These are questions that go way beyond my competence.
I should just specify who I am and who I'm not. I don't work for the government; I left the government 15 years ago, but I've continued to have some involvement in this area through contracts with the IJC, and working with the academic institutions and non-governmental organizations. So I continue to have contact and continue to be asked questions, but I don't actually deal with these things.
On Lake Champlain, the specific issue I mentioned goes back quite a few years, where we had a Canada-U.S. committee look in a very comprehensive way at flooding on the lake and on the outlet into Canada. It was a flooding issue that we looked at then, and we introduced some flood damage reduction, or flood risk mapping approaches, which were new at the time. The thought when we started the study was that you would build a regulatory structure at the outlet of Lake Champlain and control the flooding in that way, but when we looked at it in detail, it turned out not to have been a good idea. It would be better to do flood risk mapping and to manage the way people live on flood plains, rather than to try to control the lakes, and so on.
In terms of the broader question of what we're trying to do and the need to remain vigilant, I was using the Great Lakes example. In the Great Lakes, governments at all levels are trying to do a lot of things at the same time. Sometimes these things slip through. You might find it's like the case with the states and provinces, who negotiated an agreement that many people thought was okay, but that other people found, once they looked at it in more detail, would have been a disaster for everybody, including Quebec. Quebec is going to be the victim of whatever happens on the Great Lakes, because that's where the water ends up. If we had ended up with a regime that permitted large-scale diversions from the Great lakes to the U.S. southwest, for example, that would have been a disaster for Quebec. You would have ended up with Montreal going dry, or whatever.
So it's very important that Canadians at all levels—governmental, non-governmental, academic, and everywhere—remain vigilant, because this kind of thing could slip through very easily without somebody catching it. The Government of Quebec and the Government of Ontario thought it was okay, until other people came along and told them what was wrong with it. It takes a lot of people being vigilant to stop these foolish things from happening. This is the point I was trying to make.