Environment committee  Absolutely. Thank you very much. There are two facets to speak to. First, there is long-term monitoring of lakes over time in the same way to see how they are changing. Another facet is long-term experiments. At the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario, we have been doing both for over 50 years.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Absolutely. I'd be happy to. I'll back up right to the beginning with.... Am I allowed to use a whiteboard to just draw a very quick picture?

Environment committee  I'll just draw a picture like this. This is the cross-section of the Athabasca River. The oil sands sit like this. Near the Athabasca River the oil sands are shallow, so near the Athabasca River oil sands are mined with surface mining, big pits. Further away from the oil sands, where the deposit is deeper—200 metres or so—that's where the industry uses in situ techniques, where they basically go down and have to blast it out from here.

Environment committee  Yes, it's an excellent question. We've been mining oil sands in Canada since the late 1960s. For 50 years now, engineers, scientists and academics have been working at developing treatment technologies and figuring out ways of improving the efficiency of extracting bitumen from ore.

Environment committee  I'm sure someone else will ask me about it.

Environment committee  Okay, if you'll allow me to. What we find is that, once we treat oil sands process-affected water using this titanium dioxide photocatalyst, we can remove the acute lethality of the water. However, if you only partly break down those compounds you can actually create more toxic breakdown products, so you really have to break all of those compounds down to be able to basically have the same end points as we see in our control fish that are not exposed to oil sands process-affected water.

Environment committee  Thanks very much for your questions. You asked what the barriers are to my research or to the tailing ponds issue. Could you clarify whether it's a question about my research or a question about the tailing ponds?

Environment committee  Thanks for the clarification. In my research group we study the effects of naphthenic acids on fish and frogs. Naphthenic acids are the chemicals in tailings ponds. They are the major source of toxicity. They're not the only source of toxicity but the major source of toxicity.

Environment committee  Good afternoon. Thank you kindly for inviting me back to Ottawa to speak today. I applaud the members for studying the role of the federal government in protecting and managing Canada's fresh water. As a water-rich nation, Canada has a disproportionately large responsibility on the world stage to be a good steward of water, and the federal government must rightly provide the leadership to do so.