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As Canadians head this summer to lakes and rivers to enjoy our beautiful freshwater heritage, most probably think the water is well protected by the Canadian government. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There was a time in the 1960s and ’70s when environmental protection for our freshwater supplies was strong and scientists were respected and heard. Over the next decades, freshwater policy was increasingly politicized and environmental concerns were forced to compete with demands to use these waterways and watersheds for industrial development.
Many responsibilities for water were handed over to the provinces, creating a mishmash of policies. The Freshwater Institute and the National Water Research Institute were essentially gutted in successive budgets, leaving a dramatically reduced role for the federal government.
Federal water policy has not been updated in 40 years and consecutive Environment Canada reports have warned of a looming water crisis as a result. The Council of Canadian Academies recently warned that our groundwater supplies are “increasingly threatened by misuse and contamination.” Yet we have just started to map our groundwater supplies and it will take two decades to assess their sustainability.
The Great Lakes are terribly polluted and are being drawn down faster than the recharge can replenish them. Lake Winnipeg is very sick. The Athabasca River’s existence is imperilled by the unrestrained water takings and contamination from the production of heavy oil in the Alberta oilsands.
Through its effects on evaporation and snowpacks, climate warming is exacerbating the problems. We also have 1,300 melting glaciers, all of them due for total melt. Yet the Stephen Harper government has no concrete plans to combat global warming.
Canada is the only industrialized country not to have a national drinking water standard. While drinking water in our cities is thankfully safe and regulated by the provinces, the state of water in First Nations communities— a federal responsibility — is a travesty. Many other small communities also have questionable water supplies.
The Harper government has continued the assault on our water heritage. It does little to enforce the Fisheries Act, generally regarded as Canada’s toughest water law. Half the mining operations in Canada violate the act.
Recent amendments to the act allow lakes and rivers to be designated as “tailing impoundment areas”— dumpsites for mining waste. Mining companies have the go-ahead to dump their tailings into perfectly healthy bodies of water, such as Sandy Pond in Newfoundland and Fish Lake in British Columbia. Eleven pristine water bodies are currently slated for destruction under this law.
The 2009 federal budget essentially gutted the Navigable Water Protection Act, which protected our waterways as a public trust and required an environmental assessment to build dams, bridges and other major developments.
Now the decision for environmental assessment to protect our navigable water systems from overdevelopment rests with the transport minister. This is part of a planned overhaul of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which might see federal environmental assessments drop by 95 per cent.
Not content with its abandonment of Canada’s freshwater heritage, the Harper government is now putting the international freshwater program in danger as well.
For 30 years, Canada has hosted the Global Environment Monitoring System, assessing more than 3,000 freshwater sites around the world and supplying 24 UN agencies with vital information upon which to build and assess water policy.
The system, known as GEMS, is the dominant global system to monitor water quality and has been built with Canadian expertise and technology. But in recent years, successive federal governments have starved the program so much that director Edwin Ongley quit the program in 1998, citing the “abysmally naive understanding by Environment Canada of emerging global water issues.”
In early 2008, senior Environment Canada officials told GEMS scientists that the program would no longer be funded in Canada. After a public outcry, Environment Minister Jim Prentice contradicted his officials and said the program would remain after all; but the funding allocated is only $500,000 a year—half the already diminished previous budget and nowhere near enough to keep the program going.
As a result, GEMS scientists could not continue their contribution to the 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership report, an important initiative to track and recommend on invasive species and loss of biodiversity. Nor could they contribute global indicators to the recently released UN World Water Development Report, arguably the most comprehensive compilation on the world water crisis ever written.
Ottawa’s lack of support for this internationally renowned program is embarrassing.
The world is experiencing a growing water crisis that poses one of the greatest ecological and human threats of our time. The Canadian government must get its act together now.
David Schindler is the Killam Memorial professor of ecology at the University of Alberta. Maude Barlow is national chairwoman of the Council of Canadians and senior adviser on water to the president of the UN General Assembly.
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