Season 1, Round 2: Highlights

Who-is-who-in-the-zoo?

This video summary highlights the critical issue of water security in Southern Alberta, highlighting the impact of drought and various land use activities on water sources. Colin emphasizes the importance of protecting the Eastern Slopes and Southern Alberta’s water sources, noting that without water, essential industries like agriculture, oil, and beer production would suffer. The conversation also touches on the ecological services provided by watersheds and the need for restoration and sustainable management practices. Various speakers express concerns about the effects of gravel pits on water quality and the environment, with specific examples of contamination and inadequate regulatory responses. The discussion underscores the need for community involvement, better regulatory practices, and learning from successful models in other regions to address these environmental challenges effectively.

Highlights from the conversations on “Who’s Who in the Zoo?” with Colin Smith (11), Gerry Bietz (9), Muriel Wynnobel, Lyse Carignan, Neil Konner, Joyce Kyncl, Christina McCharles, Jody Young, Adele McKechnie, Dale Christian, Mark Dorin (12) and Shantel Sherwood (13).

Colin Smith – Cooperative Solar Developer | Land Lover | Bioregional Organizer

Yes, something that was said, I went to the Dried Up documentary, a 30-minute short film about the state of the drought in Southern Alberta made by Kevin Van Tighem and a few others. The best long-term investment we can make is in the water security of the Eastern Slopes and Southern Alberta. I’ve been reflecting on these terms. If you have no water, we have no beer, we have no beef, we have no oil, we have no economy and no life if we damage our water sources. And yeah, Jenny, you asked me to talk about the is this 10-kilometer strip that is essentially the source of 95% of all of the water in Southern Alberta and areas like Banff and Kananaskis, there’s no extraction and those forests are intact, almost too intact, and the other regions are over- forested.

There’s oil and gas, there are roads, there’s cattle, and all these things drastically affect the ecological services that watersheds to store and filter water for our major cities, for agriculture, for oil and gas extraction, for making beer with climate change, with land use decisions, we are on a trajectory to have a lot less water. I don’t think your average Albertan is feeling it, but farmers, ranchers, municipal decision-makers, the oil and gas industry, and all these people who require water to make their jobs and their responsibilities work are worried. We were originally calling for a moratorium and policy, but we are now advocating for the restoration of headwaters and ecosystem services and the headwaters. All this stuff I’ve said is a lot of doom and gloom, but I think the key part to shifting the tide is inspiring people with a vision of a brighter future and how they can get involved. There’s a lot of work to be done like actual hands-on work, but also organizing and changing our mindsets and speaking with our friends and family about the situation, but also giving them, providing opportunities. So something

Gerry Bietz – Big Hills Springs Preservation Society | Rocky View County Aggregate Resource Committee Member

People cannot appreciate, the open spaces and the natural environment unless they have the opportunity to experience it and go to our website, and visit the park. There’s a road allowance that extends from Cochrane up to the park. It’s a public road allowance and if people are inclined to walk up there, it’s available for walking. It’s bordered on both sides by private lands and so if people are inclined to walk up there, we’d encourage them to make sure that they respect that private land. It’s only 70 acres. It sees a quarter of a million people a year or more. It needs to be recognized that it needs to be protected, it needs to be expanded because it’s being loved to death. It needs further respect. We’ve put up on our website a map that illustrates the potential gravel production that we’ll see out of this area over the next 40 years because gravel production is an extended process from the gravel industry’s perspective. It’s a short-term enterprise, but it’s terminal. We won’t see the end of these gravel operations in our lifetime and I don’t suspect my children will see the end of them when these gravel operations are complete. There could be up to a thousand acres of depressions up to 25 meters deep and many of them I believe will have pit lakes, which means their depressions collect water. Then whatever contaminants reside on that landscape floor in the groundwater.

Muriel Wynnobel – Big Hills Springs Resident | Preservation Advocate

We live right adjoining practically the prospective gravel pits next to Big Hills Springs Provincial Park six that are immediately next to the headwaters of the Big Hill Springs Provincial Park. The one that has been approved and is under appeal right now, both by the Preservation Society and myself and some others. It’s 800 meters away from the headwaters of the spring. These springs feed the big Hill Creek, which then empties into the Bow River, so we’re talking pristine water number four or something spring in Canada, so it’s very important Spring, the rocky view just said go ahead and now it went to Alberta Environmental Protection and they approved it and there have been appeals and the Preservation society went for a stay so as they wouldn’t, but they allowed them to start anyway. There are 13 wetlands on that one piece of property, the one mountain ash property and that’s being allowed to just be wiped out to make a berm to protect from dust and that to our properties, not the park, but everything that goes before the board or before the county and then EPA says, “It’s okay, they’ll monitor and if it contaminates the water, well, then they’ll be asked to stop at that point”, but water doesn’t be decontaminated that easily and the board has said that stopping Mount Nash would be too sort of expensive or difficult for or something like they shouldn’t have started in the first place.

