ENVI Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 3rd SESSION

Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Monday, April 19, 2004

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1535

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills (Red Deer, CPC))

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer (Executive Director, Policy Research Initiative, Privy Council Office)

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1540

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. David Runnalls (President, International Institute for Sustainable Development)

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1545

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1550

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1555

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. Charles Hubbard (Miramichi, Lib.)

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

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1600

Mr. Charles Hubbard

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Charles Hubbard

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Charles Hubbard

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1605

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.)

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1610

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

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1615

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

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1620

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

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1625

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. David Runnalls

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1630

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Dr. Ian Campbell (Senior Project Director, Sustainable Development, Policy Research Initiative, Privy Council Office)

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Dr. Ian Campbell

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

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1635

Mr. David Runnalls

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. David Runnalls

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Dr. Ian Campbell

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

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1640

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

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1645

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Paul Szabo

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1650

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. David Runnalls

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

Mr. David Runnalls

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills)

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development

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NUMBER 011

l

3rd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Monday, April 19, 2004

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

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[English]

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills (Red Deer, CPC)): I call the meeting to order.

    I would like to welcome our guests. I know they have a presentation. They are going to talk to us about sustainable development.

    I would ask you to proceed. Our meeting may be shorter than normal, but I'm sure we'll give you our attention.

[Translation]

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer (Executive Director, Policy Research Initiative, Privy Council Office): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[English]

I'll be very brief.

[Translation]

    First of all, we would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about the report, “Advancing Sustainable Development in Canada”. This report was produced jointly by the Policy Research Initiative and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. This is also a good opportunity for us to inform you about the work of the Policy Research Initiative in the area of sustainable development.

    I'm joined today by Ian Campbell, Senior Project Manager for the Sustainable Development Project at the PRI, and David Runnals, President of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

[English]

    Before we engage in discussions on the content of the report, I would like to say a few words on the mandate and work of the policy research initiative, the PRI's work on sustainable development, the reason for the joint report with the IISD, and the follow-up to the report that we have conducted through our publications and other associated work.

    You may not be familiar with the policy research initiative. It was established in 1996 by the Clerk of the Privy Council to further the development of the government's knowledge base and policy capacity in order to respond to the increasingly complex policy issues facing Canada.

    Our core mandate is to advance research on emerging horizontal or crosscutting issues that are highly relevant to the federal government's medium-term policy agenda and to ensure the effective transfer of this knowledge to policy-makers. We also have two ancillary objectives: to contribute to the strengthening of the federal government's policy research capacity, and to foster collaboration on horizontal policy research among federal departments.

    We have two deputy ministers who oversee the policy research initiative and we consult regularly with senior federal government officials regarding our mandate and research activities. We receive administrative support from the Privy Council Office. Ian and I are employees of the Privy Council Office, but we work independently of the organization; we work at arm's length.

    Currently we are working in partnership with departments and external experts on five horizontal projects. One is on social capital as a public policy tool. It's an examination of how social networks provide access to needed information, resources, and support, and we have a focus on populations and communities that are at risk of exclusion.

    Another project, a very key trend for Canada, is population aging. We call it population aging and life-course flexibility. We look at the central challenge caused by an aging population, how we can find ways to address simultaneously the potential labour shortages that come with this situation, and how we can provide more choices to individuals in terms of the time they devote to work and other activities.

    We have a project on approaches to poverty. Basically it's a systematic exploration of innovative policies in terms of addressing poverty.

    We have another one, which again is quite timely, on North American linkages. Basically here we're trying to provide some cost-benefit analysis of various options that involve the deepening of North American integration.

    Finally, we have sustainable development, and in this area the policy research initiative has been facilitating socio-economic research with federal departments. We're not scientists. We're made up of about 25 economists, sociologists, and political scientists, and what we try to bring to the issue is a bit more of the socio-economic dimension.

    We have done some work in the past few years dealing with trade and environment issues, corporate social responsibilities, and instrument choice, and there were reports published in this area. But a year ago, we were going through some restructuring and refocusing of our research agenda and we thought it would be quite apropos to take stock, identify, and take a really hard look at what the medium-term research priorities should be in the sustainable development area. So we've asked the International Institute for Sustainable Development--you know their quality and excellence--to help think through what those key priorities should be, with the view, of course, of sharing this with our colleagues from the various departments and to help focus the mind.

    Perhaps in a few minutes Mr. Runnalls can speak briefly about the priorities that were identified in the report.

    What we did with the report is we produced 250 copies that were distributed to federal government decision-makers. Well, we produced more than that, but 250 copies were widely distributed within the public service, to members of this committee, senior government officials, policy analysts, as well as some of our expert partners in the academic community.

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    We also held a round table. We have regular round tables on topics like that, and they involve policy-makers and academics. We discuss it thoroughly before its final printing. We have these quarterly publications for the PRI. A recent issue was sent to your office. It includes a summary of this report and a series of other topical issues in the area of sustainable development. This is circulated to about 4,000 people, so it provides a lot of exposure for the issue.

    But in the end, we didn't do all of this to just disseminate it. The basic point was to have a backgrounder to help orient our discussion with our partner departments on what our focus should be. The decision has been taken to focus on one of the priorities that is identified in the report, and that is fresh water management.

    We intend over the next few months to conduct research on socio-economic and governance issues related to fresh water, emphasizing the federal role but also examining provincial, territorial, and municipal concerns. In our activities we also try to involve a provincial representative to the extent possible. Our work is very much done in the public domain.

    We will pay particular attention to economic instruments for water resource management. I told you that our expertise in terms of the PRI is not so much scientific but more in the socio-economic area. I'm an economist myself, and reading this literature, I found that perhaps the instruments of intervention for government are often more focused on regulation. There seems to be a bit of a lack of focus on economic instruments--incentives, credits, and so on. So we'd like to explore that a bit more with our colleagues from other departments--why that is the case, why we're not making more use of economic instruments.

    In the next months we'll have several workshops, working groups, and a variety of research reports. One of our first initiatives is a symposium on economic instruments for water management, which we've planned for June. We've been busy elaborating the program with academics and with experts from institutes and departments. We will use this opportunity to explore the experience in other countries and in Canada to see where and how we can make progress in terms of using more economic instruments--and market forces, basically--to address some of the sustainable development issues.

