Alberta Environment & Sustainable Resources
Our Water Our Future – A Plan for Action – November 2014
Water Conversations With Albertans
What Happened in Red Deer
In attendance: 72
March 14, 2013
Healthy Lakes
- The entire watershed needs to be considered
- Increase the collaboration of stakeholders, government departments and users
- Need more education and awareness to help all Albertans understand the impact they have on the health of lakes and the actions they can take to improve
- Lakes should be managed locally, but include provincial standards for septic systems and setbacks
Drinking water and wastewater systems
- System is working, do not fix what isn’t broken
- No to privatization, water should not be sold for profit or managed by third parties
- Regionalization should take into account the different needs of the regions
- Forward thinking and long-term planning is needed
Hydraulic fracturing
- What are the long-term impacts; should development be slowed down until there is more information?
- Is baseline testing adequate enough to fully understand the current state?
- More information needs to be shared – concerns that information is being withheld, would like more communication between industry and landowners
- Concerns that landowners will have fewer options under the single regulator
Water management
- Water that remains in the water cycle should be treated differently than water that is lost
- Water is not a commodity, unused allocations should be evaluated and reallocated
- Regional planning and management could be enhanced
What Happened in Drumheller
In attendance: 25
March 19, 2013
Healthy lakes
- Must maintain both quality and quantity of lakes and watersheds
- Use all mechanisms to do this – education, monitoring, enforcement, and legislation
- Reservoir health is important
- Need better regulations for lakeshore developments
- Need a consistent framework, clear authority to manage lakes province-wide – lake by lake approach is not sufficient
- Prescriptive versus subjective approaches to management – look at both of these
- Need greater transparency
Hydraulic fracturing
- Need to enhance regulatory framework
- More transparent, accessible info needed for laypeople
- Finger-printing for aquifers, wells
- Must use saline and low quality water sources first
- More monitoring of groundwater, aquifers is needed
- Government should incentivize partnerships between users to maximize efficiency of water use
- Bottom line: we need to protect water and ecosystem health
Drinking water and wastewater systems
- Conservation important – we need to use more gray water
- More consistent monitoring and enforcement for systems that have semi-regular users (youth camps was the specific example that came up)
- Geographic approach is acceptable as long as the focus continues to be on local realities
- P3s are not a viable solution for delivery of these services
- If government proposes standardized changes/upgrades, government should be responsible for costs and delivery of changes
- Infrastructure and operating costs are different and both need to be accounted for
Water management
- Need to protect waters in rivers – in-stream flow
- Need to enhance water storage and consider all possible mechanisms to do this
- Transfers – need to consider end-use (role for government to do this)
- Incentivize conservation – this requires being able to measure usage
Above article is from Water Canada – June 2013