And so it is!
The Government of Canada officially announced last week, in our fair city, that the new Canada Water Agency would be established as a standalone entity and will be housed — proudly — in the capital of our province.
While many of us knew this months ago, it seems that now the wheels are firmly in motion and that Canada’s very own water agency is set to cut the ribbon shortly (after existing under the wing of Environment and Climate Change Canada for a temporary interim period).
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The IISD Experimental Lakes Area is a freshwater research facility about 300 kilometres east of Winnipeg. Its executive director says the new Canada Water Agency has plenty of work ahead of it.
It’s hard to understand how sorely needed this agency is without taking a step back to consider the current landscape of Canada’s water resources — and the laundry list of issues that the soon-to-be-minted agency must tackle.
While, on one hand, Canadians are blessed with abundant freshwater supplies (seven per cent of the world’s renewable supply, to be exact), our fragmented approach to its protection means that we are lagging behind our peers when it comes to safeguarding those precious supplies.
The issues abound, so I will be brief.
We’re a massive country with watersheds that spread across municipal and provincial boundaries, but our response to water issues is diluted across our complicated patchworks of local and federal governments.
Also, given our expansiveness (and relatively small population), we don’t have robust mechanisms to keep tabs on the health of water systems across the nation (through consistent and harmonized monitoring efforts), nor to share those results to make better — and more effective — decisions.
(Don’t get me wrong, there are great things happening across the land, but they’re not tied together to have the impact they need to have.)
So, we need a national response to a national problem.
And while our cousins to the south of the border have had a dedicated national office to tackle national water issues for decades, the nascent Canada Water Agency will have much to do once it opens its doors.
I’m excited to see that one of the first orders of business will be a review of the Canada Water Act.
Last updated in 1970(!), the Act seeks to support and provide for the management of water resources in Canada. But much has changed in 54 years, and our national body for water protection must incorporate new realties and threats into its federal mandate.
One of those new realities is the growing importance and recognition of Indigenous rights and knowledge, which must be incorporated into any new strategy to tackle freshwater health, especially given the ever-intensifying impact of climate change about which Indigenous forms of knowledge has much to teach us. Grand Council Treaty No. 3, for example, over in Ontario has declared that nibi (water) is a life force, is alive and has a spirit in a landmark declaration.
I’m excited to see how the new Canada Water Agency incorporates this critical lens into its work.
Then, there is always the question of data. We need to work to pull together the fruits of all the official (and unofficial) efforts currently underway across Canada to track the health of fresh water — from government monitoring to homegrown citizen science programs — to build a robust painting of where we are at, and where we need to be.
The Canada Water Agency has been sorely needed for a long time in this country, and I am thrilled to welcome it to our city.
Now, we need to determine how the CWA tackles all the myriad issues that plague Canada’s freshwater supplies, to benefit us now, and for generations to come.
Pauline Gerrard is the executive director of the IISD Experimental Lakes Area.
