‘It makes for a water free-for-all in Alberta’

Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of the Keepers of the Water, discusses Bill 7, which aims to amend Alberta’s Water Act. The bill, introduced on October 30th, proposes amalgamating the Peace and Slave watersheds with the Athabasca watershed, allowing inter-basin water transfers without legislative approval. This could lead to unchecked water extraction, potentially harming communities and the environment. Cardinal highlights concerns about the bill’s lack of public oversight, the impact on First Nations’ water rights, and the broader implications for water scarcity in the Northwest Territories and Alberta.

The following is a transcript of the interview you can hear here.

Cassandra Blondin Burt
Thank you so much for joining us today. Would you tell us a little bit about Bill seven as it’s moving through Alberta legislature right now?

Jesse Cardinal
Bill 7 is the water Amendment Act, and it was introduced into the Alberta legislature on October 30, 2025 and so how it’s being introduced is it’s a bill to amend the Water Act stating that the Water Act hasn’t been updated since the 90s, and it’s severely out of date.

And so there’s all these changes that are being proposed in this Bill 7, I just want to inform people of what is in the what’s in this proposed Bill that Keepers of the Water is concerned about. There is a proposal to, first of all, amalgamate watersheds.

So, they want to bring in the peace and slave watershed, which is currently one watershed. So, the Peace River and the Slave River watershed is one watershed, and then the Athabasca is another watershed.

Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of the Keepers of the Water. (Photo: Jesse Cardinal)

They want to amalgamate that into one watershed. And so, what a watershed is, is the river, and all of the connecting rivers, streams and lakes is, is the watershed. And the reason why they want to amalgamate this is to make it easier to transfer water from places.

If a company or somebody is, you know, they go to the Alberta government and they want to transfer water there needs to, this needs to go to legislature. And so, if the Alberta government wants to propose to transfer water from the Athabasca River, to, say, the Slave River, or the Peace River, or somewhere in the Peace watershed, there needs to be legislative lead of approval.

So, that needs to that particular transfer needs to be brought into the legislature and needs to be made public, discussed and voted on, because it’s a big deal to transfer water from one watershed to another, because it’s never just a small amount of water.

The reason why it comes to legislature is because this is a big amount of water that’s being proposed to be taken from one watershed or one lake or one river and taken somewhere else. And it’s not going to be necessarily transferred into a lake or river. It may be transferred into facilities holding station, but it’s going from, say, the Athabasca watershed area to the Peace River watershed area.

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So, what this Bill 7 is proposing to do is, first of all, make this into one watershed, and they’re taking away the legislative procedure for inter-basin transfers. So, what will happen now is it’ll just be the government, who’s in power at that time, will just approve it. The public will not know about it. And what our concern is now is that it makes for a water free-for-all in Alberta. So, the Alberta government can take as much water as they want from any watershed and send it anywhere they want, and that can be, you know, southern Alberta, like anywhere they and they don’t need to tell anyone.

They don’t need to tell them when they’re doing it, how much water is being taken or where it’s sent to. And it’s really concerning, because in Alberta, you know, they cater to the oil and gas, the big industries. And so, our concern is, you know, there’s a lot of concerns. There’s the concern of the human right to water.

How is this going to affect the communities and our need for water, and then the Northwest Territories, all of the water comes from the south. So, all the water comes from Northern BC and northern Alberta. And so, you know, we’re already in a water crisis, like we are in drought in Alberta.

So, at one time, it used to be southern Alberta that was notorious for running out of water and being in drought. They have all these irrigation systems set up. They have one of the biggest irrigation systems in Canada set up in southern Alberta. And the reason why is because they have the some of the biggest agricultural projects in the country of Canada.

They call it the bread basket of the West. So, in Saskatchewan and in southern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta, they have these massive agricultural projects. Agriculture is the biggest water user in Alberta, next to oil and gas and so, so they use a lot of water and so for decades, right? Because in since the 1930s they established this system called first in time, first and right. So as Alberta was establishing themselves as a province, they set up this system called first in time, first in right, where whoever was there first has the has the rights to water.

So, they were accommodating all of the settlers. And they would give these farmers massive areas of land to set up farming, and they would give them a license. And said, Here’s your water license. You can use as much water as you want, you know, and so.

And they completely disregarded the First Nations people who were there. So, they were they, you know, and there’s a lot of contention around that issue, because first nations are like, hold on, we were the first people here.

We have the first rights to water. We know how to manage the water. We know how to steward the water and take care of the water. And so that’s still an ongoing issue in Alberta and so that’s what’s happening. That’s what we’re concerned about, is that the Alberta government has plans to start piping water to start sending water to southern Alberta. But the issue is, is that northern Alberta is running out of water now. And as you guys know, in Northwest Territories, people are seeing the lowest water levels they’ve ever seen in their lifetime.

