Thank you so much for having us here today.

Mr. Sandford painted a global picture, and I'll bring you very local now to the Ottawa River watershed. Here we are. Whenever your service brings you to the national capital region, you are directly depending on the Ottawa River and its tributaries for your survival. It's our drinking water today as well, so cheers!

I'll be presenting along with my colleague, Larissa Holman, director of science and policy. You recently met her, as she presented at the freshwater study as well.

We were just invited a few days ago to present, and the timing is impeccable. We have prepared a flow-changes report on the Ottawa River watershed using federal data that has existed for years but has never before been analyzed through a watershed lens. So, to truly look at the data for what is happening in the Ottawa River watershed.... The results are eye-opening.

This Ottawa River watershed is vast, with a surface area of more than twice that of the province of New Brunswick. It provides drinking water for you and two million people. The flow of the Ottawa River can be so great that it can exceed that of all of the Great Lakes combined. It has been given the moniker “the sixth great lake” as a result.

We have a mighty river flowing through our nation's capital.

I'll speak about our experiences with the floods of 2017 and 2019 that have informed our comments today. It is also important to note that this mighty river is also affected by drought, so we need to take into consideration that even our mightiest of rivers are impacted by both floods and droughts.

Just two weeks from now we'll be releasing our first watershed report card, and we've analyzed 14 different indicators. Changes in flow is one of them, as I mentioned. Despite the availability of flow data through the water survey of Canada, our watershed report card is the first report that has conducted analysis on the data trends for both flooding and periods of low flow at a watershed scale. The jurisdictions within this watershed are very complex. The river itself becomes a border between Ontario and Quebec.

When the Ottawa River experienced extensive flooding in both 2017 and 2019—many of you will remember that—it caused extensive damage to infrastructure, property and people's homes. Both the Ontario and Quebec governments attempted to address the flooding in different ways, thereby working separately to confront an issue that cannot be solved one side of the river at a time. We see a need in this context, like with many other watersheds, where political jurisdictions need to be coordinated in order to ensure that the response is effective. This applies to predictions and forecasting as well.

We looked specifically at Bill C-317 and have a few recommendations to put forward.

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