The second-ever Canada Water Week, coinciding with World Water Day, is just about done. I spent yesterday traveling to Birch Hills, SK, to do a talk and reading from my book Lakeland for the local library annual fundraiser. It was an amazing evening that included, among other things, a sailboat used as decorative art. The night will get its own post shortly.

Meantime, check out my latest piece, published on The Tyee. It’s all about how the Canadian federal government under Stephen Harper is exploiting a loophole in the Fisheries Act to turn virgin lakes into mining tailings ponds, thereby destroying them in perpetuity.

Sadly, this is not all.

In just the last few days, a leaked government document has come to light showing that the Harper conservatives intend to entirely remove the concept of habitat protection from the aforementioned Fisheries Act. The damning document was brought up in the House of Commons by British Columbia MP Fin Donelly. The government did not deny nor disavow the document, and it confirmed that unspecified changes to the act were forthcoming.

My colleagues from Nature Canada’s Stop Wasting Our Lakes Campaign and Living Lakes Canada have received warning that the Harper government intends tack these legislative changes onto the federal budget bill due to be tabled in just a few days. As is always the case with these omnibus bills, the intention is bury the unpleasantness in mountain of paper. The media and opposition will be spread thin trying to deal with the fallout of the whole budget. Who’s going to notice a little wording change in the Fisheries Act?

The Fisheries Act is one of our oldest environmental laws in Canada, and indeed the world. Its concept of habitat protection is simply to support fish but to protect the whole pyramid of life upon which fish depend. Habitat-level protection is holistic law, the kind of thing we need more of, not less. Losing it will be a terrible, and dangerous, setback.

The budget comes down in a few days. I would dearly love to be wrong about this. If you have any influence with the government of the day, please use it nip this ill-considered move in the bud. Make a liar out of me, please.

If you are in Saskatoon this coming Monday, March 21, please join me over the lunch hour in Convocation Hall on the University of Saskatchewan campus where I will be giving a talk called Synchronized Swimming: How Citizens, Scientists and other species can work together for water right now. The university has just embarked upon an ambitious, seven-year research project that will redefine water security in our own backyard and around the world. I’m going to talk about how non-specialist, average citizens like you and me are crucial if we are going to leverage all this great science into a sustainable water future.

The talk will open U of S Water Week, a series of lunch time presentations to celebrate World Water Day. Garth Materie from the CBC’s Blue Sky will be hosting.

The folks at the university really want to reach out to citizens right now, to engage people in what they are doing on the science front, and this isn’t just public relations. Because in about seven years, some of the brightest people on the planet are going to hand us a blueprint for a water future that can serve both human beings and ecosystems. Building it is another matter, however. Scientists cannot do that for us. We have to do this ourselves, as a society.

As someone keenly interested in building direct partnerships between lay citizens and professional scientists, I am delighted and honored to be the only non-scientist on the Water Week roster, glad to walk through a door that is opened. I would love to see my friends and colleagues from town. For those too far away, the talk will be available online, and I will post a link. But it would be better to just be there.