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In 2008, the BC government released its "Living Water Smart" strategy.1 This was described as a wide-ranging effort to bring together and harmonize current, widely dispersed responsibilities related to water management. The strategy promised a range of actions to improve water management in British Columbia, one of which was to review and to revise the provincial Water Act.2 In 2009, an extensive consultation process began to identify concerns with the current act and to suggest ways of improving it. A discussion paper released early in 2010 sets out the key objectives of this reform and notes that its scope is limited to the Water Act's functions, policies, and decisionmaking processes.3 The goals are: to protect stream health and aquatic environments, to improve water governance arrangements, to introduce more flexibility and efficiency in the water allocation system, and to regulate groundwater extraction and use in priority areas and for large withdrawals.
These goals are not particularly contentious, but achieving them will not be easy. Protecting stream health and aquatic environments means that environmental demands must sometimes trump other demands. Improving water governance arrangements implies giving voice and power to those interests that currently have little of either. Introducing more flexibility and efficiency into the water allocation system likely means that some current users will have less water so that new users and new uses can be accommodated. And regulation of groundwater extraction will limit who can gain access to groundwater and how much they can take, at least in priority areas. Unless the reform process is merely a public relations exercise, it will seriously affect some stakeholders.
This analysis focuses on the possibilities for introducing more flexibility and efficiency into the water allocation system, with particular attention on the Okanagan, where this is a critical issue. Using data available through the BC Ministry of the Environment's Water Stewardship Division,4 several aspects of the water "crisis" in the Okanagan can be highlighted. Among the 3,423 water sources in the Okanagan that have at least one current water licence that specifies a water volume, 3,064, or 89.5 percent, are subject to restrictions on issuing new licences.5 Almost two-thirds (62.6 percent) of the almost 642 million cubic metres of currently licenced extraction comes from these restricted water sources. On...