    We would be very glad to have you at these sorts of events, either as simple participants or perhaps to chair sessions or things like that. This is something we try to do in our activities now, to involve parliamentarians a bit more, to the extent that they can devote the time to come to these sessions. We would be pleased to have you.

    I'll stop here. Thank you for your invitation. I look forward to our discussion.

    Perhaps Mr. Runnalls can speak more specifically about the priorities identified in the report.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Thank you very much.

    Mr. Runnalls.

    Mr. David Runnalls (President, International Institute for Sustainable Development): Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for having me back. The last time I was here we were talking about the outcomes of the Johannesburg summit, but I think we ranged into renewable energy and what was happening with Ontario Hydro and everything else. I welcome another wide-ranging discussion, if you wish that.

    I should be clear on what we've done. As Jean-Pierre indicated, we have tried to identify a number of areas where we think the government needs to do more research. This is really the agenda for ministers for the medium to longer term. This is not necessarily a package of stuff you'll find on your desk tomorrow, although, as you can see, some of the areas are quite contemporary. We haven't reached very many conclusions. The conclusions we've reached are that these are areas that need more work, some of them quite urgently.

    What we tried to do was begin by focusing on location. You'll find that we focused on what we call socio-ecological systems, and we start with the smallest, which is urban systems and urban redesign, followed by watersheds, which is really fresh water management--I know this is an issue of some concern to you personally, Mr. Chairman--followed by ecoregions. We talk about the whole question of ecoregion sustainability, and these are quite large regions, like the Great Lakes Basin or the Prairies. Then we move on to global systems and look a bit at the impact of globalization on Canada. We've talked about this in this committee before in light of discussions on trade and the environment.

    The remaining three areas then are concerned with various policy tools and their application to problems of sustainable development. Once again we went from the small to the large. We have a section that deals with signals and incentives, the point Jean-Pierre made about the use of economic instruments, making the markets work for sustainable development, better water pricing, pollution charges of various kinds, ecological fiscal reform, the sorts of things I know the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy has appeared before this committee to discuss in the past. We then look at the whole question of the sustainability of lifestyles. We are among the richest people in the world, among the largest consumers of goods and services in the world. How sustainable is that in a world of 6 billion, 7 billion, 8 billion people? Finally, we look at the whole question of international engagement on poverty and sustainable development, our foreign assistance program and the sort of work that needs to be done there.

    So, Mr. Chairman, I'll give you a little snippet of each one, and that might get the discussion started.

    On urban redesign, we've really constructed cities that are designed for large amounts of travelling, designed around the automobile, where we have sunk a vast amount of infrastructure money, and we're not going to undo this. How do we begin to redesign the current urban form so that it becomes more efficient, it reduces the so-called ecological footprint, and we can get public transportation systems to work better? This is very much in line with some of the discussions that have been going on about the urban initiative and the infrastructure initiative.

    On fresh water management, water scarcity and declining water quality are at a crisis point in many areas of the globe, driven by increasing competition for water resources for our growing population and per capita consumption levels. A strong global demand for investment in and access to clean water will have an impact on Canada, which has placed a high priority on water quality. And we are water rich. We have 10% of the world's fresh water, less than 1% of the world's population, and the second highest per capita consumption of fresh water in the world. As you know, there have been continuing discussions and debates on the whole question of water exports, and I would submit to you that as the water problems deepen in the United States, there will be increasing pressure on this resource. This is an area where Canadian governments will need to be thinking about how to react.

    Many of our river basins are affected by pollution from industrial and municipal runoffs, and airborne pollutants are beginning to seriously affect people and ecosystems. Here I give you the Great Lakes Basin. The Great Lakes Basin is subjected to a really substantial amount of both airborne and waterborne pollution.

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    Water supplies are threatened by inefficient use, allowing for unnecessary overconsumption.There's a real urgency to this, as you know, Mr. Chairman, because there is at the moment a prolonged drought in western Canada. There is concern that the glacier-fed rivers, in Alberta particularly, will be under increasing pressure as the glaciers continue to retreat, some say under the threat of climate change. Where my institute in located, in Winnipeg, we have a combination of too much and too little water. At the moment we have too much. If I look outside my apartment, I can see the Assiniboine getting up to about the level of the swimming pool, but we have also had a sufficient lack of water that Manitoba Hydro lost, I think, $600 million last year, largely because there wasn't enough water flowing through the dams.

    So water issues, water allocation, and water pricing, which the PRI has picked up now, I would submit to you will become major public policy issues in Canada over the next four or five years, and there will be lots of need for both further research and some better policy direction as to how we cope with that.

    The next one is the whole question of the sustainability of ecoregions or ecosystems. The buzz term now in environmental management is ecosystem management, trying to manage the entire system, because they are all interconnected. I give you one example of that. About 10 years ago, David Crombie, the former mayor of Toronto, was appointed by both the Ontario and the federal governments to head a sort of joint royal commission on the Toronto waterfront. By the time he finished his report it was called “watershed”, because he had discovered that you couldn't possibly talk about the waterfront in isolation from the entire watershed of the Greater Toronto Area, because of interconnected river basins and water flows, and that led to pollution and so on. In the process of doing his report, if I remember correctly, he identified over 1,000 different public agencies that had some form of jurisdiction over this watershed.

    As we move to make watershed ecosystem management a greater public policy priority, we are going to have a real challenge of interprovincial cooperation, federal-provincial cooperation, and how we begin to get local authorities to collaborate with each other. So this one's not just a scientific problem; it's a real governance issue, and it's quite critical. Many Canadians still depend on these ecosystems for their livelihoods. We all know about the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, resulting in 40,000 jobs lost. We now have a real problem of species endangerment in Canada. The number of endangered species has gone from 178 in 1988 to 415 in the year 2002. There are going to be real pressures as to how we manage these very large spaces so that we pay more attention to natural boundaries than political boundaries. So that's another set of issues.

    Finally, we have the whole question of the impact of globalization on Canada. We're very dependent, as you know, on foreign trade. We're a very small but open economy. Our involvement in trade agreements is creating opportunities as well as vulnerabilities for Canada. National economies are becoming more and more integrated in a global economic structure, and as a result, you get these components sourced from around the world. This trend toward globalization has been driven in part by these new technologies and in part by reduced barriers to international trade and investment flows.

