Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources
Issue 5 - Evidence - December 9, 2004
OTTAWA, Thursday, December 9, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources met this day at 8:37 a.m. to examine and report on emerging issues related to its mandate.
Senator Tommy Banks (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good morning. Senators, our last witness in the committee's study on water has been called the ``Indiana Jones of ecology.'' Dr. David Schindler will be honoured tomorrow when he receives the Order of Canada. We are delighted to welcome him to our meeting this morning to assist us in our considerations. Mr. Schindler, please proceed.
Dr. David Schindler, Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology, Faculty of Science, University of Alberta: Good morning, senators. Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee. I have prepared a number of slides of what I think are the most important aspects in respect of the Prairies. I have others that we can use in discussion, if necessary. I have been told that senators like to discuss some of the potential problems rather than simply listen to a presentation.
The first slide is a depiction of the plumbing of the country. We are always told flatly that Canada is a water-rich country but, in fact, Canada is almost the size of Europe and many of the provinces of Canada would equate with the largest country of Europe. For example, Alberta is bigger than Sweden or the U.K. or Germany. As a result, there are some distance problems with piping water around Canada and with many of the things that people fantasize about doing with respect to water.
The black dots on the map are major population centres and show up as a little band about 300 to 400 kilometres from the American border. Most of the water is north of the border or is busy making its way north. The area we should be concerned about first is the grey area in Alberta and Saskatchewan on the map. That area generates no net outflow even during the wettest period for which we have instrumental records in the mid-20th century.
Evaporation removes more water than falls as precipitation in that area. The main reason there is any water in that landscape at all is that the area is adjacent to the Rocky Mountains, which receive almost three times the precipitation. The area of greatest concern is Alberta because in addition to being an extremely arid part of the country, it is developing rapidly. In this next slide, senators can see that there is higher activity in Alberta than anywhere in the American West. Of course, with industry comes people and industrial water use. In addition to the natural drought, that is a second threat.
Next, we have a map of the mid-20th century precipitation in Alberta. As you can see, the area in the south and east is of greatest concern. Through much of that area, the precipitation is less than evaporation, particularly anything depicted in pale green and into the yellows and reds on the map.
Within that area, we have extremely high population growth, especially in the vicinity of Calgary where it is currently in the order of 4 per cent per year and higher for some of the suburban areas.
Another factor is high water use for irrigation. About 70 per cent of Alberta's water use is for irrigated crops that, for the most part, feed livestock. We have to think long-term about the fact that the major reason is to export livestock to the U.S. under normal circumstances when we do not have BSE border closures.
There is a third factor that comes increasingly into play — climate warming. A few people would still like to debate whether greenhouse emissions are causing that warming. My response from the standpoint of water is that it does not matter whether the cause is natural or from greenhouse gases. Either way, evaporation will increase. The excess of evaporation over precipitation will increase. If the models are correct, we can expect to see a considerable temperature increase in the remainder of this century.
However, we must remember that the global average figures on this map are a range of all the scenarios of all major climate models. You will find that the Prairies are expected to have two or three times the global average. The global average is much damped by the high heat capacity of the oceans. I would say that, behind the west, because it is so dry already and has a high human population, the Prairies are our first concern.
The next concern would be the North, which is also extremely dry. Fortunately, we do not have the population pressure in that area, yet. The North is expected to warm even more than the Prairies.
While you can look back in history and fuss about Mediaeval warm periods and mid-Holocene climate and make all kinds of excuses, the fact remains that the forcing of greenhouse gases can be measured as well as models. The measurements of forcing indicate that we will have very rapid warming. On the map, the change in land surface from light colours — snow and ice cover — to darker colours will have a huge effect. Think of the difference in heat levels between the surfaces of a white car and a black one in the summer. The difference is between reflecting solar radiation and absorbing it. These are the greenhouse forcings for the human produced greenhouse gases. You can see the combination of gases up to the left, for which the IPCC has very high to medium confidence in what they will do.
The Chairman: What is the IPCC?
Mr. Schindler: The International Panel on Climate Change.
Most scientists would agree with the IPCC. There was a summary article in last week's issue of Science that reviewed 952 abstracts in peer reviewed journals and did not find a single article that dissented with the view that these gases are causing greenhouse warming. Most of the dissension seems to be on websites and in the popular press. In all fairness, the sceptics have some good points, but they do not have the overwhelming point of view; and the fact that these forcings can be measured carries the day.
Of course, we have another factor which really did not come into focus until the last five for six years. However, there are examples going far back in time. These are Palliser's notorious diaries after reviewing the West. Of course, we know now that Palliser arrived at the end of a 25 year drought, one more severe than anything we have had in this century. Fortunately, that drought broke soon afterward and, while I do not think any Prairie farmer would claim that there have been lavish livings made on the Prairies, they did eke out a living and we have a lot of farmers hanging on.
One piece of evidence which I think is fairly scary is from the so-called mid-Holocene which had at its maximum, about six thousand years ago, various records from tree ring position, species of trees and so on, to suggest that the prairies and much of southern Canada were about one degree centigrade warmer than the mid-20th century. Some pretty frightening things happened then that I think should give us some pause.
I have coloured Lake Manitoba in red. This would be a great lake in any country but Canada. It is actually the tenth largest lake on the continent. Work at the University of Manitoba suggests that Lake Manitoba was dry in the mid- Holocene. The slide shows the depth in lake muds in the bottom of the lake. You will see green bands. At those depths there were bands of grass embedded in the lake sediments which were buried afterward. It suggests that Lake Manitoba was a buffalo pasture, not a lake in those periods. Much of Lake Winnipeg was also gone. It was a much smaller pool of water than it is now.
When I went to university we were told that the prairie wetlands had been left by the glaciers. A study by two scientists from Edmonton suggests otherwise. What these two scientists did was to take the oldest peat from the bottoms of wetlands where it started to accumulate and date it, using carbon-14 dating. The numbers on this figure, which range from three to five, are the age of the oldest peat in thousands of years. They show that all of these wetlands were formed after this mid-Holocene warm period. They probably were formed after glaciation, then dried up during the mid-Holocene period when it was only a degree or so warmer than the 20th century, and then reformed again as the climate cooled in the Little Ice Age. Many of those wetlands are dry again now, due to the drought of the late 1990s and early part of this century.
Several studies in the last few years indicate some pretty disturbing things. Of course, before about 1890, we have no temperature or precipitation records. A number of people have used proxy records, matching tree rings with temperature and precipitation or diatoms that grow in lakes and are preserved in sediments because they have siliceous frustules.
This is a tree ring example, done by scientists at the University of Regina. They found that in the 20th century they got a very good correlation between the width of tree rings in places like the Cyprus Hills that are surrounded by prairie and precipitation. Since that was good, they assumed that they go back farther in time if they could find older wood. As you can see from these two sites, one in Alberta and one in adjacent Montana, they can go back three or four hundred years. This suggests, and the diatom record suggests the same, is that the 20th century was unique in this whole period. It was by far the wettest century and, of course, because this is when Europeans settled and we had industrial development. We have come to think of the 20th century as normal.
On the graph every coloured bar represents a drought, and the red ones represent droughts that lasted 10 years or more. The second bar from the right side would be the Dirty Thirties. It was a puny drought by historical comparisons.
The diatom records indicate exactly the same thing except that, so far, they have pushed the record back 2000 years and even going back that far, the 20th century stands out as exceptionally wet.
