Saskatchewan group looking for regulation to preserve wetlands

A Saskatchewan group is looking for regulation intervention to help save wetlands in the province as more and more are drained to make way for agriculture.

Aura Lee MacPherson is chair of the Saskatchewan Alliance for Water Sustainability (SAWS). She said all kinds of wetlands are being destroyed in the province as farms drain it away – wetlands that replenish aquifers, support the local water table and drinking water – and when too much drainage is built, it can have negative downstream effects like causing flooding, infrastructure damage, and degrading water quality increasing toxic blue-green algae blooms.

The Water Security Agency (WSA) is working on its agriculture water stewardship policy, and MacPherson thinks policy shouldn’t be built around agriculture first.

“We need a wetland policy like Alberta, Manitoba (and) the rest of Canada first. And then we can tailor the policies to each industry,” said MacPherson.

She said the ideal policy would look at water quality and quantity.

“(We need to be) making sure businesses are not being impacted (and) people are not having their insurance rates go through the roof. It would create neighbourliness, and it would need regulation. It absolutely has to have regulation,” said MacPherson.

SAWS wants to start a letter-writing campaign to the WSA as it works on its policy and goes through the engagement process to make its concerns known.

Clint Blyth is a rancher in the Pipestone Creek Valley. He and his family moved to Saskatchewan from Alberta to ranch several years ago.

“My wife and I, when we chose to leave Alberta we looked for a landscape where there was water because if you’ve got cattle, you’ve got to have water,” said Blyth.

Where he came from, there wasn’t much water and he really noticed when he arrived in Saskatchewan how much work people were doing to remove water from their land.

“And I thought, ‘Boy, these guys are nuts. Do they realize what they’re doing to their land and what the impacts and the implications are of that?’ ” said Blyth.

He talked about a creekbed on his land that’s twice as wide as it was 10 years ago because of erosion.

“We had to move fences again this spring over three feet because that’s how much bank we lost. We did the same thing last year and we’ve had water go out of the banks three times since a year ago this spring and we haven’t had any abnormally high runoffs (or) rainfalls,” he explained.

Blyth said he’s been asking the WSA to evaluate the watershed before licensing more drainage – and when it did, projects weren’t licensed because the found effects were too great. But he said since then, the WSA has gone back to allowing individual projects.

Watersheds in Saskatchewan rely on wetlands, said Blyth, and if you drain off that water, when you get a big rainfall, it won’t soak in enough to recharge the aquifers.

What’s happening now in the province is short-sighted, according to Blyth.

“We have the opportunity here to fix and look after our wetlands and our stream flow and our water quality,” he said.

The NDP’s WSA critic, Erika Ritchie, joined the call on Monday. She said there’s a lack of working policy framework and a lack of mechanisms for things to be resolved.

“That’s why it’s so essential that we have a workable policy that doesn’t create winners and losers and the externalization of costs … and so that you’re doing the full cost accounting for all the impacts, that all the interests in the community are being heard and being taken into account,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie noted the WSA should be enforcing the policies it already has, and as new policies are created, it should take into account things like ecology, tourism and the potable watershed as well.

“If you only have one sector whose interests are being considered above all else, then the others are suffering unfairly,” said Ritchie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an amended version of this story, correcting the spelling of Clint Blyth’s name.