Lyse Carignan – Big Hills Springs Preservation Society Member | Resident

They dug a berm and they said they couldn’t allow a stay because they had already done the work. There was an ARP meeting and then the county, the group was supposed to reach a consensus and they only reached, agreed on three points between the industry and them, but the industry does not believe in setbacks. We talked about being 800 meters from the headwater one meter down. They don’t believe in this. The group thought they should provide some money, increase the levy from 40 cents per ton of gravel, but give it to the group so they don’t want to support these groups at all. Also, there was no agreement at all on cumulative impacts. Interesting. As Rocky View County had done a biophysical attribute rating, rating, the biodiversity, the water and so on. In 2003, this wasn’t provided to the group or the council.

Jody Young – Red Deer County Resident

We have some private pits by us as well as a musical gravel pit. We are in Red Deer County and in our situation we’ve ended up having multiple public hearings. In 2020, they passed it and added the land beside us into the gravel overlay district. We were told the same as Dale and Adele that we had no appeal option. What ended up happening was about two weeks after the bylaw got overturned, they reapplied for the same bylaw and we dealt with that for another two years, came up under three different bylaws and then in July of last year, the council ended up voting because we’re immediately adjacent to the Red Deer River and the land beside us has been designated as an environmentally significant area and there were concerns given its proximity to our water well that we would lose our water. Well in 2022 we discovered our water well was contaminated During this whole process.

It was unknown what the cause was, but coincidentally, the municipal gravel pit uphill from us had been digging what appeared to be in the groundwater. You can see it from satellite imagery as they were expanding their operations and getting further in the water, we saw turbidity starting in our water and then it became contaminated and not drinkable. The municipality filed for a Water Act application to mine in the groundwater. They’ve applied now to have N pit lakes. It was approved even though we sent in a statement of concern and we’ve now filed that with the Alberta Environmental Appeals Board and we’re going to mediation with that next week.

Adele McKechnie – Red Deer County Resident

A little bit of history on that. Back in about 97 or 98, a previous owner had applied to mine, the same piece and it was approved at the county level. We appealed it. The county upheld the approval but told them they had to measure our water table to commit to staying above it, and the water table at that particular year came in at 2.7 meters below the surface they did a little digging and they hit the water so they took their toys and went home and then subsequently sold it to the current owners who said, “Well, we know better. We can do it better. We’ll do it just fine.” This whole area is a very valuable aquifer that feeds downstream users ourselves and downstream users, and Dale and her family have been in this contest of wits long before we came and they’ve been kind of our guiding force, but there’s a small group of us here who are currently under have a decision made by Albert Environment under appeal. Ironically, we had to have our statements of concern in August of 2020 and the day after the morning after the election last spring, we got the notice that it had been approved. Can you spell disingenuous?

Dale Christian – Red Deer County Resident | Former Red Deer River Watershed Alliance Advisor

They divided the province into these WPACs (watershed planning and advisory committees) and thought we did some pretty good work there. We got a bunch of the W packs on the South SaaS basin to send in a joint letter that stole how wonderful floodplains are and sent a lot of scientific information in. We’re staying back from the river. The province has spent lots and lots of our money on stepping back from the river and all kinds of different I call propaganda where everybody should protect the water and yet they won’t protect the water themselves. We’re all trying to work together here to get a voice that can be heard because of the way we are right now, we’re just victims of the landscape being picked off one by one. Our rights are just trampled all over. Nobody wants to listen to us and they have these ridiculous excuses. Wordsmithing water management, not river water management. They leave. They do everything in silo, not cumulative like it’s supposed to be. We have laws, the Cumulative Impact Assessment Act for some reason or just ignore.

Neil Konner & Joyce Kyncl – Mountain View County Residents

Neil: Yes. My name is Neil Konnor and my wife Joyce.

Joyce: Hi.

