As most of you know by now, Minister Penner has started a water blog to supposedly allow the public some input to thoughts on amending the Water Act. Many of us are having difficulty having our remarks posted due to the blogs editorial rules.

As Editor of this website, I have offered to post blogs that are refused. Ingmar Lee had his refused as did I, so I wrote back again and removed the "names of persons, organizations" that the moderator considers unsuitable. I combined my note along with Ingmar's note and we are still waiting to see if it gets posted. This note is as follows;

I have MANY comments on WATER as a person who is involved in our whole effort to bring control of our water sources back into public hands. Aquifers ( groundwater) need mapping across this province so that unbridled development is not allowed where there is not adequate,renewable water supplies.

Our watersheds are another HUGE issue! There are few watersheds in this province that are publicly owned and they must all become publicly owned and should be considered off bounds to any logging or ownership by forestry corporations.The government could start by protecting designated community drinking-watersheds from the incessant scourge of logging. Take a Google Earth flight over the Nanaimo drinking watershed for example and see the horrific legacy of private-land logging. The entire 350 sq.km. drinking watershed has been stripped of not only every stick of its once-magnificent primaeval forest cover, but so too have the second forests been stripped off. The Jump Lake reservoir, from where the residents of Nanaimo obtain their drinking water has the highest concentration of logging roads in the province. After heavy rains, massive turbidity plumes can be seen running into the lake. The entire watershed was utterly destroyed by the giant American logging corporation. The entire watershed is owned as ‘private land’ with virtually zero oversight nor even the slightest environmental protections. This Corporation, unbeknownst to the Greater Nanaimo Water District spread more than 60 tons of chemical fertilizers into the area around Jump Lake before it was proven that the Agrium product they were using was derived from US industrial waste containing dioxins.

The government should immediately confiscate all privately held community drinking water supply areas, and designate all such areas, public and private, as off-limits to any sort of logging. We need the very highest standards of protection for these lands which must be set aside solely for the production of pure drinking water, -in perpetuity. Politically, such action would be easily accomplished.

Along with amendments to the Water Act, there must be credibility and enforcement placed back into the Department of Environment.
If the Water Act is to be amended...please give it some meat that is turned toward public ownership of the quality and the supply of water.

2. The second one received is from Nelle Maxey and it reads;

Dear Mr. Penner, et al,

Historically, all peoples at all times have protected their watersheds.
Access to quality water for drinking and washing is not only the basis of human health, but of all human settlement. Access to quantity of water is the basis for all agriculture and industry. The principles of legal pluralism explain that when statute law meets traditional wisdom (common sense/common law) head-on, unrelenting agitation from the public is only to be expected and solutions must be sought to end this conflict.

A true “modernization” of the water act would in fact accomplish three things that would be in the public interest.

First, it would remove the current wording in the Act that excludes resource extraction activities (both forestry and mining) from affecting the volume and safety of our drinking water.

Second, considering the concerns of the government regarding the threats of both the beetle kill and so-called climate change on consumptive use watersheds, the government should reinstate community watershed protections which have historically protected our sources of drinking water. Under the former Act, this protection of community watersheds included by definition ALL streams that had more than 2 domestic use water licenses registered on them. Thus rural residents holding consumptive use licenses but not part of a community water system would have their domestic use rights protected as would all community water systems.

Third, considering the advancements in eco-system science and green economics and the government’s avowed interest in community sustainability, nothing is more important than understanding both how our forest cover is the key to our water supply sustainability and how the costs of destroying our watersheds needs to be factored into discussions of the economic costs of maintaining our water supply. It’s not just about resource extraction jobs, you see.

On your website, you present pie charts of water license distribution in BC. These charts show that 98% of water licences are issued for the production of hydro-electricity. Only 2% are issued for all other uses including community and individual water use, agriculture, commercial and industrial use and wet-land and river-flow protection.

Of that 2% of surface water allocations only 1% is dedicated to domestic use water licenses and 34% to waterworks (community water & wastewater systems). What this means is that we are talking about protecting only .02% of all surface water allocations for domestic use licences and 6.8% of all allocations for urban & rural waterworks.

That is a total of only 7% of the surface water allocations in BC that citizens want protected so they have clean, guaranteed flows of water in their homes and businesses. Considering that 75% to 85% of BC citizens receive their water from surface water sources, that this protection would be in the public interest, is not the question. What is the question is whether the government has the will to protect our rights to quality and quantity of water for drinking, bathing, cooking and wastewater systems. Surely in the interests of health alone, water protection is the “modern” approach to be followed in revisions to the Water Act.

It is extremely short-sited and distinctly “old-fashioned” to believe that the government can continue to relax regulation of all our natural resources to the benefit of corporate interests at the expense of the public interest. If the government continues on their current course in these matters, both political and economic repercussions to are to be expected.