Convening for Action in British Columbia

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BC Water Sustainability Action Plan

    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Remembering Barry Janyk, political champion for Smart Development” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in January 2025


    Bruce Milne was elected mayor of Sechelt the same year Barry Janyk was first elected to council, in 1996. “He held us all to account for the next three years, to make sure we really did make some change,” said Bruce Milne. “Elected officials who weren’t as confident sometimes found a lack of space left over for less confident people to be difficult for them, but it was never a problem when he was actually advocating for Gibsons or the Sunshine Coast.” Barry Janyk’s environmentalism was a pillar not only of his life, but his time in office.

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    CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “Knowing what we know about the past three decades, the re-set is not as simple as going from an X to a tick mark in each column of the table of cascading factors,” stated Ray Fung, a past-chair of the Green Infrastructure Partnership


    Nine cascading factors that must be in alignment to implement a course correction. At the top of the list of cascading factors is political leadership and commitment to the shared vision. Leadership boils down to a willingness to act and bring together other champions willing to provide the type of energy and organizational drive that overcomes inertia. “The current reality is that you have to build new political commitment and basically start all over again in a new crucible phase…where you coalition-build to develop a new shared vision, etc.,” stated Ray Fung.

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    WILL 2025 BE THE YEAR OF THE RE-SET AS DECISION-MAKERS BUILD ON LESSONS FROM THE PAST? – “Deep knowledge is rapidly being lost. Organizational amnesia is the consequence, and this creates risks and liabilities for communities,” stated Kim Stephens of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in the season opener for Waterbucket eNews


    “Re-set means implement a course correction so that governments would maintain and manage engineered and natural assets as interconnected components within a system that includes the people who live there. What would success look like? At a high level, the community writ large would buy-in to the need and financial case for funding SOLUTIONS THAT ARE AFFORDABLE, EFFECTIVE AND PRAGMATIC. That is the point of departure for setting in motion changes that are for the common good,” stated Kim Stephens.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia Will 2025 be the year of the re-set?” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in January 2025


    “Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. And everyone here will ultimately be judged – will ultimately judge himself – on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort,” stated Robert Kennedy in 1966. Considered his greatest speech, it popularized the phrase ”may you live in interesting times”. The phrase is ironic because “interesting” times are usually times of trouble.

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    DOWNLOADS FOR THE FALL 2024 SEASON OF THE LIVING WATER SMART SERIES: “Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication,” stated Professor Rives Collins, author of ‘The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling’


    We share our world view through our stories and storytelling This is how we pass on our oral history. Storytelling is the way we share intergenerational knowledge, experience and wisdom. “Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times,” stated Professor Rives Collins, Northwestern University, author of “The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling”.

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    CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “Few people know how important the Fraser Valley is to food security for British Columbia. The question is…does anyone care, really?” – Ted van der Gulik, President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability, and former Senior Engineer in the Ministry of Agriculture (6th installment in a preview series)


    “The fertile Fraser Valley is some of the best farmland in Canada and can grow a lot of the food that we need. To get to food security in BC, we need to increase the irrigated area from 200,000 to 300,000 hectares. If we invest in the infrastructure needed to supply water from the Fraser River, one-third of the additional 100,000 could be provided in the Fraser Valley. But we are slowly losing our land base for growing food. And it is not because land is coming out of the Agricultural Land Reserve. Rather, it is all about what is happening on the land within the ALR,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “Meeting Metro Vancouver’s urgent housing demand is exactly the sort of situation for which we developed the regional growth strategies legislation in the 1990s,” stated Mike Harcourt, former Premier of British Columbia whose leadership made possible the Growth Strategies Act (5th installment in a preview series)


    “How do we manage the number of people that are moving into the Georgia Basin when we have a very tough geography where the urban space is pretty limited by the sea and the mountains, and by rivers and agricultural land and park wilderness. When you take all that out, there is not a lot of land for urban development and an urban population. Cities are all about choices. much will depend upon getting the choices right,” stated Mike Harcourt.

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    CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “Local governments need a real number based on financial value if they want to get natural assets into their management plans on a regular basis. EAP gives them that,” stated Tim Pringle, Chair of the Ecological Accounting Process (EAP)


    “The question we asked was, how do you find that number? Well, we can treat a stream as a land use because we have the Riparian Areas Protection Regulation and we have BC Assessment for land values. The rest of it is the methodology that does the right calculation. Local governments have a spatial way of looking at land use. EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, is a spatial view because the methodology is keyed to parcels which is as spatial as you can get. EAP allows local governments to explore the financial impact of land development choices,” stated Tim Pringle.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Election day flooding spurs re-set and course correction” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2024


    “With an update underway in early 2023, Metro Vancouver staff reached out to me for historical perspective on the ‘streams and trees’ component of the region’s Liquid Waste Management Plan. Because I had been the chair of the advisory panel for the region’s second LWMP in 2010, this evolved into a knowledge-sharing process. What did you learn along the way, they would ask, and where did that lead each time. Because of their questions, what started out as a chronology of events grew into something much bigger in scope. The Chronicle is a tome,” stated Kim Stephens.

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    CHRONICLE OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION: “Erik Karlsen was the secret sauce who convened the fantastic streamside regulation discussions that created collegiality between municipalities,” recalls Susan Haid, adjunct assistant professor at the University of BC


    Susan Haid has played a leadership role in trailblazing an ecosystem-based approach to community planning in British Columbia, first with the City of Burnaby and then with Metro Vancouver. This approach also took root in her subsequent experience in the District of North Vancouver and the City of Vancouver. “In many ways, what I am teaching comes back to the same kind of framework around ecosystem-based planning which Erik Karlsen and others were advancing in the 1990s, and which is synonymous with watershed-based planning,” stated Susan Haid.

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