Madam Speaker, of all the defining issues of the next century, indeed of the next millennium, water has to be the most important one.
As our pulse beats every 60 seconds we lose 50 hectares of forests around the globe. That means every year we are losing 30 million hectares of forests or well over twice the size of Nova Scotia. As a result the desert is gaining ground at the rate of 10 million hectares per annum or almost the size of Nova Scotia.
The environmental organization UNEP, United Nations Environmental Program, has shown through its statistics that if we were to add the desertified lands of the world together we would have a surface in deserts equal to North America and South America combined. This gives us an idea of the immensity of the water challenge.
Our forests are disappearing. The desert is gaining ground at an exponential rate. Our rivers are silting and drying up. Our groundwater is being depleted again at a huge rate. For all these reasons a country's water resources have become its most precious asset, its most valuable resource.
Many of us live under the comfortable but false assumption that our water resources are so immense as to be inexhaustible.
But it must be remembered that our freshwater resources represent only a fraction of the planet's total water resources. In fact, 97% or more of the planet's water resources are salt water. Only 3% are freshwater. And of these, the freshwater resources visible to us, our lakes, our rivers, the waterways that seem so never-ending to us, represent only a tiny proportion of the total freshwater resources, the great bulk of which lie beneath the earth's surface to form the water table.
The fact of the matter is that, in many American states today, particularly in the West and Southwest, the water table has been seriously depleted.
The more the water resources of certain American states dwindle, the more the U.S. has its eye on our resources in Canada. Certain companies, even in this country, see this as a golden business opportunity.
Thus pressure grows for Canada and its provinces to sell our water resources for commercial reasons and for profit. Those who would sell and buy our water resources would argue that we are blessed with water resources which are among the world's most prolific. This is true. Indeed the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes basin alone accounts for something like 20% of all surface fresh water of the globe.
I think we should put this in perspective. May I take the example of the same Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin to show how much we use, overuse and abuse our water. Every day out of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence we draw 655 billion gallons of water or 2.5 trillion litres of water. This is equivalent to putting water into 19 million jumbo tank cars each 65 feet long and with a capacity of 34,000 gallons. If we strung them together one after another they would stretch for 237,000 miles or 9.5 times around the earth at the Equator.
These mind-boggling statistics give us an idea of how much we have abused and used, day in and day out, the resources of just one water basin.
We should reiterate that of all our natural resources water is by far the most precious. I back the remarks of my colleague from Davenport that NAFTA has nothing to do with that. NAFTA provides for water in bottled form. We should not be constrained by ideas that we have to ask the Americans for permission to protect our water resources.
I congratulate the mover of the motion. We cannot at any price sacrifice our water resources for export whether on a large scale, medium scale or small scale. As parliamentarians and as Canadians we must send strong signals to the Americans and anybody else, to those who would sell our water for profit, to those who have grand designs for grand canals and small canals and bulk exports to make money, that our water and our water heritage are not for sale. They are not for sale at any price, not now, not tomorrow, not the day after, not the day after that or at any time thereafter.
This is why I agree with the motion. We must move without delay to protect our water resources. This is why I will support the motion when it comes to the vote.