The scenario that I see developing is a huge increase in population and industrial development in Alberta. The periodic droughts that I think we can expect, if we return to anything like pre-20th century conditions, and the accelerated evaporation from climate warming, at some point in the next century will come together. My guess is, earlier rather than later in the century. We will know what water shortage is all about in Alberta. I think that through the late 1990s, many people are beginning to realize that already.
To mention some recent work, for a couple of years, a young colleague of mine, Bill Donahue, and I have been trying to piece together changes in temperature, precipitation and river flows. These are modelled data. The left-hand clump shows measured records. The rest are modelled by a combination of global models and scenarios run at the University of Victoria's climate centre. They are an average for the Western Prairie cities that have major meteorological stations. You can see that they predict an increase of about 6.5 degrees on average. The bars are the limits. Different stations have different scenarios. You can run these for yourself on their website by plugging in latitude and longitude and the year you would like to see. It will do a run of a major model for you right on your laptop and give you a scatter plot of what the various models predict.
One more factor that we will have to contend with is the loss of glacial water. I have heard a lot of people try to dismiss this glacial water concern because, on an annual basis, it is a small part of the flow of major rivers. However, it is not a small part in mid- to late summer. That is when agriculture needs the water. There is also a high municipal demand for water for washing cars and watering gardens and lawns. That combination makes me think we need to pay more attention to those low-flow periods.
The Athabasca glacier is probably the most famous because it is at the ice field centre. This is a replica of the display they have there, showing this glacier receding 1.5 kilometres in a period of about 70 years. The average that they have figured for that period is that the glacier has lost about 16 million cubic metres of water per year in excess of what it has regained from annual snow.
However, it is not the worst of the lot. This is the Saskatchewan glacier, the head waters of the North Saskatchewan. These are taken by Graeme Pole, a friend of mine who produced them for a hiking book. I wrote a section for his hiking book in return for getting copies of these to display. You can see, by comparing 1924 and 2002, how much that glacier has receded.
The worst, however, is the Bow Glacier. Graeme took the lower picture as a replica of one he found in the Whyte museum. One picture was taken in 1898 and the other in 2002. It is noteworthy that this is the same tree in the two photos. It has fallen another 90-degrees but it still has almost all its branches. Unfortunately, the ice was not preserved that well. It is disappearing over the horizon. This is the same glacier where, in some past work, we documented enormous releases of pesticides being deposited in the mid-20th century that were melting into the Bow River as the ice receded.
The Chairman: To give us an idea of the scale in case someone has not stood at the face of the Columbia ice fields, how deep is the ice at the face of the glacier?
Mr. Schindler: I do not know what the maximum would be. These cover variable terrain. I know there has been a considerable thinning. We have few glaciers for which we have good mass balance. One of my main recommendations would be that we do not have good information for many of those glaciers. We need the depth profiles and, over a time period, that will allow some calculation of this mass. Where we have the data, the indication is that we have had a 40 per cent loss.
Some of the small glaciers have been receding much more rapidly. Some are only a kilometre or two in extent. They are literally in little heated bowls where the terrain around them, being much darker in colour, absorbs radiation. They are retreating very rapidly. There has been a detailed study done in Glacier National Park, just across the border in Montana. They predict that that area will be essentially glacier free by 2050. Probably many of the smaller glaciers will be in the same situation.
There are some predictions that the Bow Glacier and the Peyto Glacier, the two glaciers that feed the Bow River, are already over the hill. No matter how much it warms, they cannot keep pace or yield any more water.
I added data here for the Athabasca showing that the glacier is still responding with accelerated stream flows because of warming.
This is pretty indicative. We have done these sorts of calculations for all the major precipitation stations on the prairies. I show you a few here for Alberta. In Alberta, there seems to be a gradient from south to north. That continues into the territories, with Fort Smith having even more warming than Fort Chipewyan. I have deliberately chosen sites that do not have urban heat island effect, as some of our business reporters are fond of reporting. Anyone who has landed in Fort Chipewyan in the middle of summer knows there is not much or an urban heat island there. It is a small community and the airport is 10 kilometres away. In Edmonton and Calgary, the 1837 on records are for the sites of the international airports. Considerable warming has already happened since that mid-20th century period that is generally used as a baseline.
The next table is more complicated than I would like it to be. However, it varies somewhat depending on what model for evaporation we use. There are several well-known models. Some require more data than others. We cannot run all the models for all stations. In general, they indicate we have had a 10 to 12 or 13 per cent increase in evaporation already from that mid-20th century period, as the result of warming. These are for Edmonton and Fort McMurray, two sites of interest. In the case of Fort McMurray's it was a matter of rapid development around the oil sands.
This period indicates what will happen with another three degrees centigrade increase. From that mid-20th century baseline, if you add those together, we would have close to 25 per cent increase in evaporation. Through much of this area, precipitation is almost equal to evaporation now, with only a slight excess.
In terms of predicted temperatures and precipitation, temperatures are supposed to increase, but precipitation is not supposed to change much. In some cases, there is about 5 per cent increase predicted and people think that will be wonderful. What they forget is this huge effect of temperature and a longer ice-free season on evaporation. Even though it can rain a bit more, conditions can be dryer.
One more factor that we can already see is the effect on snow pack. This is based on some work done by scientists at the University of Lethbridge. The green line indicates the actual 1973 to 1974 snow pack. The black line indicates what they model would have happened to the snow pack with the climate warming expected by 2050. In general, less of the precipitation falls as snow and more as rain, something we can already see in the many of the southern river catchments. You can see those sharp declines. At several points where snow does fall, it is subjected to increasing periodic winter melts so that it seeps away during the winter. As a result, there is less available when we would like to be recharging our rivers in the spring. Their calculations indicate a decrease of about one third in river flows as the result of those warmer conditions, assuming the same snow pack. That is yet another factor that I am sure will be affecting prairie water supplies.
If any of you are interested, you can plug into this website and it will ask you for a year, latitude and a longitude. It will give you a choice of 20-20, 20-50 or 20-80. After you fill in those few blanks, it will run. These are all the IPCC models and their major scenarios, the scenarios being for different assumptions about CO2 output. It has precipitation on one axis and temperature on another axis. This example is for the oil sands area. While the models have different predictions, you will see clusters. This is for 20-20, with a predicted additional temperature increase of a degree and a half or so and a precipitation increase of about 5 per cent. I have drawn a line for the evaporation that has already increased from the mid-20th century. Evaporation by the middle of the century, if the models are correct, will be elevated. If you run these for all the major sites on the Prairies, you will find that, based on model predictions, there is no site where the predicted increases in precipitation can match the predicted increases in evaporation, when taken from these temperature increases and running them through any number of well-known evaporation models.
I was told that one of the interests of the committee is the oil sands. This next slide was compiled by me with several people from the University of Lethbridge. The blue lines indicate the actual licensed water. This was done by a number of my students in a graduate course. The yellow lines indicate the predicted water use in the oil sands. Senators, the name on this should be ``Alberta Energy and Utilities Board.'' For some reason my students confused this with ``Alberta Environment.'' The red lines on this same slide indicate water use for producing oil — six barrels of water per barrel of oil produced, which to date has been the average. The green lines indicate that the new companies, such as CNRL and Shell, can produce one barrel of oil using only three barrels of water. I hope that they are able to succeed with that usage but I have heard reports that they have had corrosion problems when trying to reuse the water that much. I am hopeful that they can overcome the problem.
My point in showing this is that this water use would be roughly half the winter flow of the Athabasca River, if our predictions about river flows and these projections of use by the oil sands come to pass. That amount should be of considerable concern.