    Part of the result has been an increasing role for the international trade organizations, and here one is particularly thinking about the World Trade Organization and the continuing negotiations under the so-called Doha round. The rules of the WTO, as a result of these discussions, have been reaching well beyond national borders to regulate the myriad domestic processes that can impede trade flows. I would submit to you that there's a need for us to better understand the possible effects, for example, of the liberalization of trade and services on our regulatory systems, on our ability to deliver our health care systems, and on some of our natural systems as well. So I think there will be a need for us to be better able to understand that the international flow of goods begins to have an impact on both the domestic environment and the international environment.

    Of the last three sections, one is this question of signals and incentives. This committee's done a lot of work on this, and I won't say much about it, other than to say that there is a lot of experience with market-based incentives now. They tend to be more efficient, they tend to be more effective as regulatory tools, and they are easier for the private sector to cope with.

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    It's not in the report, but I'll just give you one example. The sulphur dioxide emissions trading system, established in the United States originally to deal with acid rain, basically assigned a cap to each American utility that was producing this, the precursor to acid rain. If you had a cap of 100 and you only emitted 90 tons, you had 10 tons you could sell on the market. If you were still emitting 110, you could fix your factory, shut it down, or buy 10 tons on the open market in Chicago. That system has worked for about 15 years. It has 100% compliance, the only program ever run by the Environmental Protection Agency that does. It exceeded its goals by about 25%; in other words, they reduced their SO₂ emissions by about 25% more than planned. And the price has begun to drop, because this has become an economic good. It set an incentive for companies. It actually does make a lot of sense to spend some money in cutting your SO₂ emissions, because you then get a marketable asset.

    So the real argument is for changing from the old traditional command and control regulatory system to trying to use markets to get people to do the things we want them to do. This is one of the things I think the policy research initiative will show with its work on water pricing.

    Finally, Mr. Chair, there are two more, and I know you'll want to have a discussion on this. The first is the question of unsustainable lifestyles. We don't actually understand why people can tell us, as they do in the polls, and as I suspect they do in constituency meetings, that the environment is one of their top 10 issues, while at the same time it doesn't filter down to people questioning their own personal behaviour in use of resources, the size of car they drive, how much they drive, how much they consume. What we do understand is that we are getting to the stage where we'll have to find a way to change consumption patterns. I'm not talking about compulsion, I'm talking about sending the right sorts of signals to people to consume in a different way to make their economies more efficient, to move to more closed-cycle production processes. We are going to have to do that. We can't continue to consume at the present material levels.

    Finally, Mr. Chair, we've looked a little bit at the question of how this plays out at the international level. We are getting to the stage now where the number of poor in the world is not declining any longer. There is a direct relationship between poverty and unsustainable forms of development in developing countries, we know that. We need to begin to think about how we condition our own foreign assistance policy in such a way that we're not only helping governments to deal with poverty alleviation, but we're helping governments to pursue policies that begin to preserve their own environmental assets.

    So that's it. It's a complex agenda. There are other things I'm sure we could add to the list, but we went through a number of processes of asking ourselves questions, going through international surveys, talking to people, and this is what rose to the top of the list.

    One thing you'll notice is missing is climate change. That was a decision made by our colleagues in the policy research initiative, not on the ground that it was unimportant, but on the ground that there was so much going on with that issue within the government at the moment that bringing it to the surface yet again wasn't going to shed any light. If I were doing this from a standing start, climate change would be up there among the first four or five major issues.

    Thank you very much.

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    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Thank you very much.

    Mr. Campbell, do you have anything to add, or are you ready for some questions?

    Mr. Hubbard, I think you had your hand up first.

    Mr. Charles Hubbard (Miramichi, Lib.): Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

    We've covered such a broad scope of future problems this afternoon. I wonder how we're ever going to be able to contend with all of them.

    Mr. Voyer, how big is your group? How many people do you have working on this project?

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: It's not big. We have about 25 professionals for each team. I mentioned five projects, and we're doing other things as well. Each team has four or five people, a multidisciplinary background. Those four or five are basically the hub around which we can try to bring other participants from departments. The idea is to have just enough in a group to make an invitation to departments to participate. It enables us to bring the finance department, the environmental department, the natural resources department, and other departments together on some of these issues.

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    Mr. Charles Hubbard: We've heard a lot, Mr. Chair, on water and energy. These are probably two of the biggest areas that we will have problems with in the near future, especially energy.

    I was interested in something on page 3. You talk about new approaches for addressing poverty and exclusion. Are we talking about within Canada or within the globe?

    Mr. Runnalls talked about it.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: Yes. The project that I'm referring to in these notes is a separate undertaking where we're studying the situation in Canada. The priority that David Runnalls pointed to was more in a global context.

    Mr. Charles Hubbard: How would you define poverty in Canada?

    We've had a lot of different groups, and especially one that has major concerns with poverty. How would you define poverty, the so-called “poverty level”? Do you have a financial income definition? Do you have a social definition? How do you look at poverty in Canada?

    I'm going to try to follow-up a little bit on how we can attempt to address poverty.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: I'll answer the question. The problem with sustainable development is that all issues can fall under it. In the Government of Canada, we're using different definitions of poverty. In fact, Stats Can will not talk about measures of poverty, they will talk about low-income cutoffs, as you know. The LICO is one statistical measure that has been used. Another one was developed called the market-based measure of poverty, which the government has only started to publish, that is more a measure of actual deprivation of goods and services as opposed to a relative measure compared to others. There are other measures used at the OECD that use median income measures and how you compare that in terms of median income.

    In terms of across government, it's always useful to look at those three kinds of statistical measures to get a sense of poverty and how it is evolving in Canada. Exclusion is a much bigger issue to define.

    Mr. Charles Hubbard: With poverty, we have different programs in this country that deal with homelessness and parents with children that are low-income families. We look at the many factors that are involved here. In all of it, in the cities for example, there's a major problem with housing and having good standards of housing for people. In the country, you probably find the same problems, the problems with family income.

    Then in terms of Mr. Runnalls' comments, there are concerns globally that capital is often chasing what we might call in Canada “poverty”. They're looking for people who will work for virtually nothing. You can get a nice commodity today out of China where workers are earning less than $100 a month. We, as Canadian consumers, seem to take glee in the fact that we can buy a product, whether it be a toaster, an iron, a certain kind of wrench, or whatever it might be, for a price that we would hardly consider paying for the raw materials that are in the product. In terms of globalization, we're certainly chasing poverty.

