Environment committee  Thank you for the question. I believe there are three primary areas that could have a greater federal approach. One was previously mentioned by experts before this committee. It is improvement in water prediction. The provinces and territories need help. Some big, rich provinces have excellent computer models that do this.

Environment committee  I was very happy to see the Canada water agency advancing. This is a long-held dream for many people who felt more federal leadership would be helpful here. The first priority is a focus on observations. It should have the active observations of water quantity and quality brought together and dispersed to Canadians in a national way through collaboration.

Environment committee  We have to be very careful that we don't regret our developments in a few decades because of the rapidly changing conditions we have. Something you mentioned was road development. Road salts are heavily used in southern Ontario. They are in fact making the recovery of Ontario's lakes much more difficult, because they cause stratification of the water, and therefore more phosphorus is trapped in there and there are more algae blooms.

Environment committee  Yes. The first is to fix the federal fragmentation. We have about 20 departments with water functions, including four with large ones. The Canada water agency has been stood up, but these functions have not been coalesced into the agency. This is not working yet; we just added another fragment to the mess.

Environment committee  Yes. Those irrigation projects are essentially completing the plan for Lake Diefenbaker, which was a reservoir built for irrigation in the 1960s. Very little of that irrigated water use was taken up at the time. It's the largest water reservoir in the Prairies and has tremendous capacity to support irrigation.

Environment committee  I think southern Alberta has shown that this has tremendous economic input effects on its economy and on food exports with a diverse range of crops. Saskatchewan needs to look at irrigation to make sure that it has the marketing in place so that farmers want to irrigate, that we have the funding to do it and that we are growing high-value crops used around the world.

Environment committee  Of course, the oil sands are on the Athabasca River, which flows north to form the Slave River and the Great Slave Lake, and then to the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. The aquatic impacts are in that region. The aquatic sampling program has been extensive in there. The one concern, of course, is the storage of water from the oil sands extraction process.

Environment committee  In terms of policy, this should be part of the integrated river basin management for the Mackenzie River basin. There are vast natural ecosystems downstream, and indigenous populations in a relatively lower political power jurisdiction. The Northwest Territories is not a province.

Environment committee  Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here as a University of Saskatchewan professor who does his work on Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 lands in the home of the Métis. We honour them. I'm here representing the knowledge of over 200 professors at 23 universities across Canada, over 500 collaborators, and over 2,000 researchers and students who are finding solutions to water problems through their work in the Global Water Futures Programme, a federally funded study.

Science and Research committee  Thank you for the question. One of the things I conduct research on is the water footprint for cattle, whether it's providing water for them for drinking or water for the feed for the animals, and then also making sure we dispose of waste appropriately. With rapid climate change, what worries me about climate change more than other things are what Jim Bruce described as “the raiser”, which is water, the extremes of drought and flooding.

Science and Research committee  Yes. The government scientists I have had the pleasure of working with have seen their budgets drop over the decades. Their numbers have dropped over the decades. Investments in federal laboratories have not continued apace. They have become isolated. There used to be many programs for government scientist-led national research enterprises and networks and engaged deeply with them.

Science and Research committee  This particular facility was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It's simply the best in the world to study the problem of acid rain, but it also then became over time a more valuable facility to study the impacts of climate change, land use development and others. It was a federal laboratory for many years, and was dropped, as were many others.

Science and Research committee  Thank you. Many of the problems we face in Canada are interdisciplinary. They go further than the natural sciences and engineering, medicine, or social sciences and humanities alone, and they require an interdisciplinary or maybe a transdisciplinary approach, moving outside universities into the private sector, public sector and communities.

Science and Research committee  It's absolutely crucial for the survival and prospering of rural regions. My focus has been water, so we look at irrigation, drinking water supplies or groundwater, but also agricultural practices that can better manage water and ways to harvest water, in unique methods. The communities benefit substantially from this when they have a better means to their economy, when their ecosystems can remain intact.

Science and Research committee  Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be speaking to this committee. It's a great pleasure that there is such a committee for Canada. It's absolutely marvellous to focus on science and research. I'll introduce myself briefly. I completed my graduate and undergraduate training in water sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.