The Harper government is waging war on Canada's freshwater.
We didn't start with a strong record. Our national water laws are out-dated, we don't properly enforce the ones we have and we chronically underfund source water and watershed protection. And consecutive governments refuse to consider the effect on freshwater when creating economic, industrial, energy or trade policies.
Yet the Harper government appears intent on systematically dismantling the few protections that have been put in place at the federal level to protect our freshwater heritage.
In its 2011 budget, the Harper government announced a reduction of over $222 million from the budget of Environment Canada and the elimination of over 1,200 jobs in the department. Programs to protect water, such as the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation in Lakes Winnipeg and Simcoe among others, were particularly hard hit. Others targeted for deep cuts include the Chemicals Management Plan and the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, both of which are crucial to source water protection.
These cuts followed the cancellation of a major B.C. coastal conservation project after lobbying by the energy industry and the weakening of key elements of the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which eliminated mandatory environmental assessments for major developments such as bridges and dams on Canadian rivers.
But the big guns have come out in the current Budget Implementation Bill. Parks Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will lose over $100 million in funding and many hundreds of employees between them, which will have devastating impacts on water conservation and watershed protection. Fully cut are the urban wastewater research program and integrated monitoring of water and air quality.
The Fisheries Act, which made it a criminal offence to pollute or destroy fish and fish habitat in Canada and the only federal water protection law with teeth, is being gutted. Already, the Harper government allows the mining industry to apply to have healthy fish-bearing bodies of water to be renamed "tailings impoundment areas" and thus no longer subject to protection of the Act.
But the new rules remove legal protection of fish habitat, allowing harm to fish and habitat based on the "on-going productivity" of commercial fisheries. In essence, the new rules legalize activity that destroys wetlands, lakes and rivers unless these habitats can be proven to have a defined economic value.
Industry will now have unprecedented influence over water protection policy and the Harper cabinet will make decisions about which watersheds deserve protection based on political, not scientific, grounds.
The 2012 Federal Budget also repeals the Canadian Environment Assessment Act and replaces it with a new law that limits the length of time the assessment process can take, sets strict limits on who can appear before a panel and allows Cabinet to opt out of projects it does not want assessed.
With the plethora of pipelines planned to carry Alberta tar sands bitumen -- the dirtiest oil on earth -- over fragile watersheds all across Canada, the politicization of the environmental assessment process poses an irreversible threat to our freshwater systems. The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to the B.C coast alone would pass over at least 1,000 waterways.
In a mean spirited move, the Harper government is killing the Global Environmental Monitoring System, an inexpensive project that monitors over 3,000 freshwater sites around the world for a UN database that Canada has proudly hosted for decades.
Cut too is the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, which recently published an important paper calling for an end to free or cheap water to resource extractive industries. Perhaps this report was unpopular with the energy and mining companies soon to benefit from the new environmental regime.
This, just months after the Harper government cut funding for the Canadian Environmental Network, a 34- year-old network that acted as a link between 640 small environmental groups and the federal government and which has been a fierce defender of local watersheds.
The United Nations says the world is experiencing an unprecedented ecological and human water crisis. Governments and communities around the world are moving to protect their precious water systems to ensure they will be here for future generations.
What a travesty Stephen Harper has decided to sacrifice our freshwater heritage in order to please his industry friends. We will all live to regret this.
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/session_10_crp_6.pdf
Intervention to the Seventh Session of the
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues 2008
Submitted by the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development
Agenda Item 3: Special theme: Climate change, bio-cultural diversity and livelihoods: the stewardship role of Indigenous peoples and new challenges
For the last three years our organization and co-signatories have addressed the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on the Protection of Water as a human right, and we are honored to do so again under this year’s special theme. In this regard, we call for the recognition of Water as essential to Life, crucial for bio-cultural diversity and for sustaining all aspects of Indigenous Peoples’ survival and well-being, including assuring our physical health, nurturing our spiritual development, and central for the continued vitality of our cultures and traditional livelihoods.
We recognize that Water is the most vulnerable element of all forms of Life in light of Climate Change and its impacts. Time is of the essence. We must take action now as some places are flooded and others stricken with drought. With this in mind, we urgently reiterate the critical significance of protecting Water sources and Indigenous Peoples’ full, unencumbered access to clean Water on our territories and advance these recommendations.
6. We also condemn the use of national militaries and corporate private armies employed to prevent Indigenous communities’ access to their traditional Water sources for drinking, agriculture, fishing, transport and ceremonies.
* 60 years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not include water explicitly.
This has created the opportunity for some governments to deny that such a right exists despite a large and growing body of legal doctrine and interpretations at both the global and national levels.
* The core documents with relation to the human right to water and sanitation (because sanitation and water are inextricably linked with relation to the human right to water needing sanitation to ensure enjoyment) include the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (as interpreted by General Comment 15 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
* It is important to note that the human right to water being declared a human right in this resolution is more accurately a re-affirmation of a right that exists, despite what some member states claim. This is as clear as the fact that water is life and that General Comment 15, the interpretation of the legal obligations of covenant parties by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was unambiguous in asserting the existence of the human right to water.