    To get back to the Canadian scene where we have child tax benefits and so forth, economically in this country, there has been a great tendency in the last years to do pricing, what consumers pay for goods, on the basis of what they can afford.

    I see Mr. Runnalls is shaking his head. It's because he's probably my age, or nearly my age, and he remembers the old-fashioned economics, where you put all the input into a product, you marked down a fair return for your capital, and that was the price of the product.

    In terms of the system that we have in this country now, it seems that even our automobiles are based not upon an international price of what the product would cost to produce, whether it be in Mexico or wherever, but on how much Canadian consumers can afford for the product. With the background of what things cost, what the poor person has to pay for the product, how can we overcome poverty?

    Poverty is a certain group of people who have difficulty accessing the basic needs of society. But when the standards are always increasing in terms of the capitalistic approach to society.... Maybe I'm getting too philosophical on this, but how can governments attempt to overcome poverty when poverty is continually being raised by the increases that our producers are demanding of the people within society?

    Jean-Pierre, it's probably a pretty difficult question, but maybe we could hear your reaction to that.

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    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: It is in part a philosophical question that puts in question perhaps the way the market economies work these days in the context of globalization. It's the subject of many books and debates. We try to take a more practical approach to the issue by first of all understanding very well who those groups are that are stuck in situations of poverty, what the groups at risk are. Some research has been able to identify five groups of people that have a higher probability. This helps on focusing interventions.

    I'm afraid that we're still very much into remedial types of policy. We're trying to deal with poverty when it happens as opposed to trying to prevent poverty. But to the extent that we're in a world of remedial policy, the project we're talking about is looking at different tools—whether it's skill enhancement, using social capital, which is the creation of social networks to better support people, or the role of assets, which is an area we have not really looked into in Canada. We always deal with poverty as an income problem. What we find out is that people are not necessarily poor all the time, only during parts of their life. And we also find that assets, or the ability to preserve assets—whether it's human, capital types of assets, or financial—can make a big difference. So it's in that context that we're looking at the poverty issues.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Mr. Szabo.

    Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.): That's a good line of questioning on the poverty side. It's something that interests me a lot, but maybe we'll come back to that. I'm sure we'll have a second round.

    I was very interested in the comments with regard to the need to bring about changes in the way we develop and design our cities and our communities. My own city is the city of Mississauga. It used to be a bedroom city of Toronto, and now it has its own commercial base. It's now the sixth largest city in Canada. It was designed for people who have automobiles. You cannot live in Mississauga without a car because everything is big box stores. You have to travel some distance. You don't see people walking on the streets very much. There are no people places. It is a lot of pavement, a lot of concrete, a lot of infrastructure. It is a combination of about six or seven smaller communities that were amalgamated to form a city.

    The people who are still in charge are the people who made those decisions. It worries me. Their thinking has been that it's in the books, in our policy manuals, in our training. It is almost like “this is the way you do it”. I sense that you're trying to break the paradigm, to say that we do have problems there.

    It's taking a long time for cities to admit that they made mistakes, and isn't admitting you made a mistake really the first step? Shouldn't we tell people that here is where the mistakes were, and can't we all learn from it? I don't think it should be left just to the think-tanks, the conferences, the forums, and the discussions among those who dwell on these things and it's part of their lives. How do you engage ordinary people? Changing people's behaviour patterns is a very big part of this whole sustainable development thrust. You cannot legislate behaviour; you have to motivate it or induce it somehow through sound principles.

    So how are we doing in terms of admitting our mistakes, our problems--some of the reasons used, for instance, in designing cities, etc.? And how do we engage those stakeholders who should be engaged to start thinking outside of their current paradigm in ways that are going to be part of the solution rather than continuing to be part of the problem?

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    Mr. David Runnalls: That's a very good question. I'm old enough that I can remember when Clarkson had a thousand people. That's actually where I grew up, so I know whereof you speak. I can remember that when I was a kid we used to pick fruit on the local farms during the summertime. I suspect those are all gone.

    I'm actually quite optimistic about this because I think there are root-and-branch discussions going on in many Canadian cities. I've watched the debate in Winnipeg transpire. For example, our mayor has proposed a new deal for cities. He's one of the people who has actually been stimulating the national debate. And while he didn't certainly get acceptance of this first set of proposals, what did occur was a very high degree of community involvement and discussions of some of these issues, because from the beginning the new deal involved an admission that the urban form had gone wrong in Winnipeg; that in fact what you had was one of the first metropolitan areas in Canada, and yet they had still allowed the creation of enough strip malls and big box stores and shopping centres within the city that it had basically drained the downtown of vitality. So you got a very interesting city-wide debate about some of these things. How much are we prepared to pay to invest in a better a public transit system? Are we prepared to be taxed differently by the city in order to do that? How much are we prepared to debate some of these densification issues that are coming up?

    I find that debate going on in a number of Canadian cities. Around the new municipal plan in Ottawa, for example, there has certainly been a really heated debate about whether you are going to let people build into the greenbelt, or whether you are going to try to get higher densities within the greenbelt in Ottawa, so it becomes possible to build a public transport system. With the standard densities in Mississauga, for example, as you know, you can't deliver public transport because there simply aren't enough people per square inch to fill a bus or a street car or a subway train.

    And it'll take a while. Urban design is something that lasts for centuries. The basic design of many European cities was laid out 300, 400, 500 years ago. But I get the impression that there is a general sense of uneasiness in Canada about this, that as part of this debate on what to do about cities, some of the more articulate mayors are now beginning to try to encourage these sorts of conversations amongst citizens.

    Sustainable development itself in Canada, I think, has probably gone further at the municipal/community level than it has anywhere else because people have actually got down in small groups and argued through some of these issues. What do you do about urban transport? What will we do about energy consumption? Are there ways of changing the urban form in such a way that they're more energy efficient, that people can get around better?

    I think where it's going to be very difficult is in communities like Mississauga or Markham, which, as you pointed out, are entirely low rise, entirely designed around the private car, and you've sunk all the infrastructure costs. They're already there. You've already built the roads, put in the sewers, put in the water. I don't know how that debate comes out, but I get the sense it's being had.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Yes. I must admit there is certainly a significant effort on residential intensification. Somehow we have to change what we have into something that we should have had. It will take an awful long time. At the same time, though, what it's doing is undermining other areas. There are some maybe unintended consequences.

