And here it's important to remember that water is not water in all cases. Water that is salty is not fit for drinking. Water that is polluted is not fit for drinking, but it may be perfectly fine for flushing toilets or irrigating fields. So water comes in different qualities, and each quality has different uses. And if you're going to talk about water allocation, you have to remember that you're talking about allocation of different qualities of water, not just water in general.
That said, there are different approaches to water allocation in Canada, and one of the more interesting approaches, which I think bears some watching over the next few years, is in southern Alberta, where a water rights market has developed, where people are actually able to sell their right to extract water from the river to other people who might want more.
There's a paradigm that has emerged over the last 20 years. It was hinted at in the 1987 policy—although not quite with these words—and has come to be known as integrated water resources management. It's an approach that tries to balance all the various uses and needs at the same time. Essentially, it's sustainable development applied to water resources. One of its key characteristics is community consultation; indeed, it very often heads in a direction of community-based decision-making, which is a trend in the management of a great number of natural resources that are inherently local. I think one of the challenges in integrated water resources management is to get governments at all levels, as well as the non-governmental actors, working together in a collaborative framework.
I won't talk about transboundary issues a whole lot. You have other people here who are far more qualified than I am to address transboundary issues. I'll just note that the map provided in the deck does not include the extensive international boundary along the Yukon, Alaska and B.C. border. For many people today, the key issue around transboundary water has not changed in the last 20 years and is still whether or not bulk water export is covered under NAFTA and, therefore, whether we have the power to prevent bulk water export to the United States. Many people would argue that as long as a court has not ruled on it, we don't actually know what the answer is. Other people will say that it's quite clear, one way or the other.
On the international aspect, I'll just say a couple of very brief words about the United Nations millennium development goals. Canada has signed on to this. Two of the targets under goal 7--goal 7 is to ensure environmental sustainability--relate to water and waste water. There is some progress on these targets. If you look at the chart on page 12 of the deck, the patches in green are patches in the world where we're not doing too badly, but you'll notice there are significant areas, particularly in Asia and Oceania, where progress is really quite poor. Achieving clean drinking water for the world's population is a major humanitarian goal, certainly.
Climate change obviously has a lot to do with water resources. Climate is essentially temperature and precipitation, so it's temperature and water. If you're going to talk about climate change, you have to talk about water, and if you're going to talk about water in the long term, you have to talk about climate change.
Climate change is expected to have variable effects across the country--floods in some areas, droughts in others. Some of the key effects that are expected are glacier melt in the Rocky Mountains, where the glaciers feed some of the prairie rivers, which may, therefore--if they do not run completely dry--run a lot lower than they have been running. Hydroelectric generation capacity in the country may well be affected as river flow becomes reduced and perhaps erratic; we may have movements of invasive species; we may have declining water levels in the St. Lawrence Seaway, which will affect shipping; and there are a host of other impacts that might occur and that need to be planned for in some way.
There are many future research needs around fresh water. There is a great need for natural and physical science research. We need to understand the toxicology of some chemicals in the environment. We need to better understand aquatic ecology. We need to better understand climate change impacts. Most of all, perhaps--and it is perhaps a key part of the federal role--we need a lot more monitoring and inventory, particularly of groundwater. That is going on--the work is being done in that area--but it's a big country; it's a lot of ground water to map and inventory.
On the social science and economic side, we need to find ways of encouraging efficiency in water use; we need to address aboriginal rights and needs; we need to find ways of making community-based decision-making work; we need, again, to look at climate change impacts and adaptation from a socio-economic perspective; and we need to look at a number of other issues.
That's a very broad-brush, 30-second survey of water issues in Canada. I'm sure I've left most key issues off the survey; there are just too many to cover in 10 minutes. I'll stop there.