About CWIC

The Canadian Water Issues Council (CWIC) is a project of the Program on Water Issues. It includes many of Canada’s most knowledgeable water experts and former senior water policy makers. It was formed in 2007 to conduct policy research, within a university setting, on the topic of Canada/United States transboundary water issues. CWIC members act as advisors to the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs (formerly the Munk Centre for International Studies) at the University of Toronto. They bring technical expertise, political experience, a passion for water issues and a network of senior government, academic, industry and media contacts. Reports and other publications prepared by CWIC can be found in Bulk Water and Canada / US Transboundary Issues.

Biographies of Current Members

Chad Day Dr. Day specializes in water and land management, environmental impact assessment, and sustainable development. His major focus concerns the effectiveness and efficiency of institutional arrangements to support sustainable resource management practices. Within this area he has extensive experience in international river basin and coastal zone management, interbasin water transfers, water quality management, environmental regulation, and coal and mineral regulation policy. In the 1990’s he began research on shared decision making in land and water management.

In 1994, he helped organize a trinational symposium on Competition, Innovation, and Sustainability related to NAFTA. Further, since 1990 he has been involved a variety of projects in China related to sustainable management of water and land management projects, as well as advising on regional economic development proposals in China.

Dr. Day is a past director of the International Association for Impact Assessment, a director of the Canadian Coastal Engineering and Science Association, as well as the current chair of the Greater Vancouver Regional District Advisory Committee. He was a panel member for the Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office during the assessment of the Third Runway at Vancouver International Airport.

Adèle Hurley, C.M., FRSC Adèle Hurley is the Director of the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. In the 1980s, during the early days of the Reagan Administration, Adèle Hurley moved to Washington and co-founded the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain. For several years she worked on a successful campaign that brought about amendments to the US Clean Air Act, as well as regulations that reduced pollutants from large Canadian emitters. In the early 1990s she was appointed to the Board of Ontario Hydro. In 1995, she was appointed by the Prime Minister’s Office to serve as Canadian Co-Chair of the International Joint Commission, which oversees Canada/US Boundary water issues according to the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. Adèle has served as a member of the Canadian Federal Government’s International Trade Advisory Committee – Task Force on Environment and Trade Policy, Board of Directors of the Ontario Power Authority, and Water Advisory Board of the Columbia Basin Trust.

She is Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Joanna Kidd Joanna Kidd has been working in the environmental field since 1982, first as a researcher for the Pollution Probe Foundation, then as a Senior Consultant at Lura Consulting and currently as the principal of Kidd Consulting.

As a consultant Joanna provides environmental planning, communications and public involvement services to a wide range of public sector clients (municipal, provincial, federal and international). She has an extensive background in water issues. In the Great Lakes Basin, she has been involved in four Remedial Action Plans, four SOLEC conferences, and projects relating to transboundary groundwater, contaminated sediments, community health indicators, withdrawals and diversions from the Great Lakes, the US/Canada Bi-National Toxics Strategy and the International Upper Great Lakes Study. Working with the Ontario government, conservation authorities and municipalities, she has extensive experience in watershed planning and reporting. Joanna has authored reports on many water-related issues including the State of the Great Lakes, stormwater management strategies, groundwater in North America, best practices in watershed planning, sustainable shoreline development and watershed report cards. She has been an advisor to the Program on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto since its founding in 2001.

Clifford Lincoln Clifford Lincoln entered politics and was elected to the Quebec National Assembly in 1981 as a member of the Quebec Liberal Party. The Liberals took power as a result of the 1985 election and Lincoln was appointed to Robert Bourassa’s cabinet as Minister of the Environment. Lincoln resigned from cabinet in 1989, along with two other anglophone ministers, to protest the Bourassa government’s language policy and its adoption of Bill 178 which invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution in order to require French to be the dominant language on commercial signs.

He won a seat in parliament in the 1993 federal election for Lachine–Lac-Saint-Louis and was re-elected as the MP for Lac-Saint-Louis in 1997 and 2000. He served as parliamentary secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of the Environment from 1993 until 1996 and was Chairman of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage from 1997 until 2004. In the latter role he authored a report on Canadian broadcasting, Our Cultural Sovereignty: The Second Century of Canadian Broadcasting.