    One development I know of specifically, which I actually intervened on in front of the OMB, is the case of 30 townhouses being put into a four-lot site across the street from 100-year-old houses. It makes absolutely no sense, in terms of the character of the community and respect for the heritage angle of things, but by the same token, the numbers work out to be better or in line with what they want. So now we have some conflicting views, and I suspect that those will continue.

    If I may, I would like to quickly shift to the transport thing. You mentioned that cities go on and their plans benefit for decades and centuries. The culture in Canada is much different from the culture in Europe. We want a backyard. They don't want a backyard in Europe. They live high-rise, high-density. Everybody is walking everywhere and they can support a public transit system.

    The Toronto Transit Commission, the TTC, in the largest city in the country, the largest intensification of people, cannot economically sustain itself without enormous subsidies. It already has some of the highest fares in major urban transit systems in North America. If Toronto Transit Commission cannot operate a viable, economic transit system in the largest city in Canada without charging the highest rates and still losing money, how would you expect that we can get other cities to get viable, economic, essential public transit systems to replace all the cars we've been depending on?

º  (1615)  

    Mr. David Runnalls: That's a terrific question that goes back to the old debates about public goods and how much we are prepared to pay for them.

    As you know, all European cities also subsidize very heavily.... It's just assumed. I'm not a public transport expert, but I don't know of any public transit system in the world that's self-supporting, and the real argument is, how much are you prepared to fork over in public money for what degree of comfort and convenience and quality of service? On the whole, in European cities—which are denser, as you point out, and also tend to have narrower streets that you can't cram as many cars into—there seems to be a social consensus that you pay more, in terms of subsidies, for public transit systems because they are an expensive public good.

    I lived for years in New York City. New York spends a phenomenal amount of money subsidizing the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the same reason. The streets can't accommodate any more cars and parking is at a premium; therefore, there is a political consensus that a certain amount of money has to go into running a modern, urbanized transport system.

    That's exactly the sort of debate I see us beginning to have in Canada, partly as a debate over this gas tax business. I've certainly seen that in Winnipeg, and I've seen it in Ottawa. In fact, as the discussions have gone on about the proposal of assigning more gas tax revenues to cities, I've seen lots of cities have debates about how much money we should actually spend on urban transport. In Ottawa, they're talking about a light rail system that would basically go from one end of the municipality to another. In Winnipeg, they've been talking about a transitway somewhat like the one in Ottawa, where you get a dedicated right-of-way for buses. That's a lively public debate. I don't know how it's going to come out, but at least we're now having the discussion, and I can certainly see in it quite a lot of discussion about CO₂ emissions, climate change impacts, and sustainability. I think those are very healthy public debates.

    Whether or not we are prepared to make those choices is a question more for you than it is for me. I would suggest that we do. Over the next 15 or 20 years, the cities that survive and prosper will be those that manage to lessen their ecological footprint, that manage to lessen the burden of traffic congestion, and that manage to accommodate their urban infrastructure to a more efficient, more sustainable way of living. I think that'll make them more competitive.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: This is fascinating.

    There's no question there's going to be continued significant growth in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area of maybe 20% to 25% yet. But even today, every major highway is gridlocked during rush hour, and we're going to add to it. I'm sure the next generation will be looking at films of what people were doing during our generation, and they will be laughing at us for the time, energy, and productivity we threw away. This is the behavioural thing coming out.... I'm not sure that we're going to change behaviour, but I don't see the messages coming out stronger.

    Let me just finish with one last area that you may want to comment on, the issue of economic instruments to induce proper behaviour, whether it be of individuals or companies. With regard to, say, the Great Lakes, we have dealt with the issue of invasive species and the whole issue of ballast emissions and the fact that the IJC, the International Joint Commission, has no teeth to really impose any rules on anybody. What we have are voluntary guidelines as opposed to mandatory regulations.

    Since I think the international round table on the environment told us—David McGuinty, was it...?

º  (1620)  

    Mr. David Runnalls: Yes, the national round table.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: The national round table told us that the cost of invasive species annually is greater than the cost of SARS was to Canada.

    Mr. David Runnalls: Probably, probably.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Very few people would know that, and it's too bad that they don't. Yet, we don't have mandatory regulations on ballast discharge.

    It just seems to me that we're kowtowing to commercial interests, because it would be costly for them to deal with the ballast. So let's do some economic incentives and let us pay for it; is that the way we should be dealing with it? Or should our model be something like, here are the rules to play in our ballpark; this is the way it is, and if you want to do business here, this is how it's going to be done? When are we going to start taking a little bit better balance between the economic incentive thinking and the social responsibility thinking?

    Mr. David Runnalls: Look, I agree. I would never maintain that economic instruments are a complete substitute for regulation. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.

    Anyway, most economic instruments actually won't work without some sort of monitoring and regulation. I'm thinking here of the analogy I used for SO_x emissions in the United States. The only reason that system worked was because the Environmental Protection Agency continued to monitor SO_x emissions from factories. So basically the absolute cap was 100 tons of sulphur dioxide. You could buy your way out of that by buying some other credits, but somebody was there monitoring your emissions; and if you got above 100, then you either had to buy your way out, shut down, or pay a fine.

    So this is not a substitute for regulation, but it's a different sort of regulation. It doesn't always work, I agree with you. In the case of alien invasive species, you're just going to end up with a ban. You're either going to end up with a ban or you're not going to get anything. And it's become a diabolical problem all through the Great Lakes, and now we're beginning to see things like the Asian longhorn beetle, which is beginning to devastate large parts of the interior of British Columbia. This is a looming catastrophe that passes under everybody's radar screen, despite all of the publicity that the zebra mussel invasion got in your part of the world.

    I feel very strongly about the whole question of alien invasive species. We can't get anybody to take it seriously until after it happens, and then you discover what the accumulated damages are, whether it's loss of forest cover in B.C.; whether it's the additional cost of operating everybody's water intake in the Great Lakes, or everybody's power plant in the Great Lakes; or whether you really begin to see some of these killer species that people manage to raise for fun and that escape, and you suddenly discover that you've got the goby swimming around in Lake Erie, to the stage where it's begun to crowd out many of the native species. This is something that you'll never deal with using economic instruments. This is a regulatory issue, pure and simple, and I entirely agree with you.

