Environment committee  Yes, it's a huge issue. Again, you have to go to the industry people to probably answer this question better. The oil industry deals with this problem all the time because they encounter briny waters. There are ways to manage it. They're very controlled in how they release it back to the environment.

Environment committee  Well, evaporation is the primary means by which the tailing ponds empty. The question, I guess, is whether they leak as well. That's the part that's open. Yes, it's one cycle. If water evaporates into the atmosphere, it becomes part of the net holdings of the atmosphere, which get precipitated at some point.

Environment committee  The sustainable yield transport mechanisms in surface water...in several cases we don't have the answers to those.

Environment committee  I'm not sure either. I understand, though, that they try to extract the salt before they use it. It's actually an industrial problem; salty water is corrosive, and they don't want pump it through the pumps. I believe they clean it before they inject it into the system.

Environment committee  I would suspect he actually means the three things that Dr. Rivera outlined, of sustainable yield, transport mechanism, and interconnections between systems. Without an understanding of how that works, all three of those are a little problematic. We're at the beginning stages of understanding that aquifer, so it's hard to be concrete about any of those three.

Environment committee  There is a well-established understanding of this in some realms. In oil and gas exploration, for example, they are very careful to seal off their well holes so that they don't create a hydrologic connection between two layers. So that understanding, I think, is there. There is actually a legal framework, and people follow it all the time.

Environment committee  Alfonso, do you want to respond?

Environment committee  Yes. They typically collect expert advice from a variety of federal government departments, and we have groundwater experts inside NRCan. Whenever there's an environmental assessment report that needs to be reviewed from a groundwater perspective, our experts are asked for that information.

Environment committee  Yes. That's one of the perennial challenges. This is very much a research program in some ways. We understand some types of aquifers very well and can tell you what's going to happen with them from studies of other ones. This buried valley kind of aquifer is a little different, and we don't understand it quite as well.

Environment committee  Well, yes and no. That's an excellent question, but it's also a bit tough to answer. As Dr. Rivera said, it takes maybe 10 years to recharge this aquifer system. We're interested in the dynamics, but it's very hard to get a handle on the dynamics from a one-year study. We can certainly accelerate some parts of it and we can collect lots of different types of data, but there still are uncertainties that we just can't deal with.

Environment committee  I'm not sure we can answer the legal question precisely, but we always do this, exactly, with the provinces or territories. We would never go in on our own to try to do something.

Environment committee  We're starting that process now, so we are taking that on, and I think the statement is accurate.

Environment committee  We have no problem. We actually have an agreement between the federal government and each of the provinces called the Intergovernmental Geoscience Accord. It sort of separates the provincial roles from the federal roles, and collaboration is a key thing. We never do anything unilaterally.

Environment committee  Yes, I think it does. Alfonso, do you want to add to that?

Environment committee  I'll take a quick shot at it, and then Alfonso can put some more details in. I think it's working extremely well. I don't think anybody is being protective of data. I think some of the limitations are resources. A lot of this is trying to get existing data into the right formats in digital forms.