We were in Hay River last year, and you could walk across the river. That’s how low the river is. We are concerned about what’s going to happen to the communities in Northwest Territories if Alberta is starting to take even more water out of the rivers that feed the day, show, such as the Slave River, the Peace River, the Athabasca River.

You know, these rivers are already you know, there’s so many water users on them, industry, agriculture, pulp mills, you name it like, you know, there’s already a lot of water being taken. When I say the water is being taken, it’s not being recharged. So when industry takes water, a lot of that water becomes contaminated, such as in the tar sands, so they’re drawing millions of barrels of water out of the river every day, millions of liters of and barrels of water out of the river every day, and a lot of that is being put in toxic holding ponds because it becomes so toxic that you can’t use it anymore, they can’t put it back into the water.

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So, there’s a lot of concerns with Bill seven, and what does this mean for the future of the of the water?

Cassandra Blondin Burt
And what I’m hearing you say is that Bill 7 would effectively remove the oversight that is in place to mitigate a lot of that development that they want to push through.

Jesse Cardinal
Yes, it would take away any you know, like public oversight, and that’s really scary, because we have a government that is when they make their decisions, they’re not making their decisions based on, you know, community needs for water.

There’s no discussion. It seems like they’re making decisions on behalf of the Northwest Territories without any consultation with the Northwest Territories, and I don’t know what discussions they’ve had with the government of the Northwest Territories, but they haven’t discussed with the Dene Nation. There’s been no community consultations.

The Alberta government had engagement sessions, you know, over this past year, but nowhere in there did they say they were going to introduce Bill 7, that they were going to amend the Water Act, that they were going to make this change where they would allow inter basin transfers without legislative approval, and there was no mention of any consultation with the Northwest Territories.

So, you know, what needs to happen is, first of all, then the communities need to become aware that this is happening right now, and they need to be vocal. So, the leaders, the elected leaders, the community people, where is the Northwest Territories government in this you know this is going to affect them too. They live there.

Cassandra Blondin Burt
And just for listeners who wouldn’t be aware, because we’re speaking from space that acknowledges that those territorial, those provincial and territorial boundaries that are there, are part of a colonial system, and they create these they’re like their borders or their lines on a map that don’t have anything to do with the natural topography of Earth and the way that First Nations people will look at those, those waterways. And we’ve talked about this before, but again, for listeners who might not understand the flow of the water that flows north, right, rather than kind of the misconception that it would, you know, I’m using air quotes right now, but like, flow down, that it would flow south, right?

Jesse Cardinal
I always assume people know that, but thank you, Cassandra, for bringing that up. That’s the thing people need to know, is all of the water, like all of the water in the Northwest Territories, comes from the south, so the water flows north. So, in northern BC, it flows into the Northwest Territories, and in northern Alberta. So, the headwaters is what they call it. So, Jasper, you know, in the mountain areas there, that’s where the water the rivers come from, like so the Athabasca River comes from the Jasper area.

It starts there, and so it’s fed from underground glaciers, and, you know, fresh water. We’ve been doing water testing on the keepers of the water. We started a water monitoring program in 2021 and we monitor the water on the Athabasca River from the Jasper Hinton area all the way north of Fort McMurray.

And the water in the Jasper Hinton area is always, it’s always pretty good, except in 2023 when there was the massive fires, or the Jasper fire, the water did. The water quality did decline, but then it’s recovered. But as you get further north, so the Athabasca River flows through the town of Athabasca, the town of Fort McMurray, through Fort McKay, through Fort Chip and then it flows into Lake Athabasca, and then it continues flowing into the Dehcho and into the Arctic Ocean. Because all of those rivers join.

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All of that water comes from, from Alberta and BC, and they’re using massive amounts of water right now. Like, in in northern Alberta, like, we still don’t even have snow. We get a little bit of snow, like, right now, normally we would have a lot of snow. We don’t. We don’t have a lot of snow, like, and if we do, then we get warm weather and it melts.

We’re not getting the same precipitation that we used to get. Our rivers, our lakes, are not being recharged the way that they used to be recharged. And that’s what we’re telling people, is the schools need to stop educating that water is a renewable resource. Renewable resource means it’s always going to be there.

It’s always gonna come back like, the sun is a renewable resource. The moon is renewable. Water used to be seen as a renewable resource because it always rained, it always snowed. But now we’re seeing less rain, we’re seeing less snow. We’re seeing lakes run dry. We’re seeing streams run dry and not coming back. So, we can’t say it’s renewable.

Everyone you know, these politicians have this golden wand like and they’re coming to our communities. I hear them to say, you know, your communities will get out of poverty. Their your problems will be fixed.

Your drug and alcohol issues will be fixed, like we have prosperity and economy. But they’re not talking about the water crisis we’re in. They’re not talking about that these community, a lot of these communities, can’t even drink their own water that they’re having to pipe in water. You know, we need to really shift our thinking and what are our values? What are our collective values?

Cassandra Blondin Burt
Mahsi Cho to Jesse Cardinal, thank you so much for joining us here tonight on Medicine Stories.