    I have never understood why the U.S. and the Canadian governments can't begin to force ship owners to exchange their ballasts at sea, because that's all it requires. It simply requires that you pump out your ballast while you're at sea, and substitute seawater for it, because then you're not bringing something from another ecosystem into the Great Lakes. I have never been able to understand why this doesn't get done.

    I agree with you.

º  (1625)  

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Thank you.

    We have certainly had a variety of topics here. I'm going to come back to an environmental issue, one that you're going to emphasize, and that's water. Of course, it's a major concern across the country, as you've identified.

    I want to use one example to make my point. I attended a public meeting this past week. We have a map of Alberta here. All of the coal seams that are under all of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. are there. We have them mapped right down to the quarter section: where the coal is, how deep the coal is, and so on. Then we have a superimposed section, which happens to be in the middle of my constituency, and we have identified where every water well is, where every oil well is, and where every pipeline is. We have there a plan to drill wells into the coal bed, anywhere from 4 to 16 per quarter section--hundreds and hundreds of these wells. They are low intensity and they go down well below where the aquifer is.

    Obviously, people are asking questions: What does that do to the aquifer? What does that do to our wells? What does that do to our rivers? What does that do to the watershed through which all of these thousands of wells would be drilled? The answer is, well, we don't really know where all of the aquifers are and we don't really know exactly how many would go through the aquifer, and we don't really know what happens when you puncture this aquifer in these thousands of places.

    I think the point that comes out of this.... Industry obviously knows where the coal and methane are, and obviously it's economic to do it now because of the price of gas, and yet we don't know what it might do to our water base.

    It would seem to me--whether we're talking about the Great Lakes or, as you and I were talking about earlier, David, whether it's Lake Winnipeg or wherever--we don't put emphasis on knowing about these aquifers. Yet water is the number one resource in the future that literally wars will be fought over.

    I wonder what you think we should be doing. How can we stimulate government to get on with it? Before these wells are drilled someone should be able to say, here's what happens when you go through an aquifer a thousand times. Of course, the company says no problem, we'll cement it; no problem, the aquifer will be fine. But what if it isn't?

    Mr. David Runnalls: I've always been astonished by how little we know about underground water. I was mentioning to you before the break that ten or fifteen years ago I was involved in a kind of binational study of the state of the Great Lakes water quality. One of the things we tried to do was collect information on groundwater. We discovered that in places like Ohio and Michigan and Illinois, the Americans knew a lot about the state of groundwater. They had done their research. In southwestern Ontario we didn't know very much. It was kind of “don't ask, don't tell”; if you didn't ask about a problem, then you didn't have a problem.

    I'm not a water expert, but by talking to other water experts in the west, I get the impression that we're pretty ignorant about the state of many of the major aquifers.

    I don't know the case you're citing to me, but as you know, there have been some rather bad experiences with coal bed methane extraction in the United States, because when you actually pump stuff down, it comes back up, and what comes back is not very pleasant. I would be wary of those sorts of technologies until it was really proven what the impact was going to be on groundwater.

    It sure is a subject we ought to know more about. From what one knows from the U.S. experience, for example, the major underground aquifers in the great plains and in the southwest of the United States are being pumped out at very unsustainable rates. I suspect that may be true for part of Canada, but again I have the impression we really don't know and we're making guesses, as opposed to actually doing the hard, nitty-gritty research.

º  (1630)  

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Mr. Campbell.

    Dr. Ian Campbell (Senior Project Director, Sustainable Development, Policy Research Initiative, Privy Council Office): Thank you. I can perhaps address some of that.

    The major aquifer in that region, I believe, is the Paskapoo Formation. It varies in thickness up to something like 600 metres, if I remember correctly. I could be wrong about that, though.

    The Paskapoo is sandstone and shales, fairly porous, particularly in the sandstone horizons, which is what makes it a good aquifer, of course. The coal beds--and therefore the coal bed methane--are well below that. The Paskapoo itself contains next to no coal, so you would indeed be drilling through it, not into it, in that sense.

    As for the impact of puncturing the aquifer a few thousand times, it's not quite like a balloon. The aquifer itself is underlain by permeable rocks, and the coal beds tend not to be impermeable; they tend to be fairly permeable. The pressures that are underneath the aquifer will keep the water from leaking downward, pretty much no matter how many holes you punch through it.

    My own worries would be more along the lines of potential contamination from methane and whatever else might be down there that might be leaking upward. How much research is being done on this? I don't know. I think it certainly is something we would need to be concerned about. I don't know how much research has been done, though, so I don't think I can address the question of whether it's safe at this time or not.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): This again points out the problem to all of the hundreds of residents who attended this meeting and asked those questions: What if you hit saltwater? What if the saltwater comes up and gets into your aquifer? Those are the kinds of questions that it seems...well, again, I think someone said, “Don't ask, don't tell”. Obviously, nobody wants to talk about it, because nobody seems to have done that research, and I find that very troubling.

    Again, it sounds as though one of the issues you're taking on is water. It seems to me that mapping those aquifers would be probably one of the highest-priority items. How can you decide if you're going to sell something, you're going to do this process through something, if you don't know what you have? So I hope you would put that high on your priority list of what we need for Canada.

    Dr. Ian Campbell: Yes, the groundwater mapping in Canada is done mainly by the Geological Survey of Canada and by the provincial agencies. Alphonso Rivera is leading the effort at the Geological Survey, and I believe his plans are to have mapped 10 major aquifers over a period of three years, something like that. I believe the Paskapoo is one of them. I'm not sure of that, though. You'd have to check with him.

    Mapping groundwater and understanding groundwater flows is extraordinarily complex. It is not an easy thing to do. It's very much a technological problem. You can drill holes to your heart's delight, but that'll just tell you if there's water there or not. You have to do more than just drill the hole to find out where the water is moving, how old it is, how fast it moves, and so on.

    So the problem of understanding Canada's aquifers is not trivial. Unlike in the United States, there are large parts of Canada where there are not many wells already dug. In some areas there are, and we know more about those areas. We just don't have the population densities across much of the country to have the well density that would give us more information. But I think the project being led at the Geological Survey will, hopefully in the next two or three years, start answering some of these questions.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): I have just one other short question.