Much of the oil sands are overlain by wetlands. With the last two projects, 56 per cent of the would-be-mined area was overlain by what my wife would call a ``wooded fen'' — a big, thick, peat blanket with some old spruce trees sticking out of it. There is no way to restore those wetlands afterward. The oil companies have had several meetings with international groups of scientists who simply shake their heads because it has taken thousands of years for those fens to develop and there is no way to restore them. Their best restorations look like pools you would find on a golf course. I do not think they will have the same function as this large, old wetland, which is akin to a huge sponge such that snow-melt in the spring and big rainstorms in the summers are absorbed. That water is then released slowly through low-flow periods in the winter and becomes the mainstay of river flow during periods when precipitation is frozen or non-existent during a drought. I suspect there will be some fairly major consequences for the oil sands area, the Athabasca River and its tributaries.
In another direction, this next slide depicts some of Dave Sauchyn's recent work. He has used the same two factors that I have been talking about — P stands for precipitation and PE stands for potential evaporation, if there were water there to evaporate.
The upper slide indicates that ratio as a standard measure of aridity for the base-line period, 1961 to 1990. The two lightest colours represent ``sub-humid'' and ``semi-arid'' as determined by a geographer. There are climates where agriculture is clearly limited by water. Running the same thing with a scenario for the middle of the coming century indicates a rough doubling of those areas. That is not good news for agriculture. Of course, about $2 billion has already been spent because of the puny droughts that we have seen in the late 1990s through 2002. It is likely that such a scenario will make life even more miserable for Prairie farmers than it is now, which is pretty hard to imagine.
We will go next to actual river flows. A number of studies have looked at total year river flows in the past. In general, the records are not very good, particularly in the early years of the 20th century. That is probably because roads were poor and people could not get to the sites to do the monitoring. For two reasons, Bill and I have chosen another time period — summer flow — which is May through August. We found that the record was pretty complete for that time, and it is also the period of high demand by both municipalities and agriculture.
This first one shows the duration of record that we have for the Athabasca River. I show it first because this is the only river coming from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains that does not have any dams or major withdrawals. Earlier I showed you the blue line on the previous graph that indicated actual licensed withdrawals. They are all quite small, at least below the oil sands area. Dams, of course, while they do not necessarily remove water, change the seasonality. Therefore, we decided to look at this critical summer period.
Looking at that in detail for several stations, the red stars going down the Athabasca River indicate where the gauging stations are to measure river flows. We looked at the high point on that first graph, 1970, and the current point. We are missing a couple of years and we have not had the opportunity to rerun this since gathering the initial data through 2003. Drawing a regression line through those and comparing the early part with the late part of that regression show us that flows are down in all stations except for Sunwapta. This station is right below the Athabasca Glacier. Almost all the water it receives is flow from that glacier. The excess melting of the glacier with about 2 degrees of climate warming currently at Lake Louise, has caused the flow from the glacier to increase by more than 20 per cent. Of course, it is a small area, so it cannot compensate for what is happening downstream. It is trying hard, but there are much bigger areas of the basin below it.
If you go through that and subtract the areas above and look at the yield per unit of the watersheds down below, you will see that the yields are way down for every site, except for Sunwapta. This provides senators with an impression of what will happen once that glacier is in such a recession that it cannot sustain those increases again. The system will become much drier.
Then we looked at most of the major rivers on the Prairies. I will just give you a few examples. This is the Peace River. We have calculated a regression line through those periods. The number indicates the difference between the percentage of an initial flow of 100 per cent and what happens further on.
The Peace River is down about 40 per cent already. The Oldman, which is heavily subscribed with lots of dams all over it and lots of big withdrawals for irrigation, much of which is not returned to the river, is down by almost 60 per cent. The worst river we came across was the South Saskatchewan. This is run using data through 2003. The South Saskatchewan is the total of three heavily subscribed rivers, the Oldman, the Bow and the Red Deer. The Red Deer has no glaciers in the catchment. I showed you the Bow Glacier, and it and the Peyto Glacier appear to already have receded so much that they cannot yield more water. With the Oldman, much of the water comes from just snow pack.
On all three of the rivers, there are major dams and agricultural withdrawals and cities like Calgary, of course, and other rapidly growing cities in southern Alberta. The flows out here are only about 16 per cent what they were a century ago. I know that many people around Saskatoon are quite concerned about that.
I do not have a graph of the North Saskatchewan River. We have not run it using the last two years of data yet, but the number would be about the same as the Peace. It is down about 40 per cent.
The Chairman: Are those actual figures?
Mr. Schindler: Those are actual river flows for that May through August period. That is important to remember. People often write to me saying that they have read the paper and that my numbers do not agree. I look back, and what other people have used are the total flows with the gaps, particularly early in the 20th century that I indicated.
That is pretty much what I have to say about water quantity. Most people have forgotten that, as the result of the work that we did on nutrients in the 1970s, the models all indicate that these water flows, especially when they get to lakes like Lake Winnipeg or many of the Alberta lakes, dilute the nutrients less, and they have as big an influence on the algal blooms of lakes, so-called eutrophication, as the nutrient inputs. Roughly, if you have the water flow through a lake, it is equivalent to doubling the amount of nutrient going in, in terms of what the lake can do.
Would you like me to stop there and interact? I could go on with some of actual nutrient examples.
The Chairman: Perhaps we should stop and have you help us digest what we have heard so far. It is easier for me, at least, to grasp the problems that have to do with the flow and availability of water rather than what is in it and what it does, which is, as you say, another question. We will have questions from members now, and if there is more time we can proceed with that later.
Senator Cochrane: I must congratulate you in advance for receiving the Order of Canada. That is wonderful. You deserve it.
Mr. Schindler: Thank you.
Senator Cochrane: I appreciate you spending time with us here today because the ecologists of Canada have done our country a great service. You deal with Alberta. Are other ecologists in other provinces doing work similar to yours?
Mr. Schindler: Much of the work that I showed was from scientists at the University of Regina. There seems to be pretty active work there. For example, the work of Dave Sauchyn on past climates using tree rings, and much of the diatom work that I referred to was done by Peter Leavitt in the biology department there who worked with me as a post-doctoral student.
There are also some very good groups in Manitoba. There, the focus tends to be on government groups, particularly the Freshwater Institute. There is also what used to be called the National Hydrology Institute. Now they have the same name as the eastern one, the Saskatoon National Water Research Institute. Both of those agencies have gone through bad financial times.
With respect to what I see happening on the Prairies, one thing that badly needs doing is resurrecting the research capability of those two organizations.
Senator Cochrane: How do we educate people about the problems that we will be encountering in the future? Last night I watched Peter Mansbridge on television talking about Calgary. The masses of people that are coming into Calgary is amazing, as is the construction that is going on there.
Mr. Schindler: The water part seems pretty easy. People are very interested in it. I give probably one talk a week, and lately I have had to get students and my wife and various other people to give some talks for me, so there is huge public interest. Organizations such as Ducks Unlimited are doing a really good job of spreading the word and undertaking some projects like wetland restoration. One thing that people do not realize is that the reason their well goes dry is that they have ploughed under all their wetlands or drained them. There is a huge disconnect in the way people treat the plumbing of their landscape and what they expect it to do for them.
It is coming. I am a little disappointed in the newspapers for not picking this up, although just earlier this week, the editor of The Edmonton Journal asked if I would write an article on this. Various other papers have picked up on items such as the glacial melt. My main concern is not that the word is not spreading, but that it is not spreading rapidly enough.
