I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to address all five of those questions very thoroughly.
In terms of future pressure—which may also provide a leadership role for the federal government—there has been a developing paradigm called source-to-tap water protection, where you try to make sure that the water the municipal treatment plant is taking out of the river or lake, or wherever they're getting it, is reasonably clean to start with. I think we need to go beyond source-to-tap; we need to talk about source-to-tap to source, recognizing that in most places in Canada somebody lives upstream of you and you live upstream of somebody else. Therefore, what goes down your toilet, or what's going down their toilet, is part of your source water or somebody else's source water. We're using our water for multiple purposes, both as inputs and for waste removal. We may need to start to think about how we want to manage that to try and keep a little bit of separation between the waste removal and the input. That problem with waste removal and input is at the heart of what happened in Kashechewan and the heart of what happened in North Battleford, where there was inadequate separation of waste removal and input. I think that's a definite issue.
Provision of drinking water across Canada is going to continue to be an issue. It's extremely expensive. It takes a lot of capacity, and there are a great many small communities that are not going to have the capacity within the community; it simply is not going to be economically practical for them to have a full-time water systems engineer in a community of 500 people. It's going to continue and it will always be a capacity problem, and a problem with funding of infrastructure for the provision of drinking water in small communities across the country.
I'll speak a little bit more about climate change. In my deck, the second-last slide has two maps. The one on the left is of current conditions of a moisture index; it's of 1961 to 1990 average conditions. The one on the right is of projected, potential, or future conditions, using one particular set of modelling tools. It's not of a distant future; this is modelled for the 2041 to 2070 period, so it's of the fairly near future. If you compare the two maps, you can see the huge expansion of the red area in the prairies, which are projected to be extremely dry. You can see an expansion of green in northern Alberta and the adjacent territories. The green colour here roughly corresponds to aspen parkland, rather than boreal forest, which means a huge loss to the forestry industry in that part of the world. It also means a reduction in water availability for tar sands extraction, and so on. You can see the expansion of red in the Okanagan Valley. Overall, it's not a happy scenario. However, it's perfectly manageable if we plan for it.
I think that's the main point, that through soft paths and other approaches we can plan for a less water intensive future, and perhaps we'd better, since it's likely that there will be less water available to us.