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Living Water Smart

    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “At the end of the day, good decision-making comes down to a good process. But it also relies on wisdom in terms of balanced advice,” stated Peter Steblin, Chief Administrative Officer with the City of Coquitlam


    “Balance is key to good government. One needs good administrative expertise to advise and serve the political arm. At the same time, the political arm has to trust the administrative arm. The two arms must work together. Council buy-in follows when Council fundamentally respects the work that Staff does. In Coquitlam, respect has grown over time. It would not be possible without a really wise, good servant’s heart within the Council table. An airplane analogy is one way to describe the relationship. Think of one wing as political and the other as administration. If either wing is not functioning properly, the plane will crash,” stated Peter Steblin.

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    THE EMERGING CRISIS AROUND GROUNDWATER LEGISLATION IMPLEMENTATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “By not applying, the historical water users are effectively giving the government back the volumes of water they were using. After March 1, 2022, these volumes go back into the communal system for reallocation and when they apply, the historical users will be at the back of the line,” stated Donna Forsyth, former Legislative Advisor in the Ministry of Environment (May 2021)


    “When the government changed the rules with the Water Sustainability Act, it recognized that it was placing a new regulatory burden on historic groundwater users and gave them time to continue using their water while they applied for the licences. Now, the time to get those applications in is running out. If historic, non-domestic water users don’t get their licence applications in by March 1 2022, they’ll not only lose their authority to use the water, but they could experience a gap of years before a decision is made on their applications,” warns Donna Forsyth.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “We do not have the luxury of time to wait for a younger generation to go through their learning curve to figure out what goes into operationalizing the foundation pieces for achieving a water-resilient future,” stated Kim Stephens, Executive Director, Partnership for Water Sustainability (May 2021)


    “Technical knowledge alone is not enough! Making things happen in the real world requires an appreciation for and understanding of human behaviour, combined with a knowledge of how decisions are made. It takes a career to figure this out! Elders have a responsibility to pass on understanding and wisdom. However, responsibility is a two-way street because minds must be open to accepting the inter-generational baton and embracing the wisdom that goes with it. With this thought in mind, I created the ‘time continuum graphic’ to conceptualize the thinking that guides the Partnership’s mission,” stated Kim Stephens.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Do we have the intelligence and will to impel change? Can convention be busted open again to develop sustainably? This book encourages sustainable change agents to make fundamental, systemic change. Please go implement. Now,” stated Kim Fowler, local government planner and author of Dockside Green, the story of the world’s most sustainable development


    “We have proven a model, that can be replicated in whole or in part. There are parts people can take – for example, I describe the Triple Bottom Line matrix used in the Request for Proposals for the Dockside Green land sale. Please, go use it! Adapt it to your project. My message to those who are interested in sustainable development is to take the pieces from Dockside Green that would work for you. The vision for the Dockside Green redevelopment called for a mixed use, sustainable development based on Triple Bottom Line (TBL) principles. This then directed the Development Concept,” stated Kim Fowler.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Everyone in a local government organization needs to recognize that asset management is a process, not a plan,” stated Wally Wells, Asset Management BC Executive Director, when explaining application of BC’s Framework for Sustainable Service Delivery (May 2021)


    “The important and telling part of the title is Asset Management is a process to provide a sound basis for decisions relating to the function – which is service delivery! Assets exist and are created, upgraded, replaced, maintained, and operated to provide a service. There is no other reason for their existence than provision of the intended service. So, when considering a project related to an asset, we should be considering the service the asset is to provide. An Australian associate once said: ‘an asset without a user has no value’,” stated Wally Wells.

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    CREATING SAFE CITIES FOR SALMON: “Using the Salmon-Safe Urban eco-certification as an evaluative framework for policy comparison, the study showcases the many efforts being made across the Lower Fraser region to develop cities more sustainably with wild salmon populations in mind,” reported Andrea McDonald, author of the joint research study by the Pacific Water Research Centre and the Salmon-Safe BC team (May 2021)


    “Protection of salmon and their habitat from the adverse impacts of urban development is a challenging task that requires an all-of-government response. Findings from this research highlight the variable involvement and guidance provided from the higher levels of government in Canada. As one expert noted, the province must provide more clarity on direct regulatory obligations which have compliance initiatives in place to enforce them. Inadequate statutory foundations and enforcement of current regulations have only hindered the implementation of nature-based solutions to protect salmon in cities,” stated Andrea McDonald.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “The lack of communication between different government agencies and between governments and stewardship groups is concerning,” stated Nikki Kroetsch, DFO’s Community Engagement Coordinator with the Pacific Science Enterprise Centre in West Vancouver, when she explained why the current state of environmental monitoring in BC communities is a call to action (May 2021)


    “The Pacific Science Enterprise Centre, known as PSEC, as a whole is addressing the ‘lack of collaboration’ issue quite simply by embracing and facilitating collaboration, but in my role as Community Engagement Coordinator I’ve also been specifically attempting to address the lack of communication regarding environmental monitoring; albeit slowly and methodically, as I’m only one person! Specifically I’m doing this through the PSEC Community Stream Monitoring project, which we call CoSMo for short,” stated Nikki Kroetsch.

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    THE EMERGING CRISIS AROUND GROUNDWATER LEGISLATION IMPLEMENTATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: As deadline looms, thousands of BC groundwater users risk losing access to water, but not most water bottling, fracking and mining companies, warns the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (May 2021)


    When the Water Sustainability Act was first introduced in 2016, it was one of those rare pieces of legislation that enjoyed widespread if at times qualified support from the governing and opposition parties alike. In introducing the bill, then Liberal environment minister Mary Polak, said the time had come to effectively count and manage every drop of water in the province. “This legislation delivers on government’s commitments to modernize B.C.’s water laws, regulate groundwater use and strengthen provincial water management,” she stated.

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    THE EMERGING CRISIS AROUND GROUNDWATER LEGISLATION IMPLEMENTATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “All water users in BC need to know that the government takes unauthorized water use seriously. Enforcing the law will send a powerful message to historic groundwater users that if they fail to get in the queue by March of next year, there will be consequences,” said Ben Parfitt, resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Pollution Alternatives (May 2021)


    If historic, non-domestic water users don’t get their licence applications in by March 1 2022, they’ll not only lose their authority to use the water, but they could experience a gap of years before a decision is made on their applications. “It is entirely possible that after the deadline ranchers or farmers who had used water from their wells for a century but failed to meet the licence deadline could find themselves competing for the same resource alongside new bottled water companies. That’s a minefield the government does not want to step into,” stated Ben Parfitt.

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    DOING SCIENCE DIFFERENTLY IN LOCAL CREEKSHEDS: “Stewardship groups are such an underutilized resource right now. My Masters research looked at how governments can better collaborate with stream stewardship groups on environmental monitoring initiatives,” stated DFO’s Nikki Kroetsch, Community Engagement Coordinator with the Pacific Science Enterprise Centre in West Vancouver


    “According to the federal, provincial, and local government employees and the stewardship group volunteers I interviewed for my Masters research, data collection is currently siloed and unorganized. Many people are collecting essentially the same data, but because there’s very little communication and data sharing going on between them, it means a lot of duplicated efforts, which is a huge waste of resources given that monitoring is often time consuming and expensive to conduct,” stated Nikki Kroetsch.

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