Lincoln retired from politics at the 2004 federal election and was subsequently appointed Chairman of the Panel on Access to Third-language Public Television Services by the federal government.

Mark Mattson In the last decade, Mark Mattson has emerged as one of Canada’s most dedicated environmental lawyers. He left a career as a criminal defence attorney to pursue a practice focused on environmental and regulatory matters. He has acted as counsel for environmental and public interest groups at some fifty hearings, as well as representing the public at both the Provincial and Federal level and has appeared on behalf of clients in front of the International Water Tribunal in Amsterdam.

Mr. Mattson currently serves as President and Waterkeeper with Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and the Canadian representative to Waterkeeper Alliance’s Board of Directors. He is the supervising attorney with the Clean Water Workshop, a program dedicated to mentoring law students and providing legal tools to citizens fighting for clean water in their communities. Mr. Mattson is a skilled leader in defending Canadians’ clean water rights using tools such as private prosecutions, Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights, and federal and provincial environmental assessments. He participated in landmark hearings such as the Walkerton Inquiry and is credited with helping Ontario residents win some of the largest fines ever levied under Canada’s Fisheries Act for landfill pollution. He has been a guest lecturer on environmental law at numerous seminars and other forums, including the University of Toronto. Mr. Mattson is a former board member of Great Lakes United.

Prior to launching Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, Mark Mattson founded the volunteer-based Environmental Bureau of Investigation, dedicated to identifying and prosecuting environmental offenders. Mr. Mattson is co-author of The Citizens Guide to Environmental Investigation and Private Prosecution (2000). He is a graduate of the University of Windsor School of Law and received his BA from Queens University. He is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Ralph Pentland Ralph Pentland is currently President of Ralbet Enterprises Inc., where he has been active in consulting on a variety of water and environmental policy issues. From 1978 to 1991, he was Director of Water Planning and Management in the Canadian Department of the Environment. In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing numerous Canada – U.S. and Federal – Provincial agreements and arrangements, and was the prime author of the Federal water Policy that was tabled in Parliament in 1987. With respect to Great Lakes issues, he served as Canadian Co-Chairman of the IJC’s Diversions and Consumptive Uses Study Board (1978 – 1982), the IJC’s Protection of the Great Lakes Study Team (1999 – 2000), the IJC’s International Water Uses Review Task Force (2002 – 2003), and the IJC’s Ten Year Review Committee, Protection of the Great Lakes (2014 – 2015). Between 1991 and 2000, he worked on water and environmental policy issues in a number of countries, including Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Indonesia, Poland, China and India. Since 2000, he has collaborated with a number of non-governmental and academic organizations, and in 2013, he co-authored the book “Down the Drain: How We Are Failing to Protect our Water Resources”

Frank Quinn Frank Quinn received his B.A. (1962) from the University of Toronto, and his M.A.(1965) and Ph.D (1970) in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has over three decades of water planning and policy experience with the Government of Canada. In addition, he has taught university classes at Arizona, Washington, Victoria, Queen’s and Ottawa, and served as a regional director of both the Canadian and American Water Resources Associations. In 1984, Frank was seconded from Environment Canada to assume the duties of Director of Research for the Inquiry on Federal Water Policy. In 1986-89 he represented Canada periodically on the Natural Resources Management Group of OECD. In 1999-2000 he became Special Advisor to the International Joint Commission which had received a Reference from Canada and the United States to investigate the consumption, diversion and removal of Great Lakes waters. At its 2001 meeting, the Canadian Association of Geographers presented him with its award for Geography in the Service of Government or Business. He has published almost 50 articles and monographs in his major areas of interest, which are federal water policy, interbasin water diversion and export, and Canada-United States boundary water issues.

Owen Saunders Owen Saunders is Executive Director of the Canadian Institute of Resources Law and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary, where he teaches public international law. His research interests have included water law, international law, environmental law, natural resources law, and constitutional law. He has written numerous articles on the legal aspects of natural resources management, including transboundary resource management generally and water management specifically. He has acted as an advisor to Canadian and foreign governments and international organizations on resource management and environmental issues, including transboundary water concerns. He served on the binational study team advising the International Joint Commission on its 1999-2000 Water Uses Reference, in which capacity he had the lead role in preparing the legal background paper for the Commission. Subsequently, he was a member of the four-person task force created by the Commission to prepare a three-year update on the Water Uses Reference.