Environment committee  Thanks for the question. Similar to Kate's answer, we're looking for increased support for research and monitoring, and for pursuing shared, collaborative objectives.

Environment committee  I think it relates back to my comment that what we're seeing, in terms of climate change, is across the entire Mackenzie River basin. The Canada water agency, if it's situated to look at things on a basin scale, is in a unique position to address those basin-level effects, and then disseminate that information collaboratively among jurisdictions.

Environment committee  One of the key learnings for me over the past number of years is that the drought we're currently experiencing in the Northwest Territories isn't related to water use. It's more about climate change. It's more about something that we've never seen before, which is a meteorological system that's over the entire basin.

Environment committee  There are so many ways. I think one really clear way is this new regime whereby we have extreme variability; it's really hard to predict from year to year what's going to happen. We need new tools and new modelling to indicate what those conditions are going to be in the near and medium term, so we can better plan.

Environment committee  The Government of Northwest Territories is currently working with researchers at the University of Calgary to look at the current regime in the Mackenzie River basin. I know there are other experts within the country.

Environment committee  Thank you. I think the coal management processes that are in place in the Northwest Territories, again, stem from settled land claims—the Inuvialuit, Gwich’in and Sahtu land claims that were settled in the early 1990s—and then there was legislation produced known as the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act.

Environment committee  I think the governments of the territories are perhaps in a different situation from provinces, as I described at the beginning of my presentation, in that the federal government has devolved certain functions, but there are other functions that are still held by the federal government.

Environment committee  As I mentioned, we do have a transboundary water agreement with Alberta. One of the key pieces of that agreement is about how we share water and what the triggers or the objectives are for when that water quantity is lower and may be impacting the ecological integrity of the aquatic ecosystem.

Environment committee  Thanks. I think you raise a really important point. It's the way we do business in the Northwest Territories. There's no way for a government of the Northwest Territories to proceed without the partnership and collaboration of indigenous governments in the territory or in the region that we're talking about.

Environment committee  Thanks. I'll take it back to a really practical example. We're talking about the Mackenzie River Basin Board and some bilateral agreements. The governments in the Northwest Territories and Alberta have a bilateral agreement for our shared waters, and one of the parts of that agreement is that we'll value and use traditional or indigenous knowledge on par with western science.

Environment committee  I think it's been described before that if climate change is like the shark, then water is the teeth. That's one of the first places where we're seeing some of the effects. That's why, from a Northwest Territories perspective, we're interested in that intersection between climate change and fresh water.

Environment committee  Thank you. I appreciate the invitation to share with the committee today the Government of Northwest Territories' perspectives on the federal government's role in protecting and managing Canada's freshwater resources. I wish to acknowledge that I'm situated today in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.