Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
The City of Rossland received a healthy grant from the Canada Community Building Fund to help support its infrastructure. Rossland received $284,445 to complete a Utility Master Plan. The Plan will provide detailed condition assessments of the existing storm drainage, sanity sewer and water distribution networks, which will allow for a much anticipated infrastructure replacement and renewal efforts.
Love Your Lake is a national evaluation program developed by the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Watersheds Canada. So far it’s gathered information on 35,000 shoreline properties across the country. The project recently expanded to Nova Scotia beginning with Porters Lake, a 19-kilometre long lake on the Eastern Shore. “We will be conducting the assessments on the water with volunteer boaters and we don’t actually go on the properties, on the parcels, at all,” said Hebb, a fourth-year environmental studies student at Saint Mary's University. “We just take our assessment data sheets and we fill those out and then we log them in our data software.”
Alberta's plan to allow for open-pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains could be a serious threat to Saskatchewan's water supply, says the director of the Global Water Futures Project at the University of Saskatchewan. "For a water scientist to see this happening, it's just an abomination to have these types of developments suggested in the headwaters of the rivers that supply drinking water and the economy for most of Saskatchewan," John Pomeroy told CBC's Blue Sky. Last spring, the Alberta government revoked a 1976 policy that blocked open-pit coal mining on the eastern slopes and peaks of the Rockies.
