Environment committee  That's summer flow that I looked at, in terms of river flows all over the place.

Environment committee  Certainly. Dr. Schindler and I published a couple of papers in the last few years that looked at river flow throughout the prairies. River flow throughout the prairies has been on a dramatic downswing. River flow in the South Saskatchewan at Saskatoon is down over 80% since the

Environment committee  I believe at four of the stations there was a 20% to 30% decline in precipitation, and at the other ones there was no significant change over that 35-year period.

Environment committee  Ultimately, the amount of water that's flowing in a river will at some point be tied to the balance between precipitation and evaporation in its basin. So depending on what the groundwater flow is, there may be lags between what goes on. I would suggest in the glaciated Rocky Mo

Environment committee  It's hard to say. What I've presented for the most part has been descriptive, what has happened in flow, what has happened in things such as precipitation, snowpack, and temperatures. The model I put together, which ties together climate variables and flow, isn't what would be de

Environment committee  It's two different things. The water level basically is a function of the geometry of the river. If it's deeper, the river's likely narrower. If the depth is low in some areas, that may be because the river's either wide or there's low flow. Water depth will be a function of the

Environment committee  I'm pretty sure water levels are available. I didn't really consider them, because they're going to change. In any river there will be shallow areas and deep areas, so the level ultimately will vary as you move up and down the river. Certainly as flow declines at any point in the

Environment committee  In this paper I presented I focused on the period from 1970 on, for a couple of reasons. One, the data weren't available necessarily that went back further beyond that, for example, in the Sunwapta River, at the headwaters. It was a case of comparing apples to apples. I've looke

Environment committee  Well, it would be a comedy. I don't really know. I do know that in one of the draft frameworks it was reviewed by DFO scientists, and they concluded that it was not protective of fisheries. Somewhere along the line DFO's role became minimized, I think, and the science and the co

Environment committee  I would say yes, the federal government does have a role. The climate data, especially, that I showed as an example was from Environment Canada. One of the things I noticed when I was going through the climate data was that starting from the 1970s, going up to the mid-1990s or be

Environment committee  My comments were in terms of the framework, and what it appeared to be based on, and ultimately the implications. My point in saying that we're in trouble was to go back to what is science. The basic assumption of the water framework, when they put it together, was that the amoun

Environment committee  Yes, and that's simply because I think a lot of it was out of sight, out of mind. The presumption is there's a lot of water in the north, it's water-rich; therefore, we don't really need to address it all that much.

Environment committee  What I'm going to do is talk about the changing water supply in the Athabasca River, focusing on the entire basin, and general implications in terms of what that might mean for water-intensive development. I think I'll start with a basic summary of what science is. I don't know