Some of the people most capable of spreading the word are in federal government organizations. There has been a tradition of not speaking out in those organizations. If I were a minister, on the annual evaluation of my people, I would have a box to tick on whether they had given some public talks or not. It is tragic that the experts in those organizations are not more involved in education. They may give you some nice pamphlets, but there is nothing like one-on-one contact with somebody who has done the work.
Senator Cochrane: In an article in AlbertaViews, you mentioned how we thoughtlessly use high quality water for irrigation, flushing toilets and extracting oil and gas. We have heard this from others. You said that it is not clear why we use a resource as scarce as prairie water for some of these practices. I would like to hear your thoughts on why we do that but, more importantly, I would like to know how you would go about changing this reality. Are there good models that exist that we may follow so that we use our highest quality water more efficiently?
Mr. Schindler: I could talk about this for about two hours, so I will hit a few of the high points.
One thing we could do is water recycling. Of the 250 litres to 300 litres per day that we treat to drinking water standards, the average person drinks maybe three to four. We use that same highly treated water for washing the car and flushing the toilet. At the very least, a lot of that water could be caught — shower water and sink water — and used for lawn watering, toilet flushing and so on. I see cities that do not even meter their water. Some have incentives to use more water, say, for industries, by offering a declining price as water use increases. I seldom see low-flow shower heads or low-flush toilets. All of those things would help.
As an example, Edmonton probably has the highest priced water in Canada. It is about the equivalent of an average European country and about four times as expensive as the Canadian average. As a result, Edmonton is one of the most water efficient cities in Canada. Something as simple as charging a little bit, something like a tenth of a cent per litre, which is not much, has the effect of making people watch what they use.
In terms of what we can do, my best example is my family. For 22 years, we lived in a part of southern Manitoba that had saline ground water, so we had to have water trucked into a cistern, as did many of our neighbours. Our standard water use for a family of four worked out to between 22 and 25 litres a day. That caused us no hardship. We did not wash the car or water the garden, but it looked after our needs otherwise just fine.
Senator Milne: Thank you, Dr. Schindler, this is fascinating.
From what we have seen and heard this morning, it would seem that, basically, it is too late for agriculture in the Prairie provinces and that we should be advising farmers to sell up and get out while they still can do that.
Mr. Schindler: Being from a farm family, I am not willing to go that far.
Senator Milne: That is the problem. My background is also farming.
Mr. Schindler: I would be telling farmers to not waste the water irrigating crops for livestock feed. That is an expensive use of water. It is my view that most livestock ought to be reared in areas that have plentiful water. That being said, I looked at the water use for these operations in Alberta and the best ones use 20 per cent of the water that the average farmer uses. If we were to push the standard a bit and demand that the practices of the average be equivalent to the practices of the best, we could save agriculture for a while.
Senator Milne: Would that save us for a while?
Mr. Schindler: Yes. As well, we could grow many crops that require less water. Canola requires much less water than alfalfa or sugar beets. It would certainly help to direct farmers in that way. Of course, for other reasons, we should encourage farmers to engage in low-till agriculture methods.
In terms of water protection, if we could leave stream bank riparian areas and wetlands in place, we would benefit because part of the problem we see with the river flows relates to the destruction of those areas.
Senator Milne: Each time you fly over any part of the Western provinces, you see fewer and fewer little slews because people are draining and ploughing over them.
Mr. Schindler: That is right. I actually saw the wetland vegetation — peat — being bailed two years ago in Saskatchewan. Ducks Unlimited's figures indicate that about 70 per cent of those wetlands have disappeared since we started farming on the Prairies.
If we could educate people, those wetlands could be restored. At the very least, we ought to protect the wetlands in new farm land. One thing we have to do is to turn around the push for more and more agriculture, although I do not know if I would call for a lot less agriculture. The Alberta government's position of doubling agriculture in 10 years is a bad position when there is no more farm land in the white zone of the Prairies and it is coming right out of the southern edge of the boreal region
Senator Milne: In reference to urban areas, you talked about our not using high-quality treated drinking water to flush our toilets. In fact, you are talking about a separate water delivery system and doubling the catchment system. If you want to save the grey water and reuse it, then you would require two systems. I doubt very much if we could ever persuade any city to do that.
Mr. Schindler: There are a number of ways to do it and some are being used in the southwestern U.S. and in Israel. One is the equivalent of the old cistern system that would catch gray water as we run it through our showers. That is then piped back to the toilets and so forth. The other system involves catching roof water and piping it in. The final stage is to have two streams of water treatment such that only drinking water is highly treated and the other would be treated to a lesser degree. That would probably be quite expensive, especially to set up in previously developed areas. We could accomplish a lot if we were to recycle within individual dwellings. As well, it would help if people were to end their fascination with Kentucky bluegrass and grow something indigenous to their areas.
Senator Milne: We should return to native vegetation on our front lawns. Some people are doing that now in downtown Toronto.
Mr. Schindler: My wife hates mowing the lawn and she actually encourages the grass to die and she would never consider watering the lawn.
Senator Milne: It is easy to kill the lawn when you live in Alberta. One of my particular interests is with the International Joint Commission of Canada and the United States. Your field of expertise is the activity in the drylands of the west. I understand that the IJC, which I thought dealt with only the Great Lakes, deals with all international boundaries. The Red River flows across the north-south border and the Columbia crosses between Yukon and Alaska. The IJC also deals with some waterways; and it is now under such political pressure.
Mr. Schindler: I have just written a paper on that, which I could give to you. It is posted on the website of the University of Victoria.
Senator Milne: I would like that very much because the issue is of particular concern to me. Mr. Chair, given the nature of our study, perhaps the more immediate problem might be the IJC because it presents a political issue over which we might have some influence. I would very much appreciate whatever information you can provide to the committee.
Mr. Schindler: There are some truly troubling spots in the west. For example, the Columbia River is up for renegotiation. The first negotiations resulted in a bad deal for Canada with a lump sum payment that did not equate to the amount we paid to build dams to generate American hydro power. We also lost all our salmon. We need to renegotiate with more strength.
Moving east, there is a big altercation shaping up over the St. Mary and Milk rivers in southern Alberta. There was a written agreement in 1921, I believe, after an IJC decision. Now, the Montana farmers want more of the water. They have unbelievable irrigation practices. They simply flood the land. You do not see that these days outside of Third World countries.
Senator Milne: They do that in Australia.
Mr. Schindler: Moving further east, the decision has been made to drain the saline Devil's Lake into the Red River. That is currently under construction and that water will begin to flow by the middle of next summer. They have another plan to connect the Missouri system to Devil's Lake. If all of that were done, potentially, we could have some huge alien species problems because of the introduction of southern species, including some from Eurasia, into the Red River and Lake Winnipeg. As well, we have the annex 2001 problem in the Great Lakes.
Actually, I skipped one spot. There is an alien species problem in the Rainy River with the introduction of rainbow smelt, which will eventually invade the whole system, including Lake Winnipeg and the Nelson River. It is now in Hudson's Bay and I am told that it is moving into streams north of there. Two or three other species, mostly small crustaceans, have caused problems. The bythotrephes, a spiny crustacean that has caused many problems in the Great Lakes, has apparently just invaded the Rainy River system. Zebra muscles, which are another potential problem, are one drainage pipe away.
Senator Milne: It takes only one person pulling a boat out of one water system and putting it in another water system to introduce an alien species.
Mr. Schindler: That is right. Bythotrephes even stick to fishing lines. You cannot use the same fishing rod in two basins when one of them is infected.
