Managing Water

Selena Randall

Bryce Hoye of the CBC wrote an excellent article this week, calling for the Province to move forward with its long awaited, surface water management strategy. I agree – it’s long overdue. 2016 was an exceptionally wet year, and December brought the highest snow amount for that month in 100 years, with the expectation of more to come in this La Niná year.

Why is this important to us in Steinbach?

In the flat landscape of the prairies we are prone to flooding under certain conditions. Whether you believe in man’s contribution to climate change or not, there are facts in the records that we cannot deny. Winter is beginning later, and spring is coming earlier, and we have shifted from a model of 90% annual precipitation coming during winter as snow and 10% in spring/summer as rain, to a model closer to 50% snow and 50% rain annually. This means it’s not just the spring melt we should fear, but spring and summer rainfall events too.

Throughout the prairies we find wetlands, and sloughs, which help reduce the impact of flood events, and filter out the nutrients running off the landscape. However, in our part of the Red River Valley 90% of the natural wetlands have been removed to improve farmland, or to build homes. This means that floodwaters run quickly through drainage ditches, putting structures downstream at risk. Some will remember the impact of heavy rain in spring 2016 in parts of Hanover and La Broquerie which washed out roads needing expensive repair.

Steinbach and surrounding areas are expanding, and marginal agricultural land is being built on. This inevitably affects how water moves. Instead of water being held in the soil or sitting in pools on the surface, roof water and water from around our foundations are drained and away to ditches as fast as possible.

The NDP government undertook extensive consultations over 10 years and brought Bill 5 to the table before the provincial election last year, but it never made it to the statute books. The PC government promises to bring in a ‘made in Manitoba’ version of the ALUS program, as the answer to our water management problems. ALUS is a program that rewards farmers for maintaining natural areas such as woodlands, river banks and wetlands. The subsidies offset the potential loss of income caused by not developing the land for production. The Manitoba government has not consulted on their ALUS plan yet, but it is expected to provide incentives for protection of wetlands, limiting drainage, and restoring wetlands. This concept will be challenging in the Red River Valley where 90% wetlands have already been lost, and the land is already heavily drained, and where ‘restoration’ will need to be replaced with ‘reconstruction’.

It will be expensive too, and funding it will be a challenge for all Manitobans. However, it is a piece of the bigger climate change mitigation picture, that means we should give it serious consideration. Perhaps a carbon tax could contribute to paying for it. However, we pay for our surface water management strategy, it is needed to protect us from snow-melt run-off and heavy rainfall events, especially if the latter are to happen more frequently.

What can you do? Ask your MLA about the government’s surface water management strategy. Tell him you are concerned about how flooding events will be mitigated. Ask how Manitoban’s can play their part.