Natural Resources committee  I agree. It was difficult to imagine during the 1970s and it's still difficult today. The building code is very influential. Some provinces use it as a reference tool. It is the only one the federal government has. Perhaps we could arrange a kind of competition, as we had durin

Natural Resources committee  That's true, for the time being. The soft path approach is used, more or less, for academic studies. I appreciate what you're saying, but as we go ahead with our studies, we intend to formulate real policies to address these different issues. Right now, people are wondering how

Natural Resources committee  Let me skate around the Athabasca River, which is probably the wrong metaphor right now. You asked about putting environmental protection first. Five or ten years ago, the library bookshelf on how much water is required to keep ecosystems healthy was small indeed. The field has

Natural Resources committee  Let me deal with human rights first, because I don't want to get into a discussion of human rights—but it is not an irrelevant subject. I think it is probably worth saying clearly and unequivocally that there is no international or United Nations declaration of a human right to w

Natural Resources committee  Let me pick up on a couple of points. It's hard enough finding a role in water for government. Once I have said I'm going to put the focus on demand, I've made my job of finding a federal role even worse, because of the nature of demand--it's enormously decentralized, it's inhe

Natural Resources committee  Yes, I'll go next. I'm with Friends of the Earth, which is one of Canada's national environmental groups, which is to say that we tend to focus on national issues--among them water, biofuels, Canadian mining firms as they operate abroad, and international financial institutions