I could start.
If you look back historically at the federal role in water, we have a lot of direct federal responsibilities, but the more important thing that the federal government does is to provide leadership. If you look back over the years, say from 1970 onwards, via the Canada Water Act the federal government introduced the concept of comprehensive river basin planning, for example, and the concept of flood damage reduction, with flood plain management. Even though these areas are largely of provincial jurisdiction, the federal government played a leadership role by developing concepts and by building the capacity of provinces and other governments, through federal-provincial agreements, to do these things on their own. And we don't have to do these things anymore, because now the provinces do things like river basin management, flood risk mapping, and so on.
So what are the new things the federal government should be providing leadership on? You'd have to go through a strategic phase, I think, to decide what those should be. Anybody can guess. At the time the 1987 policy came out, the reason it was done in a very public way and tabled in Parliament was that there were some very public issues at the time. There was infrastructure funding and the issue of who was going to pay for infrastructure. The federal government had big debts and there were a lot of demands on it, and it didn't know how to deal with them. There was the question of free trade and water export, and so on, so there were very high-profile issues the federal government had to deal with in a very public way.
Today you've got some public issues that are different from that. You've got drinking water in communities, with very high-profile health issues, especially in aboriginal and other communities. You've got the issue of adaptation to climate change; how do we adapt our supply-demand imbalance to climate change, especially in the boundary water basins, where 90% of Canadians live?
But you'd have to go through it. If you were going to decide to do another round of leadership to build capacity in other levels of government, you'd go through a strategic exercise first and decide what it was you wanted to do. It could end up being the water soft path, or pricing, or the introduction of integrated resource management, with top-down guidance and bottom-up initiative. There are lots of strategies you might want to do, and you might want to bring to bear federal leadership through federal-provincial agreements. I suggest that would be a good idea, but there's nobody really doing that kind of thing today.