I'll look at all these questions just briefly.
On the question of human rights, an interesting legal concept has developed over the last 25 years in the U.S. It's called the “public trust doctrine”, and it hasn't spread across the border yet. It's something that you as a committee or your research staff might want to look into. A whole body of law has developed in the U.S. based on the notion that governments have a fiduciary duty to protect renewable natural resources for the use and enjoyment of the entire populace, not just the privileged. It has developed mainly through court cases, but it's being passed into legislation now in every state in the U.S. It hasn't come across the border into Canada mainly because a judge in Ontario made a mistake about 20 years ago.
At any rate, it's worth looking into. There was a Supreme Court case about a year ago in Canada that inferred that the Supreme Court would be open to those kinds of arguments if anybody were to bring them forward, but nobody has yet. Your research staff might want to look into that.
One the watershed board idea, St. Marys-Milk is a good example. Right now each country has one person, an accredited officer, to look after the apportionment of the water. Now you have these people on both sides of the border screaming at each other and all upset and so on. The idea there, and I suggest they move ahead with it, would be a watershed-wide board that would include all of the stakeholders--the irrigators who use the water, the environmentalists, and so on--so that they stop shouting at each other and start listening to each other. The problem is based mainly on a lack of understanding of the situation and how things actually happen, the history and so on. So if these people were talking to each other....
Beyond that, the solutions in the long run are going to come from the citizens, from the communities. They're going to have to put in place more efficient water use systems. The solutions are going to have to come from the bottom up anyway. A basin-wide board would help them with top-down advice and with how they're going to do it from the bottom up.
National capacity and water policy are interesting questions. If you look at the capacity of Canada versus other industrialized countries, over the last decade or two we've slipped quite a bit in terms of the environment and water. The OECD puts out regular figures and comparisons on how much governments at all levels, not just federal governments, spend on environment and water. We were somewhere near the middle of the pack 15 years ago, and we've slipped to very close to the bottom now of industrialized nations, if you do a comparative analysis.
On the strategies issue, as I say, we're now 20 years out of date. We haven't really done anything of significance, in a public way, for at least 20 years, so we probably don't have the right strategies for the right issues. That's going from our capacity, in a quantitative sense, to our strategies and our policies. There's lots to be done.
With regard to climate change and water, there are a lot of aspects to consider. What happens with climate change—and it is happening, the climate is getting warmer—is that the whole water cycle speeds up. You get more evaporation, more rainfall, more runoff. Everything speeds up. Whether or not you have more water or less depends on whether the precipitation or evaporation is most effective, because it's the balance that you're talking about.
In most parts of Canada, especially the drier parts, we're going to have less water, and we're going to have less water when it's really needed. Not only is there going to be less water from the precipitation-evaporation balance, but the glaciers are melting and there's less snow melt. The runoff is coming in the winter rather than in the summer, when you need it.
There's been a lot of work done in the Great Lakes region on climate change and groundwater. There are severe effects there. If you look at the Great Lakes, for example, the best predictions are that the Great Lakes that are unregulated will probably lower about five or six feet over the next 50 years, say, due to climate change. You're then going to be left with wetlands that are drylands, and all that goes with that. There are examples of that.
Did I cover everything? I think I did.