Thank you, British Columbia!
April 30th marked the deadline for formal submissions to the Water Act Modernization process. Engaging with British Columbians has been exciting, dynamic, informative and deeply meaningful for us on the Living Water Smart Team. Your participation has made this stage profoundly valuable. Time and again, we asked you for your input. Time and again, you delivered. And how!
- More than 650 participants registered for our 12 multi-stakeholder and First Nations engagement workshops. Each of these sessions produced many pages of feedback including comments, questions, suggestions and break-out session reports – in all, over 200 pages of direct feedback!
- We’ve received more than 650 email and online feedback form submissions
- We’ve received more than 50 mailed and faxed submissions
- We’ve received more than 85 comments here on the Living Water Smart blog – more than 70 of these are submission level comments.
We’re in the midst of summarizing all your input and will follow up with all who’ve submitted to confirm we’ve heard you. While electronic submissions are fastest for us to reply to, the sheer volume and high quality of comments means it may take us a while. Rest assured, we will treat all forms of submission with equal value and have a firm commitment to you to reflect what we’ve heard.
Your voices are the most important part of Water Act Modernization. You’ve trusted us with your thoughts, ideas, fears and hopes. That trust means a great deal to our team. Part of keeping that trust safe is making sure that you know what we’re doing with your insights. Our next step is to bring it all together and then report back to you what we’ve heard. We’ll be completing a Report on Engagement in June and will use the Living Water Smart Blog to keep you posted on what we’re hearing, and how Water Act Modernization is progressing. As they come available, we will be posting the notes and outputs from the multi-stakeholder and First Nations workshops. Please visit the blog often to check for the latest updates and to continue the conversation on modernizing the Water Act.
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hello smart water: wise water maybe a better way to describe water…a story from a Sinixt elder recently related to me, gave me deep reverence for the understanding that still barely exists in my indigenous family…not long ago,not far from “Flatbow or Kootenay lake” an elderly Sinixt grandmother needed a couple or three plants from an alpine meadow that would help her with the aches and pains of her age. Too old to make the trek she imagined the plants in this meadow she knew well from her youth and asked the small alpine creek water to bring her the needed plant medicines. She drank the creek water the following day and received the needed comfort from these alpine plants.
Cool story yeh? I did not make it up. Water Wisdom is deep and likely forgiving but we must stop destroying (roading) steep forested mountains (for quick timber profits) and the old growth forest swamps that meter out cool filtered clean water. Please for the sake of our children get beyond smart and please listen.