My name is Irene Hassas

In the past 20 year my favourite waterbody has been the Great Lakes in Ontario. I live in Ontario, in Toronto, so definitely Lake Ontario but then I also spend a lot of time on lakes north of the city. I canoe, I kayak, I water ski, lake Simcoe and French River and many other waterbodies in the northern part of Ontario.

I do have some memories, my memories in Canada have been great because since 20 years ago when i moved to Canada I have obviously been canoeing and kayaking which has been always my dream. But before I moved to Canada I was born and raised in Iran and about 20 years ago I came here but before that I lived in northern part of Iran sort of on the Caspian Sea and that was sort of my summer adventure with my family. My family is from that part of the country, we used to do a lot of boating and it was amazing to experience the Caspian Sea. That's sort of the great memory I have from my childhood. The other thing is we always had the best access to drinking water in terms of taste and quality. Since I have moved here especially in the past couple of decades things have been changing so much in terms of the water management approaches that people cannot drink even the tap water and its just because of bad management of water sources. Its very unfortunate and so we are obviously at the Canadian Water Summit today and I can't wait to see some of these programs and plans to be used in a way that will not only protect our great lakes here in Ontario and Canada which is my waterbody today but also help other regions and other countries around the world to have access to good drinking water and obviously to sustain that too.