Care of waterways must be an election issue

Here’s a list of actions political parties should address, says Mark Angelo.

B.C. is blessed with a river heritage that’s among the finest in the world, and yet, our waterways continue to face an array of pressures. These range from pollution and urbanization to industrial development, the excessive extraction of water and climate change.

With the next provincial election looming, a group of B.C.’s largest conservation and recreation groups have come together to ask all provincial political parties to develop policies and positions relating to the management of rivers and watersheds as part of their election platform.

Among the groups are the Outdoor Recreation Council, the B.C. Wildlife Federation and the B.C. Federation of Drift Fishers along with many other key groups, all with significant public outreach across our province.

The campaign’s goal is to generate a greater public awareness of the importance of these issues and persuade all political parties to take in-depth positions on these matters.

Promoting and generating such discussion is timely in that many British Columbians view the proper care of rivers, and our water resources, to be among our most pressing environmental issues.

It’s also my belief there would be strong public support for a multi-faceted approach aimed at addressing a host of important issues pertaining to rivers and water.

Among the key elements proposed is the need for a new Watershed Sustainability Fund aimed at supporting key river restoration and management projects.

Many waterways could benefit from this, ranging from the Cowichan River, which suffers chronic problems with low summer flows — to the Seymour River, where work is currently underway to restore fish passage after the devastating rock slide in 2014 — to Fraser Valley tributaries with numerous flood-control structures in need of upgrading to enable the passage of salmon to significant stretches of blocked habitat.

In addition, such a fund would strive to maintain and improve the ecological flows and functioning of watersheds while investing in river and wetlands infrastructure to improve the resilience of watersheds to climate change.

A portion of the fund’s budget should also be allocated to non-government groups, such as local stream keepers and river guardians, to help fund their river- and stream-restoration efforts.

To achieve this, such a fund would have to be significant in size. By comparison, over this past year, the province has allocated $75 million to forest enhancement, while tens of millions of dollars in new funding have been directed to B.C. parks. These announcements are commendable. But in the view of many, our waterways are imperilled and equally deserving.

In addition to the need for a new funding program, there are a number of other riverrelated policies that could be embraced by all parties. To name but a few:

Reinvigorate the B.C. Heritage Rivers Program, which has languished since 2001.

Ensure the actual onground implementation of the Water Sustainability Act, so that truly appropriate flow regimes do, in fact, exist on rivers and streams that have regularly suffered from excessive water extraction at the expense of fish.

Work with the federal gov- ernment in reviewing how the Fraser River estuary is managed and initiate a muchneeded process to develop an environmental sustainability plan for the estuary area.

Develop a plan to revitalize the provincial government’s ability to properly monitor and protect the environment and freshwater resources.

Ensure climate change is adequately considered in all future decisions that relate to river management, water extraction, diversions and water licensing.

Explore additional dam-decommissioning possibilities for older structures that have outlived their usefulness.

Develop a more precautionary approach to the way proposed, potentially polluting developments in sensitive areas are assessed. This should be aimed at identifying key problems at an earlier stage, which could save a vast amount of time and effort by locals and conservation groups in opposing projects that should never have gotten off the ground in the first place.

Electoral reform can make our politics more inclusive and representative. This matters on the local level, as much, if not more, than the federal level. If we’re serious about these goals, the fight needs to take place closer to home, too. Megan Dias and Vyas Saran

Conservationist Mark Angelo stands in the Seymour River, one of British Columbia’s most-endangered waterways that could benefit from the programs being proposed by a group of conservation and recreation groups in the province.