Wab Kinew wouldn’t be the first Manitoba premier who came into office vowing to represent all Manitobans or to preach the politics of unity.
However, he may be looking at a steeper slope. He comes into office as post-pandemic discord has created deep societal polarization and faces a quagmire of intersecting crises, including the escalating impacts of climate change and a volatile economy.
There’s a long list of competing priorities to tackle, but now is as good time as any to put one more on the table. Water should form the foundation for Kinew’s vision for Manitoba, and how well we manage it will be both the root of much potential disharmony and the core of our economic and social successes.
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It won’t be easy. Manitoba has lots of water and, if history is any indication, that gives us lots of reasons to fight over it.
Much of our past investment in water management infrastructure has been dedicated to either keeping water at bay or getting rid of it as quickly as possible.
It’s been divisive in both policy and practice.
Dikes, dams and ditches benefit people on one end of the flow at the expense of those on the other. I’ll never forget how Winnipeg celebrated the end of 1997’s Flood of the Century with a parade, while much of southern Manitoba remained under water, thanks in part to the hastily built Z-dike protecting the city.
Northern “development” made this province a hydroelectric powerhouse. The cost was flooding traditional lands and disrupting northern communities to benefit the south.
The future, however, could look much different. It must.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Food Day Oct. 16 focused on water. As we acknowledge that the world’s freshwater reserves are under siege at the very time our demands are growing, Manitoba’s need for a water strategy has never been greater.
The previous government had begun working on one, the first in more than 20 years. In 2021, it commissioned EMILI (Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative), a non-profit organization focused on advancing digital agriculture, to oversee the needed research.
The resulting report is both disturbing and energizing. For starters, it acknowledges the importance of including Indigenous perspectives in developing the provincial strategy – so important that the province committed to its own separate engagement process.
That process “was still in development” when the completed report was due; missing voices must still be heard.
Secondly, Manitoba’s water policies, stewardship initiatives and regulations are spread across multiple portfolios, creating jurisdictional confusion and leaving room for key questions to fall through the cracks. Our municipal water services, wastewater treatment and drainage systems are aging.
The report also found that parts of the province, particularly the south-central region, are already showing signs of acute water stress due to the disparity between demand and available supply.
However, the report also identified opportunities for the province to do better. It highlighted untapped potential from prospects like stabilizing and bolstering agricultural productivity through more irrigation or incorporating more “nature-based solutions” as alternatives to costly infrastructure.
At 40,000 hectares, Manitoba has only one per cent of the irrigated acres in production on the Prairies, compared to 640,000 ha. in Alberta and 137,500 ha. in Saskatchewan.
The report said that expanding Manitoba’s irrigated acres to 600,000 ha. is doable, based on preliminary research, and could provide multidimensional benefits besides the direct effect on farm incomes, jobs and the provincial GDP. But, it stressed, more research is needed.
That report figured large in the province’s “initial water management action plan” released this past summer, which was heavy on lofty goals but arguably light on investment.
Now we have a new government committed to building bridges that connect divided communities.
Investing in our water plan will be important to achieving that goal.
