The Peoples’ Water Law: Groups Invited to Sign on to “Statement of Expectations” for Effective Water Regulations

This week West Coast Environmental Law held a meeting “Go With the Flow: Meeting on Regulations for the BC Water Sustainability Act” with allies in the conservation world to discuss our Expectations for the next critical phase of the BC Water Sustainability Act – the development of the regulations that will make the Act effective. This Act is good news for the province, as we have written before. It will regulate groundwater, protect environmental flows and generally update an antiquated law to give more water for fish, and water for nature. During this long hot summer, as the drought worsens, forest fires rage, and crops spoil, we see the evidence daily of just how precious water is, and how much we need it. So it’s an opportune time to work out the details of the new law. Water’s on our minds.

The Act needs to be fleshed out with a series of regulations, and  together with our friends in the public interest environmental law community, to date we’ve drafted two “Statements of Expectations”:

  1. Overall general expectations for all the upcoming regulations being developed for the BC Water Sustainability Act, and
     
  2. A more specific set of expectations on the sorely needed and historic new groundwater regulation.

These Statements of Expectations are short statements of what we expect the regulations to accomplish, and how to make the law achieve its true purpose of fostering sustainability.

Please read these Statements and consider whether your organization is able to sign on.

Before the Act was passed, we developed a similar collaborative Statement that was impactful in the development of the Act. There is an opportunity once again to show strength in numbers. Please join West Coast Environmental Law, Ecojustice, U Vic’s  Environmental Law Centre, the POLIS Project, the Canadian Freshwater Alliance, the Sierra Club of BC and others and endorse the Statements. Send your group’s endorsement to Linda Nowlan, Staff Counsel at Linda_Nowlan@wcel.orgby September 10th.

 

(Next up- a Statement of Expectations on an Environmental l Flow regulation. Stay tuned!)

 

 Linda Nowlan, Staff Counsel

Strong Environmental Laws
Healthy Waters