In respect of the Great Lakes, annex 2001 is a real problem. Even some of the environmental groups were fooled by some of the nice language in the draft annex, such as ``a resource improvement.'' In fact, if you look at the language as the draft is written, there is no protection for water on the Canadian side. Water can be withdrawn from the basin up to a certain amount. There is a restriction on the size of the withdrawals but not on the number. There are dozens of cities in Ohio and Wisconsin, in particular, that would love to ship that water 10 miles. It is not even clear where that basin begins and ends with respect to groundwater. We need some improved science there. If we are going to ship water over the divide, into adjacent parts of Ohio, for the Great Lakes, it is the same as shipping it to Arizona. The water is out of the basin.
I do not think people realize how precarious the water balance of the Great Lakes is. Only 1 per cent of the water is renewed per year on average. It will be less as the climate warms because evaporation will increase. Even fiddling around with 10 per cent of that 1 per cent is something. We have already had some periods when lake levels have been down. In shipping costs, if you do not care about anything else, it is billions of dollars. Dredging, if we do it, would increase that cost.
Senator Spivak: Mr. Schindler, congratulations. You are a limnologist, not an ecologist. What is that?
Mr. Schindler: It is the freshwater equivalent of an oceanographer.
Senator Spivak: Is it absolutely established that there will be a doubling of CO2? Is that no longer in question?
Mr. Schindler: That is no longer in question. We are so locked in now that the best scenarios would be slightly less than that, but the worst ones would be slightly more. Of course, there seems to be very little indication that we are going to take anything like a conservation path. The best estimates are that we will see a doubling somewhere between 2040 and 2060.
Senator Spivak: Our committee heard from representatives of the Department of Natural Resources who told us about groundwater. You made little mention of groundwater. They told us that, so far, it looks like we are all right in that we do not have any aquifers that are not capable of being naturally replenished here.
The scenario is that, 10 years out, horrible things will perhaps be on the minds of even the oil sands people. The Alberta government is apparently looking at some sort of water policy; but who knows what that is. If they run out of river and flow water will they be attacking the groundwater? What do you see as the future for the oil sands. What is more rational?
Mr. Schindler: That is a lot of questions.
Senator Spivak: Just before you answer, I would just add that the technology is in place for irrigation. Israel has converted the desert into arable land through with tiny spots of irrigation. Why are we so stupid here that we do not adopt those methods before the apocalypse? I do not get it.
Mr. Schindler: To start with groundwater, I must get two calls a week from people in Alberta whose wells have gone dry. I would dispute that those aquifers are being recharged at least in that part of the world.
Some of the water in the West that is being used is several hundred years old. The recharge times are very long. I also know that the aquifers are not well known. Some of the ground water records were monitored up until 1993, and they have not been monitored since because of government cutbacks. Going into one of these altercations as a scientist is useless. They expect you to be a magic fairy and bring your own data. Without a database, scientists are no better than anyone else in guessing what would happen.
The same thing has happened both at federal and provincial levels. There has been so much cutting back that instead of the threatened duplication of minding the water store, we have no one minding it. Somebody has to step in and take responsibility for getting the databases we need to make some of these predictions.
I do not think the oil sands will ever be a big groundwater user. Their main water has been coming directly from the Athabasca River. The big danger to groundwater there would be that this big mossy map that I indicated that covers much of that basin will be stripped away. It cannot be put back. The return flow — that is for all practical purposes groundwater — system acts like a capacitor in an electrical system, evening out all the pulses and keeping a nice uniform annual flow. Potentially, that is a real problem. I would like to see those companies pushed a little bit harder to water conservation measures.
I have been involved in two recent oil sands hearings, making the case for water. In both, the energy and utilities board ignored us. However, in both cases the companies said that they believed us. They did not stop their projects but they swore that they would go to 3 to 1 ratios of water to oil instead of 6 to 1. Both put in some off-stream storage in that they can pump water out of the river when there is a high flow condition and not have to rely on the river in low mid-winter flows.
Senator Spivak: Is the land mass of the oil sands such that they would destroy the entire landscape? What about the fact that they will bring natural gas down? Do you always have to have steam to get that oil out of the by bitumen, or can you use something else?
Mr. Schindler: I am probably the wrong person to ask about the technology, but I do know a little bit about it. Until about five years ago I worked with some of the oil sands companies and became rather frustrated as how fast they were willing to move. Some of the newer plants use water to carry the slurry. Instead of heating it to high temperatures, it is essentially warm water that pumps along this bitumen for long distances. It is an improvement in energy over what they once did. They use twice the energy per barrel of oil of conventional extraction methods. The figure I have heard, and I really would not have you believe, is the equivalent of one barrel of oil and energy for three barrels extracted, whereas conventional oil is six or more.
It is not an efficient process. I think, again, efficiency needs to be pushed. I hate to see natural gas used for just that extraction. I am really afraid that between the rush to get that to the U.S. and the need for energy in the tar sands, there will not be much natural gas left for other things, and of course it is a valuable commodity for plastics, conventional heating and all sorts of things.
Senator Spivak: Where do you think we could have the most leverage? This is what we are looking at. We are looking at how to go about this. Do you think we should look at all of the matters that pertain to the Prairies? Where do you think we could have the most leverage at the federal level, in what areas of the country, or what aspect of a particular problem?
Mr. Schindler: I would say that you could look to two areas. One would be the Western Prairies, because the realization that there are water problems is there. Alberta has this new Water for Life program, but the minister who started it has decided not to run again. Reading between the lines, I think he may be a little frustrated in how slow it has been to get moving. Many of his colleagues are not as far-seeing as he is.
That being said, the new Minister of Environment, Guy Boutilier, just had his aide phone me to see if we could get together so that I could give him some advice. At least there is some realization that something needs to be done.
If you can arrange to support and enhance some of the things that the more progressive of provincial politicians see as necessary, that would be a positive step.
There is now widespread realization in the Prairie scientific communities that all we would need is one of these prolonged droughts of the past and we would be in for a real problem right now. However, it is impossible is to predict is when that might happen, except that in most past centuries we have had three or four of them. It is probably not over a decade or two off, on average.
Senator Angus: Mr. Schindler let me begin by saying how privileged we are that someone of your stature and eminence would come here this morning to be with us. I only wish the benches were full of media. What you are saying should be, literally, screamed from the rooftops. One of the biggest questions we have is what to do about it. How can we do something? I am a new member of this committee. They are already calling me a ``born again environmentalist'' and ``a green senator.'' I am really keen. This is a fascinating paper about your good self: the ``Indiana Jones of ecology.'' I mean it when I say you are ``the man.'' You are here and we have to find a way to take advantage of that.
One paragraph on water caught my eye. It states ``I don't think there is a scientist in freshwater ecology that has had a bigger influence or is more highly regarded in the world than Schindler.''... ``He's always on the cutting edge.'' It also goes on to say that you are not a pessimist, but that you are an optimist and you call it the way it is. You say it the way it is but you do not despair.
This committee's mandate is to prepare a report. I noted that you said some nice things about this committee's report on the Boreal Forest in 1999. Was it not this committee?
Senator Spivak: I believe it was the Agriculture Committee.
Senator Angus: It was an excellent Senate committee report, which as far as I can see, in my new capacity as a born- again environmentalist, has fallen more or less into a black hole.
Yesterday, in another committee, we had representatives of Ducks Unlimited, to whom you referred. One of their senior officers, Mr. Turner, has been sitting back here this morning Perhaps Ducks Unlimited should make representations at our committee since they have an interest in water and the wetlands.