* Most member states of the United Nations already are bound by the human right to water and sanitation through either domestic law or international legal instruments,
http://www.blueplanetproject.net/RightToWater/7days-points.html
This was around the time of NAFTA discussions... & the various overlays told quite a story....all the water merchants ended up being tied to the USA. You should have seen the map! All of Canada's water flowing to the states !!!& we tried telling Canadians (by lobbying & protesting on Parliament Hill , connecting with enviromentalists - I remember meetings with Maude Barlow, CAW, Elizabeth May) all to no avail & not picked up by mainstream media either.
Wait till Canadian children have to buy back their own water from the Americans at NAFTA prices...since various provinces HAVE TO SELL ELECTRICITY TO THE USA PRIOR TO CARING FOR THEIR OWN TAXPAYING CITIZENS - part of NAFTA agreement.
I remember communities all over were being approached to sell water rights. Good thing our people remembered to notify AFN since the approach was stealthy...
Bur then again- the Hopi & Dene in Arizona have water shortages for the last 30 yrs. since the states siphon from the watertables to provide water for the casinos & fountains & swimming pools."-
Introduction
"The management of rivers and their catchments around the world are significantly affected by the claims of indigenous people. In the arid west of the United States, local indigenous tribes have or are in the process of obtaining water rights to major portions of the Colorado and Columbia rivers. Likewise, in Australia indigenous claims on the Murray-Darling Basin threaten the current water allocations and add another layer of complexity to the management issues. The recently signed Waikato River Settlement in New Zealand does not address ownership of water but requires co-management between local tribes and the government to address the health and well-being of the river. These claims and settlements affect the management of rivers in several ways. One important aspect is the change in governance powers and functions. Another important aspect is the inclusion of cultural values in managing natural resources. This paper will focus on how cultural values may be accommodated in natural resource management from an economics perspective.
The challenges are to incorporate indigenous knowledge, cultural and social relationships, and social, cultural, and economic wellbeing in an integrated, holistic, and coordinated approach when managing the resources of a river. ...
The next section reviews the basic neoclassical approach to valuing and managing natural resources as it is the foundation for the managemen
COLLECTIVE STATEMENT
Intervention to the Seventh Session of the
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues 2008
Submitted by the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development
Agenda Item 3: Special theme: Climate change, bio-cultural diversity and livelihoods: the stewardship role of Indigenous peoples and new challenges
PROTECTION OF WATER
Thank you, Madame Chair, for the opportunity of addressing the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, an Indigenous Peoples’ non-governmental organization directly engaged with Indigenous communities and Nations to design and implement ecologically and culturally harmonious strategies for sovereignty, human rights, environmental and social justice, sacred sites protection, and the revitalization of traditional economies, submits this intervention on Agenda Item 3, under the Special theme of Climate Change, bio-cultural diversity and livelihoods: the stewardship role of Indigenous peoples and new challenges, with the following signatories: American Indian Law Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, Andes Chinchasuyo, Native Youth Coalition, Centre for Organization Research and Education, Advocates for the Protection of Sacred Sites, Laguna Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment, Western Shoshone Defense Project, Tonatierra, Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization, Idiwanan An Chawe (Zuni), and the UNPFII Youth Caucus.
For the last three years our organization and co-signatories have addressed the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on the Protection of Water as a human right, and we are honored to do so again under this year’s special theme.
These toxic creations will permanently scar the area, destroy habitat for major species like grizzlies, moose and deer, and potentially contaminate the largest wild salmon run in North America (the Fraser River).
The tailings ponds are toxic waste ponds: naphthenic acids and PAHs (among many others in the chemical soup in the ponds) are priority pollutants with known toxic effects (e.g., naphthenic acids: hepatotoxicity, brain hemorrhage, cardiac periarteriolar necrosis and fibrosis after acute exposure; liver function and other secondary problems such as elevated blood amylase, hypocholesterolemia, and excessive hepatic glycogen accumulation after subchronic exposure).
The Federal government marked 16 lakes for reclassification using a controversial provision under the Fisheries Act that allows them to redefine any lake as a "Tailings Impoundment Area."
Once a lake has been "redefined" it is no longer considered a natural body of water.
You can see the lake map here: http://intercontinentalcry.org/stop-canadian-lakes-from-becoming-mine-waste-dumps/
Everything is connected to everything else folks.
What we do to our environment we do to ourselves.
We act as an overpopulated species does we are turning on ourselves.
http://ottawasgreatforest.com/Site/Algonquin_Information.html
We may live, but will our grandchildren? How dare this man.
He's secretive, reckless, and needs to be stopped. I'm heartbroken to think that, we, collectively, can't stop him before the damage is irreversible. God, do we need help!