Neil: We all live in the South McDougal Flats area, which is west of Sundre, south of Highway 584 and north of the Red Deer River. Our area structure plan is pretty well within roughly a six-kilometer square area. There are well over 350 families in this area. There’s a West Fraser, a lumber manufacturer, a golf course, and some three-season homeowners. There are about 400 of them and we’re surrounded by eight gravel pits now and within this area, each one of these pits has got what I would call a dark side to it. We have three pits that are into the water table and they’re pushing frack water out of these three pits to the tune of probably we calculated what they’re temporary divergent licenses, about 680,000 cubic meters of estimated water for this year. We are on the headwaters of the Red Deer River. The aquifers in this area. They fall bidirectional, multi-bidirectional between the Red Deer River and Bearberry Creek, which lies to the north of us. It’s an alluvial aquifer to this date, the municipal or Mountain View county has passed the area structure plan without any studies.

Christina: Wildlife studies, flood zone. There are no studies whatsoever presented with this.

Christina McCharles – Mountain View County Resident

We’ve addressed the AER with complaints. We’ve addressed them through EPA once I discovered contamination in my water well. There are probably eight different water wells now out here. Out of 350 different families that we know have gotten proper AHS testing done, toxicology and chemistry testing on their water wells and they’ve come back. Toxicology has come back contaminated and that’s so far the people that have done water well testing. There are 300 different families so far and everyone needs to get their water well tested. They could all have water well contamination and they’re not even aware of it. So we are going to resurrect South McDougall Fox Area Protection Society and we’re also going to, from an accounting perspective, that’s what I’m going to do and I’m going to start down by the local mailboxes, is start providing pamphlets to get people to get their water wells tested with a sense of urgency because water wells are contaminated in this area. So try to get that going. I guess sort of an awareness. So that’s some of the things that’s going to happen. One other thing that we’ve tried to address with the municipality is quality. The accumulative effects of these eight gravel pits in six kilometers.

Mark Dorin – Polluter Pay Federation Board Member | Land Owner | Former Oil and Gas Operator

There’s two types of decisions at the municipal level. So some of those decisions would be made, their political decisions, for example, to pass a bylaw. So you could compare the county council to the legislature of Alberta. They’re passing a law and they have broad discretion to do so. So counsellors are elected to pass laws, but if they’re also on a municipal appeal board or a municipal development board, those decisions have to be according to fact and law, not what you want or what you think your constituents might like. You need also provincial statutory approval. So things like gravel mining are illegal unless you get approval from the appropriate body to conduct an otherwise illegal activity. This case would come from Alberta. Environment and protected areas. Terms and conditions of approval are important, so it’s one thing to intervene and try to get a project stopped quite often.

You can get terms and conditions of approval and who has the right to make which decisions. Administrative law is the most complex area of law in our country and most grossly misunderstood because we’re supposed to have this separation between the administrative branches and elected branches of government and the judicial branches of government. That’s a basic tenant democracy that frankly is being ignored in this province. So if you want to do it, they won’t let you do it, but if the industry wants to do it, no problem at all. We’re a total banana republic lawless province. Let’s be clear. They are being interfered with.

Shantel Sherwood – Hold My Hand Alberta Founder | Disability Education Activist

The first thing we need to do in education is let go of ego. One thing that kills our families all the time is hearing, “Oh, Alberta had a world-class education” and the rest of us are sitting there banging our heads against the wall saying, “For who?” We know standardized testing is not the best tool for these kids. We know that there are things that can test these kids on their way of learning we got to go back to Finland. We took a little trip to Finland and we learned that they were having a lot of problems with their education system and they were having a lot of problems with their kids and they were putting in curfews and they were trying all these things and it wasn’t working, wasn’t working, and they were like, you know what? We have to start from the ground. So they flipped their education system.

Children are tested much earlier for learning disabilities and such and given programs right away, kids are put into programs that fit their style of learning. So instead of it being based on grade one and kindergarten and this and this, they’re based on your A level for English. So you’re going to be with these kids and you might have a variant age around there like 6, 7, 8, even. It would be 7, 8, 9. They don’t start any of that until or until age seven. Actually. They don’t start reading at age seven because then it’s developmentally appropriate. They find, and again, they’re not perfect. I’m not going to shout that Finland’s perfect, but I do know that it has worked for many and I know that it has worked well. So I have to look at Alberta and say, there are parts of these education systems like Finland. Many others are working well. Why can we not take those parts that we know work well and transition them here and make them our own?