Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members.
I was asked to speak about binational challenges, Canada-U.S. challenges. That's a very big topic, obviously--at any given time, 30 or 40 issues dealing with water are going on between our two countries--so I'm going to focus today on a few water quantity issues between the two countries, and some institutional aspects or considerations with respect to that.
You hear a lot in the media about our thirsty neighbours to the south. In fact, they are not very thirsty. They probably withdraw about 30% of the water that's renewed in the country every year, and they actually consume less than 10% of the water they have, so they don't have a water shortage problem. What they have is a problem of respect for the hydrological cycle, as I've said in here.
What happens in many cases is that they withdraw water from one place, use it, and put it back someplace else. They end up mining the water where it was to start with, and they end up with problems.
There are a lot of high-profile cases like that. Lately, there are communities just outside the Great Lakes basin that, due to urban sprawl, are doing this. They're mining groundwater, and as a result, they're trying to get water from the Great Lakes basin to satisfy their need when, in fact, they have much better local solutions.
It happens on a much bigger scale in the southwest. In the Ogallala Aquifer area, under seven states, their groundwater levels are being reduced by about 150 feet, but it's the same issue. When you take water out of the groundwater and don't replenish it, the groundwater table keeps going lower and lower, the quality gets worse, and the cost of extracting it becomes higher and higher. That's the issue.
In the 1960s, if any of you go back that far, there were a lot of continental schemes proposed to move water from northern Canada--or the Yukon and Alaska--down into the U.S. Many of those proposals were done by private enterprises, and they were really lines on a map. They were never analyzed in any detail, and if they were, the few that were analyzed turned out to be very poor economics. You'd probably get back a dime for every dollar you invested in a project of that kind.
There are some very interesting cases involving communities on the two sides of the border that share common water systems. I mentioned a few of them. There are three or four cases. Those are local water sharing arrangements. They work very well; they don't threaten anybody; they don't involve diversions between river basins. They're just practical things that work, and there are no problems with them.
What is the issue, then, between the two countries in terms of water quantity? I was making the case that it's not major export by inter-basin transfer and it's not local water sharing. What it is--and it's becoming more and more serious each year--is the uneven demands on the water that we share. We share the Great Lakes, the Red River, the St. Marys River, the Milk, the Columbia, and so on. We're having uneven demands on these water bodies that we share. That's the real issue in the next decade or two; it's not moving water from Alaska to California, I don't think.
I gave three examples of these issues. The first is the Great Lakes. In this case the eight Great Lakes states and the two provinces negotiated an agreement on how to control diversions from the basin and how to control water use within the basin.
The public reacted very negatively to the initial version of that agreement. Some of you, actually, were on the committee on environment and sustainable development that looked at that issue about a year and a half ago. The committee put out a very good and useful report that helped to crystallize that issue.
The problems with the initial draft were that...it started with the free trade assumption that everybody in the world has the same right to this water, and then it went on. It had a questionable resource improvement standard. It had a very leaky return flow regime. It also significantly weakened existing forms of protection.
The public reacted very negatively in both countries. As a result, the negotiators went back to the table, and this time Ontario took a very strong stand. A very much improved version of that agreement was signed last December; it is really based on a prohibition on inter-basin diversion, with minor and well-defined exceptions.
You can see from that example that even a lot of the environmental organizations were on the wrong side of that issue. You can see the danger, I think, if Canadian governments and non-governmental organizations and others are not well equipped and alert. That sort of thing could very easily slip through, with very bad consequences for the Great Lakes and Canadians in the long run.
The second example is in the Red River valley, between North Dakota and Manitoba.
Last year the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation asked for comments on a water supply study in which they looked at means of meeting the water supply needs in the Red River basin. They looked at some diversions from the Missouri, they looked at a diversion from Lake of the Woods, and they looked at some in-basin options.
Again Canadians reacted quite negatively, those who commented. The bureau has recognized in their response to those comments that if they were to divert water from the Lake of the Woods, which is shared between Canada and the U.S., they would have to go through the International Joint Commission and have a study and get approval by the commission. That would be required under the Lake of the Woods Convention.
My third example is in the St. Mary and Milk River basins, between Montana and Alberta. It's a very hot issue right at the moment; there's a real controversy brewing there.
