Thank you.
I'm coming to you here on WSÁNEĆ territory and also that of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples.
I just wanted to clarify that I'm with the Environmental Law Centre, which is a non-profit organization working within the faculty of law at the University of Victoria. We deliver a clinic program through which students and staff provide over 6,000 hours of pro bono legal assistance in Canada each year to indigenous and community organizations. I'm not with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, as was stated.
Over the past decade, clients have engaged with the Environmental Law Centre to work on many different freshwater issues that are within the jurisdiction of the federal government. I rely on that work as the basis for this submission.
To provide some context, you know all about water, so I'm not going to fill you in on anything. I just want to highlight two things that are really driving change in the freshwater sphere and also in relation to laws and policies and their implementation.
The first one is that the way in which we're going to address these interconnected hydrological problems and issues at a watershed scale is through partnerships with indigenous communities. Whether we're seeing unprecedented multi-year droughts or we're seeing the intensification of storm events, it's really in watersheds that integrated collaborative management and governance is going to occur. I can give you some examples of where that's happening in British Columbia.
The second thing is that the actual impacts around water are being seen much more intensely, certainly driven by climate change in the last four or five years. My second point is that the federal government has a lot of tools already. My particular expertise is law. There are a lot of laws and legal tools on the books that are simply not being used to the extent that they could be to address the changing conditions that are going on right now. In particular, I point to the Canada Water Act and a renewal of the Canada Water Act, and also certain provisions of the Fisheries Act.
Those are my contextual statements. I'll just make two points around collaborative governance and then environmental flows as they're related to pollution, because the two go hand in hand.
We've seen some interesting court decisions recently. Here in British Columbia, courts now recognize that treaty and aboriginal rights are limiting the way in which state governments make decisions about natural resource development across the landscape. I'm referring to the Yahey decision from 2021 in British Columbia, which found that the cumulative impacts of primarily oil and gas development in northeast B.C. was a treaty infringement of those nations.
We're also seeing, at the same time, consent-based processes for new mines, water quality and broader conservation, such as for protected areas. With the federal funding for meeting the biodiversity targets of “30 by 30”, there is a lot of funding available to improve on conservation areas.
In terms of collaborative governance, we're seeing that in many cases it is indigenous communities that are leading the way, in partnership with the province and sometimes with federal funding. I can point you to, for example, the Gitanyow Aks Ayookxw water policy that they have just launched, which is based on both western science and their legal order. It is a process that anyone using water in their territory needs to abide by.
I also point you to—you might have already spoken about this with federal staff—the decades-long monitoring of water quality and quantity by the first nations in the Peace-Athabasca delta and the federal government's commitment to further work in that area.
My final points relate to both flow and pollution.
The way in which we do environmental regulation related to water in Canada is still very much along the principle of dilution being the solution to pollution. As flows change—I'm particularly pointing to low flows—pollution concentrates. There has never been a meaningful conversation with indigenous people about, for example, what that means for the Fraser River and the fish coming up the Fraser River. That is now occurring quite extensively with the nations in the Peace-Athabasca delta in relation to Wood Buffalo National Park as a result of a lot of pressure from UNESCO and various other fora.
I would echo the comments of the panel before us around the international impacts of the pollution from Elk Valley and the need for the federal government to more fully use its existing legal tools to take an interest in freshwater issues that are of national concern. They're of national scope and concern, not just interjurisdictionally but within federal lands, as they are affecting fisheries. The federal government does have a lot of room to act.