Libs' New Water Policy: Half Full

British Columbia's Liberal government basked in international applause earlier this year when it unveiled North America's first comprehensive carbon tax. The difference the tax will make to daily life in the province over the next quarter-century is infinitesimal.

By contrast, the province's new water strategy, announced last week to considerably less fanfare, could change the face of our communities, the internal workings of our homes, the future for endangered species and perhaps most significantly, our collective resilience to the changes in the weather that the province's pioneering carbon tax cannot hope to avert.

Sadly, it neglects the one tool that, by its own admission, is essential to ensuring that those benefits are achieved.

My recent book, Dry Spring, lays out the evidence, reconfirmed again last month by the U.S. National Science and Technology Council's most up-to-date Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States that yesterday's weather no longer offers a reliable forecast for tomorrow.

Here in B.C., we can expect more and more violent autumn and winter rainstorms of the kind that devastated Stanley Park, earlier spring runoff from the mountains, followed by longer, hotter summers when rivers and streams dwindle to dry gravel. These shifts will stretch the capacity of our utilities to store winter's surplus water for use during droughty summers, and severely test the limits of ecosystems to tolerate both extremes.

Keys steps toward adapting

Dry Spring also heeds the unanimity among experts in water planning who recommend four ways in which we can better adapt to this new climate. From the most abstract to the most physical, these are:

• Manage our water on the basis of nature's geography not man's, with "governance" scaled to the river basin
• Put a price on water that reflects the true cost of preserving its supply and quality in perpetuity
• Treat underground and surface water as one resource
• Employ eco-mimicking green designs in homes, commercial and industrial buildings and in community landscapes

To its credit, the government's new Living Water Smart Strategy, announced last week, moves some way in all four of these directions.

On some of more provocative details, it's true, its advances are more rhetorical than real. On the sensitive issue of raising water prices, for example, the strategy merely threatens that "we may have to start" doing so if other conservation measures don't do the job. On regulating withdrawals from groundwater -- a hot button for my neighbours in the Cowichan Valley and many other parts of B.C. not served by municipal systems -- the strategy proposes to do so only in what it terms "priority areas" (the lower Fraser Valley is surely one) and for large-scale pumping -- and even that not until 2012.

(There is one other item that figures prominently on Dry Spring's menu of strategies for weathering the coming climate that the Liberals overlooked. The B.C. strategy is silent on replicating here the gains that other jurisdictions have seen from establishing markets for certain water uses.)

Wake up call to city halls

Still, what the Liberal's strategy promises is far more significant than what it omits. The several deadlines it sets are already resonating through municipal government halls and will shortly echo down the province's construction and development industry grapevines as well.

In particular, local governments are on notice that by 2020 they will need to "save" one litre of water through conservation for every additional new litre they take from nature. To municipalities that must plan new water infrastructure two decades or more before it's needed, this 12-year warning is almost last-minute. Builders and municipal engineering departments have just 18 months to begin installing distinctive purple pipes to carry grey water from sinks and shower drains to irrigate landscaping or flush toilets.

The government's strategy, two and a half years in the making, creates other significant expectations and responsibilities for local communities. The most sweeping is a broad goal for the province as a whole of using water one-third more efficiently by 2020. If it is met, B.C. could welcome the 1.4 million new residents who are expected to be living in the province by then without needing to withdraw any more water from nature.

To that end, developers who design efficient water management into their plans will be fast-tracked: expect to see more subdivisions with natural landscaping, home cisterns and permeable pavements. Low-flow plumbing will no longer be a virtuous option but a code requirement. Communities that take the initiative to work with residents and neighbours to plan basin-scale management of their local watershed are promised Victoria's support.

The strategy gives potential laggards among municipalities the same warning they earlier received about carbon: provincial grants will in future flow only to communities that demonstrate progress toward meeting the government's targets. In this case, those go beyond simple reductions in water use to include steps to preserve rivers and their riparian zones as lines of resiliency against climate change.

It's that kind of detail that makes this strategy one with the potential for a far more palpable benefit for the welfare of British Columbia's on-the-ground environment than the same government's carbon reduction targets. The latter are laudable, but will have an impact only in the longer term and only if the rest of the world soon follows suit. Commitments in the water strategy, such as promised new legislation to ensure that streams retain enough water for the needs of wetlands and wildlife even in low-flow seasons, could dramatically improve the outlook for ecosystems in the here and now.

We must start metering water

All the good in the new water plan makes it especially odd that on the one practical step that would mark the starting point for progress on all four dimensions of a saner water strategy, the Liberals whiff. Although the water plan calls more efficient water use "a key objective," below a headline acknowledging that "we can't manage what we don't measure," it nonetheless fails to require province-wide installation of water meters in every home, business, institution and industry. Without an accurate measurement of our actual water use, there's really no way to know whether the rest of the strategy is delivering, or just a blue pipe dream.

Even the best-intentioned government policy must be a balancing act between the desirable and the politically doable. It may be that the provincial cabinet plumbed the voting public's likely reaction to an initiative that might (rightly) have been seen as setting the stage for higher water prices, and simply lost its nerve. Or it may be that the government intends to start, as the strategy says, with compulsory metering only for large water users, with universal mandates to follow.

I will hope the latter is true. The weather is changing. The extremes of precipitation the provincial strategy forecasts are coming -- indeed we are already witnessing them. The objectives in the government's plan are not only courageous, they are essential if we expect to continue to enjoy our quality of life. Yet with this one omission, the province's water plan declines to take up the one tool that would tell us whether we are meeting them.

The Liberals, in short, have laid out a plan that's good, in some respects even very good, but not yet good enough.

Tomorrow: The Tyee runs the first of two excerpts from Chris Wood's new book Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis for North America.

Related Tyee stories:

• Trickle Down
  Interview with Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
• Rough Weather Ahead: How global warming will hit BC
  A reader supported, Tyee investigative reporting fellowship series by Chris Wood.
• The 4th World Water Forum (series)
  Of 800 international journalists that covered the Fourth World Water Forum held in Mexico City, Chris Wood was the only Canadian.