    I noticed in your report about species at risk--and I guess again our committee spent a lot of time on it, and we spent a lot of time in the House--you mention that the numbers have gone up from 100 and something to over 400. With that legislation, it seems to me, and what I'm hearing on the ground, is that as it comes into effect on June 1--and this comes down to governance again--by not providing compensation, specifically if we take your land out of production and with due diligence having to be done by the land user, we've got two real negatives working against protecting those species at risk, much as we've seen in the U.S.

    Certainly, that's what I'm hearing on the ground from my rural residents, and I know many others are hearing that. What's your opinion on that?

º  (1635)  

    Mr. David Runnalls: I'm the world's most ignorant person when it comes to the Species at Risk Act, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry, that's something we never did any work on, and my opinions are worthless--I mean, even more worthless than usual.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): There was an article, I believe, obviously written by someone I might disagree with somewhat.

    Mr. David Runnalls: It's quite possible, but it's definitely not me.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Yes, okay.

    Mr. Campbell.

    Dr. Ian Campbell: I believe you're probably referring to an article in this issue of Horizons that was written by a couple of people from Environment Canada. We don't really know much about it.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Okay. Thank you.

    Do you have a question, Mr. Szabo?

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Yes, I'd like to pursue the fresh water angle again. Every now and then, we have a flare-up, an incident that gets people thinking about water. Walkerton was one of them. People start to realize that water and their health are inextricably linked. Even as we talk about greenhouse gases, etc, as soon as you start talking about how the processes that create greenhouse gases also create particulate matter in the air, etc., all of a sudden, there is a consequential health impact.

    In the figures that were given earlier, we have about 10% of the world's fresh water, we're 1% of the population, and we're in the top 10% of per capita water users.

    Mr. David Runnalls: We're in the top 3%; it's the United States, Australia, and Canada, basically.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: We're in the top 3%. Okay.

    With human nature being what it is and, I guess, countries being what they are, if you have an abundance of something, there's no problem. The trouble is that there is a terrible ending to that story if you carry on.

    Some have referred to the possibility that this is really a crisis that we're in, but nobody knows that there's a crisis or nobody believes there is a crisis. This is a creeping illness of sorts. It takes time, and over time it will start to manifest itself in a number of different ways, but ultimately, we're going to have to pay the price.

    What words of wisdom do you have for us as parliamentarians? We certainly can't say, you have these resources and all these thinkers, so figure it out for us and somehow make it happen. Somehow the rubber has to hit the road, and chances are the Government of Canada, in conjunction with the provinces, has to be involved.

    How do we get the message down to all of the stakeholders, but more importantly to the people of Canada, about what the realities are in terms of the “state of the union” of our fresh water?

    Mr. David Runnalls: Yes, that's a very good question. I think a lot of the answer to that is regional. These aggregate figures that we toss around are interesting, but there are parts of the country that are already water short. Trying to say that Canada itself has an overall problem masks the fact that the problem is really quite serious in the Prairies. It's much more serious in the Prairies than it is in eastern Canada, or the problem in eastern Canada is a different sort of problem.

    In the Prairies we are now beginning to see really quite severe shortages. Certainly the projections that the Alberta government has made and that some of the people in industry have done are showing there's going to have to be a major change in water use, particularly in Alberta, but also in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, if we're going to continue to develop energy resources at the same rate as we are now and if the cities of the west, and particularly again in Alberta, continue to grow at the rates they're growing at. Calgary and Edmonton are amongst the fastest-growing cities in the world.

    You have probably seen, Mr. Chairman, this work that the Canada West Foundation has done on urban water use in the west. Those are quite disturbing trends. You start seeing really major shortages fairly quickly. There are some real worries in the oil patch about how viable the Athabaska tar sands operations are going to be if you start ratcheting them up. If you keep doubling the rate of investment every 5 or 10 years, those are quite water-intensive processes, and there isn't that much water in the Athabaska River. You are beginning to see in parts of the west those that are subject to drought and those that are subject to really major competing water uses. This is beginning to resemble a crisis, I think. I think you would agree with that.

    It's very much in the news. The Manitoba government in my part of the world has actually gone so far now as to set up a department of water resources at the provincial level--I think the first one in Canada.

    Alberta, I think, has a new Water Act, Mr. Chairman. It's a fairly strong piece of legislation.

    So we're beginning to see in those parts of the country real worries about shortages and about how you actually manage to use some sort of rational economic process to allocate resources: pricing, identifying new supplies, and so on. It seems to me that this might be where the Government of Canada, combined with the three prairie provinces, might want to put some real effort, because I think the average citizen realizes this is a problem. Farmers, particularly as they move to much more intensive hog operations, for example, are both needing a lot of water and spreading a vast amount of water pollution, and they are aware of it.

    So I think there's a much higher awareness of this issue in the Prairies and in B.C., of course, because B.C. hasn't had any appreciable rain for the last two years. That's one of the reasons you get these really bad fires. So in that part of the country I think you could get some real movement. And I think it has to be at least two, if not the three prairie provinces, because water basically all flows downhill. Most of the water in Saskatchewan comes from Alberta, and much of the water in Manitoba comes from Saskatchewan, which comes from Alberta in the first place.

    So I think there's a real possibility there for some kind of major combined effort between the federal and provincial governments to begin to look at the water question in the west. My guess is that in the east it's going to be much more of a water quality discussion; it'll be water pollution, it'll be the safety of community drinking water. But I don't think you're going to get people in Toronto or Mississauga, who can look five kilometres south and see this enormous great lake sitting there, to start worrying about water shortages in the way you would if you lived in Saskatoon or Calgary.

º  (1640)  

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Finally, very often some of the issues that we deal with in Parliament tend to get technical, to the point where my eyes start to glaze over when you talk about it. From time to time I see that in the people I have to talk to who are in my milieu, in my constituency, in some of the groups and organizations, where they like to say, “Well, what are you working on?”, etc.

    Is there something going on along the line of a modelling or a vision of what happens if?

    Mr. David Runnalls: In water specifically?

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Yes. It would be very interesting to be able to say to people that if we carry on this trend, this path, this route, this behaviour, we can see very slowly that something is going to happen and all of a sudden everything you do is going to be bottled water because no water is going to be safe. If you start putting it in very blunt terms, it's a distinct possibility, I assume. It will start to affect the way we do things simply because we're forced to change rather than that we want to change to prevent that from occurring in the first place.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: I'm not aware of any models in Canada with regard to what this would imply in terms of water.

