Canadians are beneficiaries of the "water capital" created by the glaciers and Great Lakes that remain from the Ice Age, but they have to consider whether they are dangerously dipping into the "capital" with no consideration for the "water income" created by precipitation.

That approximate question should not be left for partisan politicians to answer, but should be one for an apolitical committee to consider, a Grand Valley audience was told Monday night.

"There is no political capital" in regulating water conservation, speaker Bob Duncanson said, since "the benefits accrue to the children and grandchildren" of today's politicians.

He was speaking to an audience of about 30 at the Community of Christ

Church, in the final session of a six-part Lenten Community Forum on Water, sponsored by the Grand Valley Ministerial Association.

Mr. Duncanson, who ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in the March 2005 byelection that saw John Tory succeed Ernie Eves as MPP for DufferinPeel-Wellington-Grey riding and heads Dufferinbased Ontario Headwaters Institute, said pollution is only one of the threats to fresh water supply.

He envisioned a growing demand by municipalities and residents as the population of Ontario grows by an estimated four million people by 2025 - most of those in the Great Lakes area.

He said Canada gets 6.5 per cent of the world's precipitation, but only a portion of that in areas useful to the population. And hotter, dryer summers are resulting in more evaporation, with much of the rainfall never reaching the aquifer when heavy rainstorms flow off the land before they can be absorbed into the soil.

He said warmer winters will also lead to more evaporation, as "there's a reduced ice cover on the Great Lakes. ..."

"Once the water is consumed, it's hard to replace."

Mr. Duncanson urged his audience to think in terms of using only the "water income," the amount of moisture being reintroduced to the aquifer, rather than of dipping into what could be essentially a non-renewable resource.

He was particularly concerned about "the phenomenon of bottled water. The multi-nationals are getting into the act," and Canada is exporting water in small containers, "but I sometimes wonder where the tanker trucks are going from the local wells." Mr. Duncanson was given a "small container" of water on a return flight from Europe. The container bore the name of an Alliston bottler.

Is water a commodity to be traded worldwide? Mr. Duncanson quoted the World Bank as saying that "sooner or later, water will be moved around the world as oil is now." The international threat to Canadian water supply would begin with the United States where, he said, President George W. Bush considers water a national security issue.

The topic of the night was "water, from Grand Valley to Queen's Park." It

was aimed more at urging conservation education and action than at explaining how current regulations affect individuals, although Mr. Duncanson made a chart available along with copies of various government news releases.

He did explain to some extent the Clean Water Act (Bill 43) as being a step toward a "bottom up" rather than "top down" approach to water management, based on source protection areas and public representation on source committees.

His concerns with the "protection areas" included a lack of standardized mapping of water resources among Conservation Authorities (CAs), and the fact that only ground water has been mapped with no thought of mapping the aquifers.

Dufferin, as a headwaters area for five river systems - Credit, Nottawasaga, Grand, Humber and Saugeen - was probably the most important of the protection areas. Dufferin's weakness in

control of the five sources, he said, is that representation on the CAs is largely from elsewhere. "It's hard to get their heads turned around," he said.

Allen Taylor, the elder and pastor of the hosting church, referred to a meeting between thenpremier Leslie Frost and then-United States president Dwight Eisenhower, in which the president described Canada as "a nice little country. Don't let them ruin the water the way they've ruined ours."