Mr. Speaker, my thanks to the chief government whip as well.
On November 16, 2006, I tabled the motion we are debating today, calling for a national water strategy. A little after that time, a couple of other similar motions appeared on the order paper by two other colleagues, the member for Parkdale—High Park and the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan. Their motions will be up for debate at a later date, and I very much hope to participate in those debates.
On March 19, the government appeared to react to the pressure by parliamentarians, and perhaps by the growing awareness among the Canadian public, of water as a vital resource by including a quick reference in its second budget to its intention to undertake certain expenditures in the area of water management. Let us hope the government's new-found interest in water is more real and convincing than its confused, halting and highly criticized, both inside and outside Canada, approach to climate change, an issue, incidentally, that has a profound impact on water quality and quantity.
I have my doubts, though, because the current federal cabinet includes three former ministers from the former Harris government in Ontario, a government well known for having been in charge in Ontario at the time of the Walkerton water tragedy. It was a government that made serious cuts to the environment ministry in that province, cuts that contributed, according to the report of the O'Connor inquiry, to the tragedy itself.
Water is an essential resource. It is so vital to our human existence that it is impossible to claim that a country has a real and effective environmental policy if it is not properly and comprehensively addressing the issue of water. So vital is water to human existence that it is not possible to say that a nation is committed to the values of equity and equality if it is not properly and comprehensively addressing the issue of water. Water is ubiquitous. It is everywhere and its management falls under many jurisdictions.
It is an issue that has multiple sub-issues in multiple jurisdictions. Water has many aspects. As I said, it is consumed as a good and it is also essential to economic prosperity. It is visible in lakes and streams, but also invisible in aquifers and underground streams and rivers. It can inspire science and scientific research, but it can also provoke conflict. Water, therefore, is complex and far-reaching and requires a broad and comprehensive approach.
Because it is such an important issue, because it is so complex, a national water strategy must rest on the democratic principle of consultation, which is why in the body of my motion I mentioned that any future water strategy should be developed in consultation with different levels of government, with local citizens groups and so on.
I can obviously not address the entire breadth of this issue in 15 minutes. I will only really be dealing with the tip of the iceberg of this complex, detailed and multi-faceted issue.
The first thing I will address is the myth about water in Canada. This myth is that Canada is to water what Kuwait is to oil. In other words, we have such a huge overabundance of water that perhaps we do not need to take the issue that seriously. However, if we are to have an effective policy, we cannot rest that policy on misconceptions and false assumptions. Therefore, I will set the record straight on the overabundance of water.
First, on the demand side, Canadians per capita are among the highest consumers of water in the world. There are great demand pressures on our water resources.
Let us look at the supply side. The volume of water sitting in lakes in Canada is at least 20% of the volume of freshwater in the world. That sounds very impressive. It makes it sound as though we have a huge abundance of water. However, we need to clarify our terminology.
The first thing we need to do is to distinguish between what might be called water capital and water interest, to use a financial or accounting analogy. This distinction is vital to our understanding of the degree to which our actions as consumers, as businesses and as policy-makers may be depleting our water resources beyond recovery.
For example, the water sitting in our lakes might be considered our stock of water, our water capital. In other words, it can only be used once. Once that water is used, it is depleted and it can never be recovered. The rivers and streams that run into and out of our lakes, including the Great Lakes, are like our water interest or dividends. These rivers and streams and their flow represent net additions to the water supply. They represent the renewable portion of the water supply.
It is the volume of the water dividends, the volume of the flow that matters, since this is the portion that can be used on an ongoing basis without depleting the resource base or the capital stock of water. The volume of the flow is what is known as the renewable water supply. It is interesting to note in this regard that the total volume of water in all the freshwater lakes of the world is only equal to about two year's worth of the runoff of the world's rivers. That helps to make the stark contrast between water capital and water interest.
The two countries with the largest renewable water supplies, and one of them is not Canada as is commonly assumed, are Brazil with 12.4% of the world's renewable water supply and Russia with 10%. Below that Canada is in a virtual four-way tie with Indonesia, the U.S. and China. In fact, Canada has only about 7% of the global renewable water supply. Interestingly enough, much of that supply does not flow to populated areas. It flows north of the population centres in southern Canada.
This is a vital issue and we have not as a federal government and as a nation as a whole been addressing it properly. If we look at a recent report on water management by the Senate standing committee on energy, environment and natural resources, the committee described the state of water management at the federal level in Canada as shocking and unacceptable.
I have heard other statistics, such as Canada is 26th out of 28 countries in the developed world in terms of managing our water resources. That includes our drinking water resources.
As the motion essentially alludes to, I believe governments should respect their constitutional jurisdictions. This does not mean the federal government must be a bystander or a passive observer. It does not mean the federal government must step back or wilt in some way. The federal government has a role to play in water management in Canada. It has a right to be involved, even though water is a natural resource and provinces have jurisdiction over their natural resources.
There are some areas where the federal government has a direct and a constitutional responsibility and authority. For example, the federal government has jurisdiction over international treaties and interprovincial issues. It has jurisdiction over navigable waters and fisheries, water on airplanes and water on aboriginal reserves. In a more indirect way it has jurisdiction, upheld by the Supreme Court, of toxic substances which leach into our water supply. There are many hooks on which a national water strategy could rest.
I will turn now to drinking water. To give the House a sense of the situation with respect to drinking water in Canada, Canada is one of the most developed countries in the world and we still have problems with drinking water.
New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, particularly rural Quebec, continue to lag behind in maintaining even the minimum federal guidelines for water quality. Many small communities continue to this day to have to boil their water for everyday use. Families in every region of the country are boiling their water daily because they cannot get clean drinking water into their homes.
In British Columbia the Sierra Legal Defence Fund issued a report entitled “WATERED DOWN”, concerning 28 waterborne disease outbreaks in 2003. It estimated that at any given moment as much as 10% of B.C.'s water systems should be under a boil water advisory.
In 2002 Manitoba passed a drinking water act. Since then, it has discovered in Winnipeg that concentrations of disinfectant byproducts considered carcinogenic could be located in the Winnipeg drinking water.
In Portage la Prairie lead concentrates exceeded Canada's guidelines.
Let us talk a bit about the federal role in terms of drinking water before I wrap up.
There are drinking water guidelines in Canada and they were created through a joint federal-provincial-territorial committee on drinking water. In 2005 Canada's Commissioner on the Environment and Sustainable Development, who audited the process the federal government uses to develop these guidelines, found a significant backlog of about 10 years in updating them, despite Health Canada's recommendation that they should take no more than two or three years to develop or review. The commissioner found that many known contaminants were not even listed in the guidelines because of the time lag in updating them.
There is a problem here and it is very important that the federal government show some leadership in terms of marshalling the energies of all the stakeholders in this issue.
I appreciate the opportunity to debate the motion. I hope to continue to delve into the issue in greater detail in the second hour of debate.