By Sonia Furstenau
People who cultivate the lands of the Cowichan Valley are intimately familiar with both abundance and scarcity.
Our region experiences abundant rainfall throughout most of the year, followed by a scarcity lasting three or four months in the summer. When the rains stop, and especially if water storage infrastructure is lacking, then summer can be a very long and painful season. Recently, the BC River Forecast Centre reported that B.C.’s snowpack is 39 per cent lower than normal levels, which means that there will be significantly less meltwater flowing through local creeks and rivers this spring. For growers, spring is a crucial time for establishing crops, but the prospect of water scarcity casts a shadow of uncertainty over their livelihoods. Luckily, farmers are inherently hopeful folk who generally believe in the promise of abundance. It helps, too, that the culture of our region revolves around the production and gathering of food, and we will not accept the loss of this essential community service.
There needs to be an ongoing local conversation about how we protect, share, and use water in times of drought. Because the reality is, we will be in drought for the foreseeable future.
B.C. introduced the Water Sustainability Act (WSA) in 2014, which allows for the creation of community advisory tables to establish land and water use priorities in watersheds around the province. The Koksilah Water Sustainability Plan — an innovative Watershed Planning process led by Cowichan Tribes and the Province of B.C. to develop community-led solutions — is an example of what we need in every region of this province. The benefit of these “water tables” is that communities can work collaboratively towards what they value most when it comes to water use. Here in the Valley, food security certainly ranks high on that list, along with protection of water sources, and protection of ecosystems, fish, and other animals that depend on those water sources.
Without these watershed advisory groups, decisions are made in a way that is not transparent to the community, and can cause a lot of stress and conflict, as we saw during the drought of 2023. However, decision-makers won’t receive advice from the groups for at least three years, so in the meantime, the licensing team at the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship are determining water use based on a rule that is known as “first in time, first in right”. This means that during times of water scarcity, licensees with the earlier priority dates are entitled to take their full allocation of water over the junior licensees. For example, a water licence with a 1960 priority date would have precedence over a licence with a 1990 priority date, regardless of the purpose.
According to the WSA, anyone who diverts and uses groundwater for anything other than household use is required to obtain a water licence. The government did not do enough between 2015 and 2022 to ensure that all water users had the understanding and support to successfully apply for their water licences, and approximately 60 per cent of non-residential water users currently do not have water licences. All this poses a serious challenge to farmers, some of whom dutifully submitted applications over two years ago, and are still waiting to find out if these will be approved or not. There is a very real fear among growers that they may have to severely restrict their production or shut down completely. This is heightened by news of recently passed legislation that allows for fines of businesses of $100,000 to $500,000 for using unauthorized (i.e. unlicensed) ground water.
In our opinion, there needs to be a water licence reset, otherwise the looming collapse of our local food security could become a reality. There are solutions:
1. The province should grant an amnesty to farmers who didn’t get licences, and put them in the queue along with longstanding water users who didn’t get their applications in before March 2022, to let them begin the application process ahead of new users. This amnesty should allow for commercial use of water for food production until the community advisory tables determine priority uses in each watershed.
2. The province needs to immediately put together community advisory water tables to hold crucial water-sharing conversations. Communities need to participate in determining the management of this precious and increasingly scarce life-giving force that we all depend on. These groups must include First Nations, and we need all the stakeholders at the table too — farmers, industry, commercial users, and those tasked with environmental stewardship of our interconnected ecosystems.
Let’s dig in to what are going to be tough, but absolutely necessary, conversations. Let’s support the future of farming and the long-term protection of our precious water, and continue to be creative problem solvers who strive for abundance. Drought is here to stay — we can’t avert the crisis, but we can be prepared, and we can create the conditions where we’re solving problems together, as a community.
Sonia Furstenau is the MLA for the Cowichan Valley and leader of the BC Green Party.