EDITORS NOTE: Below is some valuable information from a Council of Canadians person in Alberta. They are doing the same fight that we are doing here when it comes to Water Markets . Thanks to the C of C in Alberta and Scott Harris for the following.
I’m sorry that your government is looking at heading down the same path that Alberta has been looking at for the past two years. I’ve just now taken a look at some of this, and printed off the Water Act and technical background report to read later. Given a quick once-over it seems that many of the same arguments we’ve seen trotted out here in Alberta are the ones that are being applied. The upside for you is that your government is actually consulting on it (one of our key messages is the need for public consultations … and they’ve been put off of two years with no sign they’re coming). The good news is that once people hear about water markets, they oppose them. We’ve actually managed to stop markets here in their tracks with our campaign (don’t fret, they’ll be back after the election), mostly because people freak out when they hear.
If you want a bit of background you can check out some of the work that we’ve done here in Alberta through a coalition call Our Water is Not for Sale that we helped pull together:
http://ourwaterisnotforsale.com/One report that has been useful is the Conference Board of Canada’s Going With the Flow? Evolving Water Allocations and the Potential and Limits of Water Markets in Canada, in part because it critiques markets (mostly) from a pretty mainstream position. Not super strong on markets (ie. it doesn’t come right out and oppose them), but decent.
Another great resource has been the Australian organization Fair Water Use (
http://www.fairwateruse.com.au/) which is trying to rollback Australia’s catastrophic move to water markets.
On the other side, the Alberta Water Research Institute (AWRI) is our government’s ideological fodder for much of this stuff, and its website (
http://www.waterinstitute.ca/financial_market_based_instruments_for_sustainable_water_management.htm) is a trove of pro-market arguments. This one is particularly interesting:
http://www.waterinstitute.ca/pdf/2010_water_resource_allocation.pdfSorry that you have to join us in this fight, but I suppose misery does love company.