Yesterday, the Ducks Unlimited people were talking about what the government could do as an incentive for the owners of many of these wetlands who, it appears, have no other use for that land other than to destroy it. The suggestion was to give them a proper tax break.
We hear that there is tremendous resistance in the Department of Finance to do anything that would advance the causes you talked about. I will be arguing in this committee that we have to make a big noise. As I said, it would be good if the media were here to report our meeting.
You wrote a wonderful article in one of our national newspapers two Saturdays ago. On the wetlands, what would you recommend? You are solution-oriented. You are an optimist. I look at the photographs of those glaciers and I see what can happen in 100 years. I am reminded of the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words. Are you telling us there is nothing we can do to reverse this situation?
Mr. Schindler: I do not think those glaciers will be back until we have another ice age. That might happen, but I also think that we will postpone another ice age for a while at the rate we are going.
One solution might be to try to couple the money that we hand out to farmers for compensation and, instead, put that money up front into things like wetland protection and riparian protection. When we do hand out money, we hand out big sums of money with no strings attached.
Given the warming climate and the high population pressure in Alberta and the disappearance of the glaciers, we really need to start drought proofing the landscape. The last thing we need is to have the wetlands disappear, the rivers channelled and the riparian areas gone. I think that protection is a good part of drought proofing. There are also the conservation measures that we were talking about earlier.
Perhaps something could be done to couple the money that is already being given to farmers as incentives to protect water courses. However, I think it is unrealistic to expect farmers to pay out more money right now. They will walk away. Maybe eventually that is what it will come to.
I see big consortiums taking over farms. There is less care about the wetlands and the riparian areas. The equipment gets bigger, so those little pot holes increasingly get in the way if you try to drag a hundred foot harrow between two that are only 50 feet apart. It does not take rocket science to see what will happen. The people who own them are not resident on the landscape.
I saw equivalent programs for other reasons — over production — when I was a teenager in the northern U.S. It had a marvellous influence on wildlife and water courses. Farmers were paid to keep land out of production. If they were paid to protect the riparian strips in the wetlands, instead of giving them a lump sum once they are in trouble, that coupling might work.
Senator Angus: Another consideration is the awareness factor. There seems to be no doubt that, today, our youngest generation, above the age of reason, seems much more sensitized to climate change than we were when we were kids in high school. Would I be right in saying that one of the best things we can do is to raise the level of awareness of the gravity of the problem, or do you think there is sufficient awareness?
Mr. Schindler: I think raising the awareness is important. Frankly, I can already see movement in Alberta. In 1998, there was a report in Alberta showing the bad state of water quality in agricultural areas. Since then, many farming groups have pulled up their socks. There are programs to fence cattle away from stream banks. Water is pumped to them rather than having them fouling the streams and lakes. What has happened at the Oldman is almost a miracle, in that the people doing that have found that their cattle gain weight faster. Now there is more interest in that than there was originally. Some grassroots groups like Cows and Fish will go around and help farmers to make these things happen.
There are groups of big ranches in Southern Alberta, most notably the Pekisko group that held the protest here in Ottawa several years ago, that have decided that they are going to take matters into their own hands, and they will protect their own landscape. They are not many in number, perhaps 100 ranchers, but some of those ranches are 10 townships or more in area. It is a tremendous amount of land and much of it on the eastern slopes. They are influential people, so when they start moving on water conservation, many others will move.
The same landscape is threatened by urbanization. Calgary is growing almost twice as fast in area as it is in population. Projections indicate that by 2050, if Calgary continues to grow, it will reach literally from Canmore to Bassano, east to west. There will be a tremendous area under pavement with no infiltration to speak of, a lot of destroyed wetlands and river courses, and a tremendous demand for water. That conflict with population is going to be an important one.
In the Red Deer area, the realization is even more acute. This past summer, I appeared in an altercation between nine municipalities and an oil company that wanted to pump river water from the Red Deer River down an oil well. Nine municipalities were represented by their mayors in opposing it. They still lost, although the government cut down the amount the company could use, but that sort of action would have been unheard even five years ago.
Senator Angus: Nothing raises public awareness in a greater or more powerful way than the personal experience of droughts of these ranchers or of Walkerton. I am not a great believer in government getting into more things, but this seems to be an area in which government has a responsibility to bring the problems to the public awareness, especially those people who otherwise are not being daily touched by it. It is key.
If there were one thing you would like to see in our report, what would it be?
Senator Milne: Mr. Chair, perhaps Senator Angus does not realize Mr. Schindler is only halfway through his presentation. We want to see the rest of it.
The Chairman: That is an important question — ``If there were one thing...'' Let's be sure Mr. Schindler answers that question.
Senator Chaput has a question.
Senator Chaput: Mr. Schindler has just answered part of the question I had, so I would rather see the presentation.
The Chairman: Mr. Schindler, Senator Angus has asked an important question. Would you prefer to finish or get further into your presentation before you answer that question? The question is: What is the one thing, if all else failed, that you think we could include in our first report or be the subject of our first report, which would have the greatest effect?
Mr. Schindler: That is a tough one.
The Chairman: I am asking you, if you can, to put a specific point on it.
Mr. Schindler: I think the most important thing now — and I will qualify this by saying that I think many organizations are spreading the word — is the database behind what we have to spread. It is most important to resurrect the science programs that were lost in the 1990s. When I talk to people about problems in their areas, the scarcity of data is limiting. The government programs, both federally and provincially, that were lost in the 1990s need to be resurrected.
People are interested in this argument. They actively seek advice on it. Normally I would say that communication would be number one, but I think that communication is happening. Again, Cows and Fish, Ducks Unlimited and groups like that are helping to spread the message. It is being spread pretty effectively.
However, the scientific database on which we base our predictions are becoming poorer.
The Chairman: Would you take us into the next step of your presentation? You were discussing substances going into the water.
Mr. Schindler: I will take up on the point I made that decreased water flows will affect water quality.
This is an equation that I came up with in the 1970s for predicting the amount of eutrophication, the amount of algae, that a lake would support. This dealt with the input of phosphorous, which was the focus then, mostly from detergents in municipalities versus the volume of outflow from a lake. That is a measure of how fast the lake will turn over. There are a half dozen published versions of this with slight variations. However, this is a database of mine based on Canadian and Swedish lakes. You can see it is not a bad predictor of the amount of algae as measured by the chlorophyll content. As I mentioned, the amount of water flowing through a lake is roughly equivalent to doubling the amount of nutrient, and, in fact, both are happening because those same areas that I have been talking about with water scarcity are having huge land use changes, namely, agricultural, urban development and so forth.
This is a set of data from the Experimental Lakes Area because it is one I have at hand. During the period from 1970 to 1990, the mean annual temperature there warmed by 1.7 degrees. This is the amount of time it took for the water in a lake to be renewed. It roughly quadruples during that warming period for a lake, that uppermost line being a lake that turned over every five years, to taking 20 years to getting the same water renewal by 1990. That is the sort of thing I expect warming will do.
On top of that, our land use has changed. We no longer have people farming with little Fords and tractors or teams of horses. We have huge machines that are chewing up the landscape. This is what it looks like in Alberta. This is near LaCrete, which is halfway between Grand Prairie and the Northwest Territories border. You can see the areas that have been cleared of forest. This has already been planted, and the wetlands and ponds are being drained to turn that entirely into farmland.
