A University of Calgary water expert is warning that Alberta is unprepared to manage water in the 21st century.
Tricia Stadnyk, speaking on a recent webinar about water conservation and sovereignty, described a perfect storm of factors impacting Alberta’s freshwater.
Glaciers and snowpacks in mountain headwaters are melting faster than before, resulting in a decreasing supply of water in important rivers.
Demand for water is increasing from a growing population and industrial users, especially in the oil and gas sector.
The province has weak and outdated water management policies.
And the Trump administration is looking north to solve the water woes of the drought-stricken American southwest.
All these factors add up to a big water problem for Alberta, according to Stadnyk.
“There’s just a fundamental lack of leadership around water governance,” Stadnyk said in a follow-up interview with TheRockies.Life. “This does not position Canada to be able to mount a federal response to geopolitical threats in this day and age.”
Getting its own water management house in order is critical for Alberta.
“A water crisis is how I would describe it.” Stadnyk said.
Drought conditions
In February of this year more than thirty Alberta rivers, including the Bow, Elbow, Oldman and Kannakaskis, were already in drought condition.
In March the snowpack on the eastern slopes was 25 to 30 percent lower than is normal for that time of year.
Consequently, mountain run-off into the Bow River basin is now forecasted to be below or much below average this year.
Last year, the province declared a drought and initiated unprecedented water-sharing negotiations between license holders due to lack of snow melt. This year’s snowpack is thinner than last’s.
“This year is unheard of and we still haven’t declared a drought,” Stadynyk said.
An outdated water system
Alberta’s outdated water governance system is not helping ease drought conditions.
It’s known as a fit-first system, or first in time, first in right.
The oldest license holders have the right to withdraw all their water before any other license holders, regardless of what is needed to sustain ecosystems and water, river and snowpack conditions.
After Western Canada was colonized, all water was divided up and managed this way for decades.
BC scrapped it. Manitoba and Saskatchewan still have it but with amendments that allow the provincial government to take control of licenses and water allocation during a drought.
Alberta’s water license system hasn’t changed since it left the printer’s in the late 1800s.
Reality has changed
Needless to say, the playing field has changed. Alberta’s population has exploded 12-fold since the first water licenses were issued.
When these water licensing rules were made, lawmakers viewed freshwater as limitless. Today, our understanding of water resources is light years ahead.
Fit-first didn’t – and still doesn’t – factor in the importance of wetlands and other natural systems that humans, plants and animals depend upon.
And it didn’t include everyone who needed water.
“First Nations people were not allowed to hold water licenses and the ecosystem was never issued an allocation,” Stadnyk said.
Water, not oil
Furthermore, the fit-first system was created at a time before the arrival of water-intensive industries like oil and gas, not to mention artificial intelligence and large data centres for computing.
“So how is the Alberta government going to meet their plan of supporting growth in the AI and tech sector?” Stadny said.
“Every single city or municipality that has housed a Google data centre or any equivalent to Google has found that their watershed usage has gone up by almost 30 percent the minute that that centre became operational. We don’t have 30 percent left to give in the South Saskatchewan River basin. We’re already maxed out.”
What to do?
Canada is home to an estimated 20 percent of the world’s freshwater, but Alberta holds very little of this. Much of Alberta’s fresh water is in the north, while much of the province’s population and industry is in the south.
The Palliser Triangle, which includes a large chunk of southeastern Alberta, is one of the driest places in Canada and is home to a multi-billion dollar, irrigation-dependent agriculture sector.
“Our relationship with water is absurdly out of sync with reality,” she said.
She said the playbook has been written by places like Orange County, California that has had to adapt to a 25 years-and-counting drought.
She is calling for simple water conservation measures, like making it mandatory to have grey water recycling into modern homes and commercial structures.
She also said the province needs to blow up the fit-first licensing model to bring it into line with current climate change and water conservation realities.
“Where are we going with new industry and new people and growing cities if we’re not considering water as a limiting factor?” Stadnyk said. “I can tell you confidently right now from the point of food production, from the point of energy and from the point of manufacturing and industry, water is absolutely the biggest single biggest limiting factor for this jurisdiction.”
