By Sheldon Spackman

Raising the alarm in Red Deer over Canada’s unprotected waters

Jul 23, 2018 | 1:56 PM

A nation-wide campaign to raise the alarms over Canadian waters being largely unprotected was highlighted in Red Deer over the weekend.

The Red Deer chapter of Council of Canadians held signs at City Hall Park and then McKenzie Trails on Saturday that read ‘Every Lake, Every River. Their hope was to raise awareness locally that 99 percent of the country’s lakes and rivers have been left unprotected under the Navigable Waters Act.

Christopher D’lima, Chairperson for the Red Deer and Area Chapter of Council of Canadians, says the nation-wide campaign has been ongoing for over two years now and essentially would like to see the country’s waters be protected and remain clean.

“We feel that clean water connects us all,” says D’lima. “We use it for cooking, cleaning and especially for drinking as well as our fisheries and all that. To have healthy fish, we obviously have to have clean water.”

He says Canadians have a shared responsibility to ensure that clean water is available for all.

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“Locally, what we are doing is just reinforcing the idea that it’s important to have clean rivers and clean lakes. In the past, the federal government has kind of gutted the legislation that dealt with the water and rivers and lakes. The present federal government has taken a look at all the legislation and they’re doing a lot of consultation just to ensure that perhaps the protections are back.”

D’lima says the Council of Canadians feels the general public needs more education regarding the current lack of protection for Canadian lakes and rivers.

“We do believe however that folks are definitely more interested in environmental concerns and this has been increasing radically according to what the polls say. People are definitely more concerned but the process takes a while. Bringing this to the consciousness of folks every now and then by having these little signage things helps a lot.”

D’lima points out there are only about 97 lakes and 62 rivers that are protected.

“We feel that the more people are aware, they will speak to the MLA’s, maybe speak to government,” says D’lima. “We have a petition going on our website and they can sign it, so when the federal government realizes that people are more aware and want better legislation, they will increase the protection in the legislation, then hopefully go ahead because right now they are doing consultations and expert panels and stuff like that so it’s an ongoing process.”

Other areas of concern, according to D’lima, include recreational water use in our country, which he says creates at least six million jobs across Canada, and the current lack of environmental assessments.

“They seem to have cancelled all of the environmental assessments that were done before any major projects or instituted on the rivers and lakes,” sates D’lima. “That would also be part of the legislation which would ake sure that any major projects have environmental assessments done so that things can proceed when all factors have been looked at. Especially the Indigenous folks, they have their treaties and things along those lines and that sometimes those aren’t respected and they’re not consulted.”