People do not realize that simply clearing the land — in this example, it was turning a forest into pasture, and this is not even much of the forest; these were tiny pastures and forests — doubles the nutrient output from that land, which then flows into receiving water.
Clearing of the land is not all that happens. We have these huge livestock operations now, which are causing tremendous amounts of manure to be applied to the landscape. On the national map you can see that Alberta seems to be the manure capital of Canada.
Mr. Schindler: When I worked on eutrophication in the 1970s, if I had drawn a pie diagram, it would have been 50 per cent municipal and industrial. We eliminated phosphate detergents and put phosphorous removal on all the major sewage treatment plants, particularly in the East.
We have allowed this explosion in fertilizer use and manure production to take over to the point where this recent Environment Canada study shows that we have an overwhelming problem. This is a tougher problem to treat than eliminating phosphate detergents or treating point source effluents because it is diffused through whole watersheds.
Another thing that people do not realize is that, if you look at the half dozen organisms that cause most of the gastrointestinal disease, we share those with cattle and hogs. Having manure just spread indiscriminately on the landscape, particularly after we have removed the wetlands and riparian zone, so that if we get a big rainfall event it can go right into the water courses, is not a very smart thing to do.
I did this calculation for Alberta. There are too many columns here for a quick presentation, so perhaps we could just look at phosphorous, the nutrient that causes most of the eutrophication problems. There are 3 million people in Alberta. If you look at the equivalent, a beef cow produces 11 times as much phosphorous per capita as a human being and a hog 10 times as much. When I multiply those numbers through, we have the equivalent of 87 million people producing manure in Alberta. We treat the 3 million very precisely, but the other 84 is simply spread on the land. It is probably no surprise that, as a result, when this study was done in the 1990s, most of the waters were out of compliance in agricultural areas with drinking water guidelines for fecal coliforms.
The compliance is equally bad for nutrients. This spring, I went to a meeting in the Oldman Basin where some of the farmers had taken this seriously and taken some measures to protect riparian zones and keep cattle out of them. The water quality was improving significantly. Alternatively, I saw other areas where cattle were fenced away from streams, but about midsummer, during those periods of drought, the farmers could not resist. The areas above the streams were picked clean, and they had run the cattle in right along the stream at the worst possible time of year. Enforcement was very poor. Enforcement is on a complaint basis, and if you are in a rural area and everybody is doing the same thing, nobody will complain. There are what appear to be some fairly tough guidelines, but they are not well enforced.
The good news, though, is that we know how to protect our watersheds. It is not the unknown problem it was 30 or 40 years ago. We know enough to leave the wetlands and that low tillage helps in riparian zones, and that we ought to strategically place big livestock facilities. However, most of that knowledge is sitting on university bookshelves, so we still tend to do it the old way. Decisions are made by municipal boards or, now in Alberta, provincial boards, but they do not seem to be doing much better. Part of the name of the game is to apply what we already know to these situations and, as I mentioned earlier, to improve the data base that we have to work with so that we know how fast these things are happening.
Turning now to lakes, this is Lake Wabamun, probably the most impacted lake in Canada. This lake has four big power plants, and 65 per cent of the mercury released from smoke stacks in Alberta comes out of those four stacks. This lake is right on the Yellowhead between Edmonton and Jasper. The water level is way down. This lake has not flowed over its outflow since 1992. It has been increasing in salinity as a result. It is over-fished. Eighty per cent of every year's fish stock is caught and removed, and the fish do not reproduce until they are seven or eight years old. Only one in 100,000 fish that makes it to reproductive age.
The Chairman: Is that a pier in this photograph?
Mr. Schindler: Yes. There is not enough dock space.
This is an aerial photo of the lake. The purple is the big coal pits to feed the big coal-fired power plants. Otherwise, this lake is typical of a central Alberta lake. The whole watershed has been turned over to agriculture, first stripping away the vegetation and the wetlands, and then fertilized, or cows are pastured on it or whatever. There are also golf courses and a cottage community around the lake. It is sort of a microcosm of all of the normal activities.
The next slide shows another lake, one that my group has been studying in some detail for the past two years. This is Lac La Biche, which would be a huge lake by most standards, being 230 square kilometres. Lac La Biche is one of the oldest communities in Alberta, and they have been very concerned by their decline in water quality. With the cutbacks to Alberta Environment, they have been almost totally unsuccessful at getting any thorough studies of the lake done. That has not been the case with Wabamun. There are a number of very astute environmental groups headed by lawyers on Lake Wabamun, and they get action from the province. They have a very good 20-year data base. Lac La Biche has almost nothing. They contacted our group three years ago, and we found almost no data.
There are a number of features here that I think are typical. The green and the red areas are forested, the green being predominantly conifer and the red being predominantly aspen. The white area is agricultural. Most people think that is a forested basin. They do not realize how much of it has been cleared.
There is a community of 3,500 that drains its sewage into the lake. Originally, it went in directly, and when they realized that that was not so good, they drained it back into Field Lake, thinking that Field Lake flowed to the Churchill system, but it does not. They made a mistake, and it flows to Lac La Biche. They probably get a little bit of removal, but the sewage goes right back into the lake.
The black outlines are areas where we have been studying the nutrient runoff from areas with different land uses. Because we had no data, when we went in to study lake sediments, we took core samples of lake mud and dated them using various radioactive dating methods and came up with a chronography. You can see how phosphorous has increased over time. This is in sediments.
Senator Milne: What is TP flux?
Mr. Schindler: That is total phosphorous, and flux is the amount deposited per year.
We can also do elbow pigments in those same sediments. Using proxy methods to reconstruct the past, we can see that in three of the four types of blue greens algae pigments, blue greens being the forms that form surface blooms and cause taste, odour and toxin problems, there are indications of big increases over time.
Another example is Lake Winnipeg. This has been in the papers quite a bit in the last two years. The lake suddenly started producing huge blooms of blue-green algae that last for two or three months. A couple of things are happening there. One is the big nutrient input. The Red River runs into fertile farmland in North Dakota and Minnesota. Fargo, Morehead and Winnipeg, as well as a number of other centres, all drain their sewage into the Red. There have been large livestock developments in the Red and the Assinaboine, one of its main tributaries. The nutrient inputs have been increasing.
I showed you the data for the South Saskatchewan at Saskatoon. By the time it joins the North Saskatchewan and reaches Lake Winnipeg, it is only flowing at about 20 per cent of the rate that it was a century ago. Again, both sides of this equation that I showed you are moving in the wrong direction.
This is a huge basin. The yellow table compares it to Lake Erie. It is almost the same size, but the watershed is more than 10 times larger, extending all the way to the Rockies.
This next slide shows what the nutrients and the algae in the lake have done. It is this thin green line. I and a couple of my colleagues studied the lake in 1969. Then there was nothing done until the 1990s, and it initially looked as though not much had changed in the lake. Then with all of these changes in water flow and nutrients, you can see the lake exploded with algal blooms during the 1990s. You could plot this on a map of models. This is one that we produced in the 1970s. This shows Lake Erie at its worst when the press declared that Lake Erie as dying. You can see that Lake Winnipeg is right up there. This shows different parts of the lakes in different years. If I were to put Lac La Biche on there, it would be at highest point on the graph.
The nutrient sources are different from when we had eutrophication problems in the east. There are diffuse sources. It is in a very dry area that also has a water flow problem.
I put all of this together and summarize it in this cartoon. This is a cartoon of a natural lake with a natural flowthrough, a good vegetated basin, and a healthy fish population.