There is a water sharing arrangement between Canada and the U.S. that goes back to the Boundary Water Treaty; it's actually embedded right within the Boundary Water Treaty. That controversy really led to the Boundary Water Treaty in 1909. There's an apportionment agreement built right into the treaty. That was followed up in 1921 by the IJC's making it more specific in an order.
But in the last few years Montana has been running out of water, and they've come back looking for a better deal. The IJC had a committee look at this issue over the last year, and they came out with their draft report in April. They've asked for comments, and the comments are coming in between now and the end of June.
It's potentially a very explosive issue in that part of the continent. But basically, if you look at it, what it comes down to is that Montana's infrastructure is very inefficient. They have old conveyance channels that are broken down and not conveying water very well. Their irrigation efficiencies are about half as good as those in Alberta, and they're trying to solve a local problem of bad infrastructure by getting more water from Canada. Essentially that's what it comes down to.
In all these cases, if they indicate a trend—and they probably do—we might expect more and more demands from U.S. interests on our shared water resources. In most cases—I'd say in all cases—we can make a case, or somebody can make a case, that both countries would be better off with wiser local-scale water management. But to do that, Canadians have to be very proactive and more adept at influencing opinion south of the border.
I had some discussion in my paper, which I handed out, on our national capacity to look after our water issues, and how we can't really look after our binational issues unless we can look after our national ones: 80% of Canadians live in boundary water basins. And I had some methodology outlined in it for how one might go about assessing our capacity, both in terms of quantity and strategy.
In terms of strategy, of course, we have the 1987 policy, but it's very badly out of date. If we were doing it today we would deal with different issues, and we would deal with very different strategies, I think.
I've gone through some methodology that I used in China and in other parts of the world in trying to do this. But it hasn't been done really in Canada for 20 years, so it's overdue, I would say.
I'll add just a few more words on the institutional aspect of the binational situation. If you look at the issues we've dealt with over the years, from about 1945 to 1965 we went through a cooperative development period. We did things such as the Columbia River development together, we did the St. Lawrence Seaway together, and so on. This was a very cooperative period we went through.
From 1965 till about 1985 we went through a comprehensive management period. During that period we did a lot of comprehensive river basin planning in Canada, but on the international scale we did things such as comprehensive water quality management for the Great Lakes and comprehensive flood management in the Champlain-Richelieu basin in Quebec.
Since 1985 I guess we've been in something called the sustainable development period—both Ian and David have talked a little bit about this—where we've tried to deal with a lot of things together at the same time. We integrated water resource management to deal with all aspects of water. We look at a lot of things that interrelate with each other.
If you look at the Great Lakes, for example, what we're trying to do all at once right now is deal with climate change, with potential diversions, consumptive use in the basin, modifications to connecting channels, pollution, biological integrity, water level regulation. We're trying to do all those things at the same time and we're trying to look at all the interrelations between those things.
What happens is that you get to a level of complexity such that it just can't be done in the old way. You can no longer dictate solutions from the top down; you really need bottom-up solutions. So the job of senior governments becomes an enabling or facilitating role. Senior governments will provide policy frameworks; they'll provide knowledge, and knowledge in a usable way; but the solutions are going to come from the bottom. They're going to come from citizens and communities from the bottom up. So we have to get our policy frameworks right from the top down. We have to get our knowledge, our research and everything else from the top down, but the solutions are going to come from the bottom up.
In the Canada-U.S. context, what the IJC is trying to do is something very appropriate. They're trying to move towards the concept of watershed boards, where they put in place boards that deal with whole watersheds. And they not only bring to bear on those boards the policy frameworks from governments on top, but they bring in the stakeholders from the bottom. They bring all that together and play a facilitating role in helping the policy frameworks infiltrate down and making sure the knowledge gets to people and making sure people are able to use it.
I think they're on the right path in that regard. But this is a long-term endeavour, and in the meantime, based on my examples, I guess what we have to do is remain vigilant and proactive on all these issues. If you look back at other issues—acid rain and eutrophication, Great Lakes diversions, and others over the years—this has been a very successful approach. But it requires a very proactive approach by Canadian governments and the Canadian non-governmental sector.
I'll leave it at that, and we can get to questions. Thank you very much.