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Photograph by: Cate Gillon , Getty Images "Environment Minister Peter Kent will be left with fewer resources to address the challenges following a federal budget that slashed millions of dollars of funding in his department's budget for research and monitoring and well as for partnerships to engage stakeholders to adopt greener practices. The round table, established by the Mulroney government in the 1980s, was among the victims of the cuts, learning in the budget that it would lose all of its funding and be shut down within the coming months." - Mike De Souza |
Doomed advisory panel calls for water charter
By Mike De Souza,
Postmedia News
Calgary Herald
April 19, 2012
OTTAWA — An independent research and advisory panel that learned it would be killed in last month's federal budget is recommending dramatic actions from governments to protect Canada's water, including a new charter, better research and pricing of the resource.
The recommendations, made in one of the final reports produced by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, come as Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has introduced plans to weaken federal oversight of industrial development, while musing about softening existing tools such as the Fisheries Act.
The panel issued the report, entitled Moving to Action, following the discussions of industry and academic stakeholders at a conference in January.
"There was clear consensus among the experts and participants at the Forum that now is the time to begin acting on many of our recommendations for better water governance, exploring the use of water pricing and investing in water-use forecasting and data," said a joint statement from the advisory's president, David McLaughlin, and its vice-chairman, Robert W. Slater.
"Participants felt so strongly about the importance of these issues, they developed a new recommendation to create a charter affirming the legitimacy of collaborative water governance processes."
