Thank you so much.
It's a great pleasure to be speaking to this committee. It's a great pleasure that there is such a committee for Canada. It's absolutely marvellous to focus on science and research.
I'll introduce myself briefly. I completed my graduate and undergraduate training in water sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. I then worked for NATO and the U.S. and Canadian governments as a research scientist, and then at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom. I was attracted back to Canada in 2003 by a renewed science and research strategy that led to the Canada research chairs program and a substantial increase in tri-council funding for academics.
This made Canada a warm welcoming place where one could more confidently pursue large-scale, world-class research. Since that time, I've led or co-led five national research networks and some international initiatives. I conduct research on water, particularly the impacts of climate change on water resources of cold regions such as Canada, where snow and ice are vulnerable to the warming temperatures.
I come from Saskatchewan and the prairie provinces, where drought is always on the horizon. We even have dust storms occurring in the Prairies this week. It's a massive issue for the west. How we manage, predict and steward that water, how we understand it and make sure it's available for our ecosystems, communities and indigenous communities for food production, industry and energy is a very important issue for us.
Over the years, I've observed Canada building up a really enviable system of supporting and encouraging university-based science and research. The dependence on university researchers for science production in Canada has grown. I started off as a government scientist, but I wouldn't want to be one right now as budgets have declined over the decades.
It's better at the universities. However, there's a risk to this dependence on the universities as it's structured right now. We lack the long-term means to sustain our national prominence in research areas. Other countries have these mechanisms in place.
Here's what I mean: In the UK, NERC centres combine academic and government research on strategic topics over long periods of time—decades. In the United States, there are co-operative institutes between the federal government and universities that function over decades and sustain long-term research objectives. In Canada, we don't have this.
My colleagues and I have worked on issues of water, climate and water pollution since the early 1990s. It's been made even more pressing by climate change. We found that we've had to establish six different research networks across the country to do this with five different research funding agencies. We call ourselves “acronym surfers” because every five years or so, we have to reinvent ourselves a bit. We have to learn a new funding agency and we have to bring in new sources of support for this.
It's precarious. It's also inefficient and takes long periods of time. It's a great worry. We know that water is life. We know that Canada depends on water. We can go back to John Palliser's expedition in the 1850s where this first came to prominence as a government report. This is something that should be straightforward moving forward.
Right now, the network I lead is called global water futures. It's funded by the Canada first research excellence fund, which has a marvellous amount of funding for science research. It's based at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with Waterloo, Laurier and McMaster universities. It funds over 200 professors at 18 universities. We've hired 1,100 students and researchers to transform Canada by finding ways to better forecast, prepare for and manage our future water in the face of dramatically increasing risk.
Global water futures is positioning Canada as a global leader for water science and we work throughout the world. However, after a seven-year run, global water futures will end next year like any CFREF network and there are no renewals. There are no similar large science funding programs that could sustain our refreshed global leadership in water science in Canada.
This is a precarious position indeed. I propose a solution to acronym surfing and research instability like this; not more big chairs to bring in people from outside of Canada to do things at the end of their careers, but sustained collaboration between the federal government and universities to develop our own co-operative institutes between consortia of research universities, federal government departments, provinces, industry, communities, first nations and other partners. These co-operative institutes would sustain a long-term focus on issues of long-term national importance, and bring to bear our national scientific resources, our laboratories, on these issues to sustain big science and global pre-eminence in strategic areas of particular benefit to Canada.
In the area of water, perhaps the upcoming Canada water agency could be a federal facilitator and leader for this, along with the natural science departments, tri-council agencies, CFI and others, like a Canadian co-operative institute in water sustainability with the universities. I'm sure there are many other worthy topics of this long-term strategic support in collaboration between federal science departments and universities across this country.
We could stop acronym surfing and get down to answering the really dangerous and scary questions that we have right now, such as how we predict and prevent floods, droughts, the poisoning of our Great Lakes, the decline of our fisheries, safe drinking water for our indigenous communities and other problems.
I'll wrap up there and I look forward to taking questions from you. Thank you for having me here.