The other matter I have not touch on very much is the fact that we have hammered the fish populations in these lakes. People fish for predators, pike, lake trout, walleye and others. Once those are depleted, small minnows and other so-called zooplanktivorous fish that feed on crustaceans go wild, and they have in Lac La Biche, for example. They graze down the big crustaceans that live on algae. When they are depleted, the algae explode.
In addition to these changes in nutrient sources and flows that I have been talking about, we have depleted the capacity of the lakes internally to deal with nutrient loading and keep them in a low algal phase.
This has been documented in so many places in North America and Europe that it is known as a trophic cascade in the scientific literature. If you eliminate the predators, you flip the system from a low algae phase with the same nutrient inputs to a high algae phase.
This is what we do to our lakes with climate warming, overfishing and industrial development. We remove the fish habitat. We fish out the predatory fish. These smaller fish that feed on crustaceans explode, the crustaceans decrease. The algae are already producing more because of these increased nutrient inputs and lower flowthroughs, but because there is less grazing power by these crustaceans it enhances the overall effect.
Senator Chaput: I am quite impressed by your presentation, Dr. Schindler, and I thank you for it.
I am looking for solutions. You did give a few solutions just before the second part of your presentation. What can be done in regards to our powerful neighbour, the United States? Air and water cannot be stopped at the border. What kind of actions could Canada take in regards to what is happening there?
Mr. Schindler: The main thing that we should do is make sure that we properly use the treaties that we have in place. The Boundary Waters Treaty and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement are strong pieces of international legislation. I do not view this as something like the new Iraqi war — this time over water and Canada instead of Iraq. We have strong rules and we should treat it like going down to play hockey with the U.S. Nobody ever says the U.S. is so big and powerful that we cannot beat them at hockey. We have a good set of rules in place. If we do not let them fleece us into changing the rules, as it appears could happen with Annex 2001, we should be able to negotiate on an equal footing.
We must also be careful to ensure that we do not set some precedent for commodification of water where they can demand the water under international trade agreements. I see a few troubling signs that are open to legal interpretation right now. We must be vigilant about this.
To back this up, we need a strong federal water policy. This seemed to be developing in the 1980s and the legislation was, in fact, tabled, but it died with the 1987 election and it was never resurrected. Since then, we have even lost the arm of the government that was supposed to implement that. The Inland Waters Directorate was lost during the budget cutting exercises of the 1990s and never reinstituted..
We had a lot of good things going. Peter Pearce chaired the 1980s water inquiry, and, as a result, water was subsumed by sustainable development, and that drove a lot of what happened in subsequent years. Of course, all of us have seen sustainable development interpreted more closely as ``sustain the economy'' than ``sustain the ecology''. Water is the cutting edge of what is happening to our ecosystems.
The Chairman: Have you heard anything substantive about the Alberta government's move to the commodification of water? An MLA by the name of Abbott talked about that a couple of weeks ago.
Mr. Schindler: I have not heard from the provincial government. Alberta would be a very silly place to do it because we have such a huge stretch of dry land. If you look at the length of Alberta being greater than Oregon plus California, the only river big enough to be worth tapping is the Peace River, and it is in far northern Alberta. As I mentioned, it is already suffering from low flow. I could have talked about the effects on the Peace/Athabasca/Delta, which are also pretty dire. There will not be a move simply for economic reasons.
A few years ago there was a move by the Alberta government to put a dam on the South Saskatchewan River right at the border, the Meridian Dam. They promoted it actively until the benefit-to-cost ratio came in at .3. That was for one simple dam. If you consider the number of dams and diversions necessary to flow the Peace River to southern Alberta, the benefit-to-cost ratio would be miniscule, so I do not think that will happen.
More troubling are some recent moves to sell sewage water from Edmonton, of all places, to industrial plants in Fort Saskatchewan. Some lawyers are worried because that water obtained for free would be sold for profit and that would set a precedent for commodification. Situations such as that need to be clarified before they are allowed to proceed. It is an example of something that is so small that its significance in the larger picture has slipped under the radar of even provincial agencies.
The Chairman: Would you comment briefly on the naysayers in three respects. First, it seems to me that when people of substance talk about these things, they are dismissed by other people who oppose them by saying that they are just a bunch of eggheads. We have to get past that difficulty if we are to educate. Second, there are arguments that these happenings are simply part of the natural cycle. Alberta, for example, used to be a subtropical jungle and sea. These things happen and we do not have anything to do with either making them happen or stopping them from happening. Third, if the projections made on the best data to date are projected forward, they never work out as predicted because things change. We face those naysayers who sometimes have cogent arguments. Could you comment on those briefly?
Mr. Schindler: I do agree with some of what the naysayers have to say. We did have some natural warming in the mid-Holocene and again in the Mediaeval warm periods. If you look at the data, you will find a 50-year or a 100-year warming in one era and another occurring 50 to 100 years later on another continent. When the data are connected, they do not convince me that there was a global increase in temperature of the extent that we see now. Even if there were such an increase, I would say, so what? People in those days either died quietly or they packed up and moved on. We did not have such a pampered, highly industrialized society so dependent on water being immediately at our doorstep.
What makes the argument for me on the projections is that these forcings of greenhouse gases can be measured. Given that we have one planet, we cannot do a controlled experiment. This is our only planet and, if we screw up, we are in dire straits.
My advice would be to go with what the majority, over 99 per cent, of scientists say. They could be wrong; they were wrong about Galileo. If you consider all of the cases throughout history, the number of times that has happened is pretty few. At worst, we would do things to protect the landscape and the water, which we ought to be doing in any event.
The Chairman: The precautionary principle might apply.
Mr. Schindler: That is right.
Senator Cochrane: Dr. Schindler, you constantly talk about the lack of data. We have many government departments that would be involved in this kind of water issue. Do you think that they have data that has not been publicized, or do you think the data was never collected? What departments should the committee zero in on in its study?
Mr. Schindler: There has been a huge change in the past 30 years. In the 1970s, we had the best federal government programs and in some provinces we had strong programs, probably most notably in Ontario. Alberta was not bad; British Columbia was not bad; but at both the provincial and federal levels, they have suffered from budget cuts and increasing bureaucracy.
The cuts were not made to the layers of bureaucracy but to working scientists and technicians. Currently, I have colleagues in federal departments who have lower budgets for their research than my graduate students. Some of these scientists are world experts in their areas of pollutants and water. In some circles it is expected that universities will pick up those scientists. Few scientists at the universities can go into the field during winter because they are teaching professors and the students are in class. The long-term data sets done with state-of-the-art methods were always the forte of federal departments and of some provincial organizations. That is not happening now. Whether you are with a university or with a government, scientists suffer from the lack of those programs.
Senator Milne: I want to make a suggestion following up on what Senator Angus said. This meeting would have been the ideal one to televise. We should have television coverage of the witnesses who appear before the committee. I regret that we did not do that, because everyone should have the advantage of this information. Thank you.
The Chairman: We have been urging that this be taken care of. The impediments to it are not reasonable arguments, but we have had no success as yet.
Senator Spivak: When I was chair of this committee it was routinely televised.
The Chairman: That was before the current session of Parliament.
Senator Angus: Dr. Schindler, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. This committee is committed to making a difference, and we appreciate your expert guidance in this effort.
The Chairman: Dr. Schindler, no doubt we will have a long list of unanswered questions that we did not think of today. I hope that you will permit us, occasionally, to ask those questions. We would be grateful if you could appear before us again.
Mr. Schindler: Certainly, that is possible.
The committee adjourned.