    I'd like to bring in another element. The driver is not just the notion that we're going to run out of water. The cost of processing water seems to initiate a lot of debate. I know that in Montreal, for instance, the whole discussion about water meters was quite heated at one point. The driver is the cost of processing the water. At one point the budget constraints kick in, and that gets people talking about it. Then you can bring in, it seems to me, an element that elevates it to another level, which is yes, we're endowed with this resource--

º  (1645)  

    Mr. Paul Szabo: But the ripple effect of that, following it to its logical conclusion, bumps right into the last statement about the correlation between unsustainable development practices and poverty. It means that there will be haves and have-nots like nobody has ever imagined. You either can afford water or the things affected by water or you can't.

    Then there's the whole argument that says governments then have to step in, and we continue to subsidize those who are have-nots. Then you have the problem of whether this is an economic incentive to be poor. Why should I have to work or be a contributor to society in order to be able to afford to live in this expensive water environment when all I have to do is just sit back and let the government take care of it? There's a responsibility for every Canadian.

    Earlier there was a discussion with Mr. Hubbard about what is poverty, including LICO, the market-based measure, and all that other stuff. There is another definition of poverty, and it's probably one that everybody can apply in their own circumstances. You are not poor if you can live in your own community and not be noticed. As soon as you are noticed....

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: In fact, Adam Smith wrote about that, and he has a nice way of putting it. The market-based measure has been created within that philosophy. What does it take in terms of essential goods--clothing, housing, and food--so that you can stand as an honourable person in your own community? You don't feel excluded by the way you dress, eat, or lodge yourself.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: We don't have an official national poverty line in Canada. I think it would be ridiculous to have a poverty line for Canada, because every region is different. You need a grid that relates to the region in which you live. That grid will enable us to provide a more equitable distribution of social assistance. Welfare and social assistance will be geared to that. But we don't want to go there. First of all, it is probably prohibitively expensive to establish poverty lines. But I wonder whether or not we should pursue it even from the standpoint of establishing the poverty levels that we are prepared to tolerate to make sure that all Canadians have an opportunity to be at least above that threshold of fundamental Maslow-type poverty.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: I'll answer you as an economist on this one. In a way, the level of poverty that a society is willing to tolerate is what you get on welfare. It varies from province to province, of course, because it's a provincial policy. The level of welfare takes into account how rich the province is and how much it can afford and the ideology that's leading the government. In the end, you get a pretty good indication. It reflects how society is prepared--

    Mr. Paul Szabo: If I may, I actually wrote a book called The Child Poverty Solution. It's not for sale. It's on my website, paulszabo.com, and you can read it. It talks about an economic condition.... Everyone is calling out for economic solutions, and the premise of the book is that the majority of poverty.... Actually, “child poverty” is a political term, because it's really “family poverty”. It's driven more by social problems than economic problems.

    I can give you a very simple example. I think you know that when Ed Broadbent left, his parting motion in the House was that we eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. I think there were about 18 people in the House on a Friday. When they called the vote, “All those in favour”, somebody said “Yeah”, and then, to “All those opposed”, nobody said anything. Carried.

    Of course, now it's “Parliament unanimously...”, but they didn't unanimously...and the motion was actually to “seek to achieve the elimination”. That was the actual wording. The newspapers hardly even reported on it, and yet we make more of it today. We're becoming more sophisticated politically. But the social dimension that isn't mentioned in all of this....

    You, or somebody is suggesting that you can legislate behaviour. Now, 15% of all the families in Canada are lone-parent families, but they account for 54% of all families living in poverty. So if you want to eliminate so-called child poverty, you have to be able to address the situation of the breakdown of the family. So all of a sudden there is this whole social dimension, which blasts this open to our behaviours and what's acceptable. I think in the book I actually refer to family breakdown, in a large number of cases, as being manufactured poverty.

º  (1650)  

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: I fully agree. In fact, your diagnosis really goes right into the lines of our thinking. You seem to have a keen interest in the issue, and obviously an expertise in it. We're starting to look at the role of social networks, for instance, which is a bit of an extension of the problem of the family fragmentation that results in situations of poverty, but which is a remedial as well. There's also the absence of social networks.

    You mentioned lone parents. This is definitely a group that we identify as high risk because of the probability that...and there are new immigrants as well. There are disabled people, older workers, single men. It shows in the statistics.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: You'd better get rid of mandatory retirement. There are skills going away. It makes no sense.

    Mr. David Runnalls: The demographics will force us to do that, I would think.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: We have to bring the social perspective into it, no doubt.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: Well, when you have a meeting with some thinkers on bringing in the social dimensions, please let me know. I'd like to attend.

    Mr. Jean-Pierre Voyer: We would be pleased to have you. We have some of those. I'll send you some interesting literature, too, all the latest stuff that we're doing.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): Mr. Runnalls, do you want to bring it back to the environment committee, or...?

    Mr. David Runnalls: I just want to present one last quick thing, Mr. Chairman, about the international aspects of water. This is partly a roundabout response to Mr. Szabo's question as well, about how you raise public awareness.

    I think we're going to see really huge water problems in parts of the developing world relatively soon, in the next 10 or 15 years, and I think those are the kinds of things that Canadians will take seriously and won't be able to evade. I think the combination of climate change, relatively rapid population growth, and industrialization will form a very potent cocktail in areas that are already relatively short of water.

    North China, which is Beijing and the northern part of the country, is a semi-arid region. The Yellow River, which is one of the cradles of civilization, runs dry at its mouth now for about one-quarter of the time. This is a major source of water for north China, and north China is growing at an absolute breakneck speed, not so much in population but in terms of human activity, industrialization, and everything else.

    India has a number of areas that will be seriously short of water, as does Africa. And I don't know anybody who's connected with the Middle East crisis at the moment who doesn't think, even if one could manage some sort of political arrangement involving Israel and the other Arab states and the Palestinians, that the next issue to come along will be the chronic water shortage and the division of water in the region.

    I think these things will come up. I think Canadians will see them and will want to do something about them. So I think there is an interesting potential international dimension to this.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. Bob Mills): I'm going to call the session to a close. I've just been asked to go and speak in the House.

    I apologize for the lack of attendance. Perhaps fixed election dates would help get better attendance.

    I just had to throw that in.

    At any rate, I thank you very much. The meeting is adjourned.