What the Government Heard (but didn’t) Report: The “What we Heard Report” that was never released from public engagement on Alberta’s Water Amendment Act

April 13, 2026

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“By listening to Albertans and updating the Water Act, we’re helping communities, businesses, and our economy grow and access the water they need to thrive.”

Rebecca Schulz, (former) Minister of Environment and Protected Areas (EPA)

 

Wildlands Advocate article by Kennedy Halvorson, AWA Conservation Specialist

Read the PDF version here.

 

Last December, the Water Amendment Act received royal assent, enacting major changes to how water is managed in the province. The changes were supposedly informed by two rounds of public engagement undertaken by the province to collect feedback on the current water management system and water availability in Alberta.

And we’d all just have to take the government’s word for it, because the engagement findings were never published. Ironically, in his last Surface Water Management report, the Auditor General emphasized that the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas (EPA) must demonstrate greater accountability and transparency to the public.

When I asked when the findings would be made publicly available, government staff declined to provide an answer. This is problematic, as without the survey results, there’s no way to verify if these new policy directions are in line with public opinion and whether decision makers genuinely listened to Albertans.

It’s a good thing the government never lies!

But, just to be sure, AWA submitted a couple of freedom of information requests to bring those results into the public domain. For the information, EPA initially requested $702 for the documents from the first round of engagement and $2,673 for the second phase.

We’ve since successfully challenged the fees out of public interest (and principle), reminding the department that the information requested would not exist if members of the public, including academics, agricultural organizations, environmental groups, Indigenous Nations, non-profits, lawyers, scientists, and other key water users and industries, had not participated in their engagement activities in the first place.

From those requests, we got the results of the engagement surveys and EPA’s review and analysis of the public’s feedback. While all of the information is now publicly available on AWA’s website, some of EPA’s most interesting internal commentary is copied below.

On water use, measurement, and reporting,

“A significant gap in assessing water availability within EPA is the availability of timely water use data.

Compliance under current measuring and reporting requirements is low, estimated at less than 10 percent.

Enforcement has historically been weak. Most licence holders experience little consequence for non-compliance.”

On water governance,

“Water management tools such as water management plans and water conservation objectives have failed to meet their potential.

Managing the public resource for a variety of public goods should be central to an effective water management system.”

On water allocations and licence transfers,

“General public opinions frequently characterized the system as inflexible with entrenched or improperly enriched rights and commonly expressed that ability to profit from what is a freely given and publicly owned resource is a problem.

Feedback supports a potential shift from the traditional “let the market find itself” approach to transfers. While generalized public anxiety about transfers and profiteering is significant, a market-based framework is established and remains a more efficient approach compared to a regulatory method for prioritizing reallocation of water. Options are effectively limited to market tools or incentives, since there is no means to compel return of unexercised allocations, and licensees soundly reject that approach.”

On water conservation holdbacks,

“Irrigators and agricultural producers are strongest in eliminating holdbacks, often framing water as “theirs”. Other sectors can be more mixed or nuanced, such as municipalities with many saying it is a burden and some seeing it as reasonable for broader objectives.

Typical public comment generally saw holdbacks as necessary and fair, not applied often enough (i.e., should be mandatory), or should be greater than 10 per cent.”

On water storage,

“Climate change is altering precipitation patterns, snowmelt timing and volume, river flows, making it uncertain whether new storage infrastructure will get enough water to be filled.

Oppositions from environmental groups and public presents a challenge for new dam construction.

Regulatory and construction approval delays were cited as a major obstacle, with many arguing that the environmental assessment process is too slow and restrictive. However, environmental assessments are a must and cannot be compromised.”

On wetlands,

“Wetland preservation is divisive, with supporters insisting more should be done, while detractors insist it is burdensome and costly to those addressing practical water issues on the land.”

While AWA is still waiting for the requested information from the second phase engagement, let’s compare how the Water Amendment Act matches up with some of the engagement feedback from Phase 1. The University of Calgary Faculty of Law Blog (ABlawg.ca) has a thorough run-down of all the changes introduced by the Act, but I want to highlight three that are interrelated and particularly concerning:

• “Lower-risk” transfers of water between major river basins (known as inter-basin transfers) are now permitted without a special act of legislature.
• The authority and powers of the Minister have been expanded.
• Two of Alberta’s seven major river basins, the Athabasca and the Peace/Slave, have been combined and are now considered a single entity (despite being geomorphically distinct) under the law.

Inter-Basin Transfers, or IBTs

In their review of the engagement feedback, EPA characterized opinions on IBTs as “highly polarized,” and for good reason.

Each watershed has a different composition; a different biological, chemical, and physical make-up. Diverting flow volumes from one basin to another can disrupt these balances and overall watershed health. In the recipient basin, IBTs can introduce pests, parasites, invasive species, and infectious diseases, while the reduced flows in the donor river can negatively impact water quality and availability for downstream communities and aquatic habitat. IBTs can change whole hydrological regimes, altering the amount, timing, frequency, and variation of precipitation a given watershed receives, as well as how much water ultimately discharges from the rivers.

These impacts make IBTs inherently high-risk, and before these latest amendments, this reality was legally recognized; IBTs were largely prohibited under the Water Act, and only in very specific scenarios could they be authorized through the passage of a special Act by the legislative assembly, a requirement to ensure accountability and due diligence. In all of Alberta’s history, only seven IBTs have occurred.

When asked if there would be any impacts (negative) or benefits in removing this requirement for IBTs, 78 percent of engagement respondents acknowledged there would be impacts if a special Act were no longer mandatory. Almost half (49 percent) stated there are only impacts associated with removing this requirement.

IBTs are not common and are typically considered a last resort. All previous occurrences have been to help communities experiencing quality and quantity problems in their potable water supplies. Fifty-four percent of respondents said that “providing drinking water for communities” may be a circumstance where a special Act may not be necessary, but historically, each instance was successfully addressed by authorizing the IBT through the legislature.

Unless the government anticipates a sudden increase in communities experiencing issues with their drinking water (and doesn’t want to be proactive in addressing the root cause or pursuing any other alternatives that would build resilience against such a situation), it is unclear why the current legislation needs amending, and what benefit comes from making the use of IBTs easier. In their engagement survey, only three potential benefits of IBTs were pre-identified for participants to rate.

IBTs providing “more flexibility for water management” and “more timely resolution to secure water access” were viewed as beneficial to some degree by 62 percent and 56 percent of respondents, respectively. Ratings were more evenly split on “effort and administrative requirements that are proportionate to the potential impact” as a benefit.

EPA staff noted that “many disagree[d] with the range of potential benefits” of IBTs, and when participants were asked if there were any other benefits to consider, over half said no, and another 35 percent didn’t know. Notably, there were no questions asking participants to rate or discuss potential impacts or challenges associated with IBTs. EPA staff emphasized the public’s “continued expectation for transparency, justification, and oversight of IBT decisions.”

Consider all this feedback. Does anything here scream yes, Albertans unequivocally want IBTs to become more common and easily authorized? Because that is how it was seemingly interpreted by the government.

Expanded ministerial power

Now, through the Water Amendment Act, the EPA Minister has the power to authorize “lower-risk” IBTs (or order a “Director” to authorize them, with Directors being anyone the Minister designates), which is strange, given that public feedback was generally not supportive of cabinet ministers making these decisions.

The criteria for what makes a transfer lower-risk includes a couple of flow rate conditions, as well as a single ecological consideration: if “in the opinion of the Director, [an IBT] will not result in the transfer of an invasive species as defined in the Fisheries (Alberta) Act.”

Ignoring for one moment that invasive species are just one of many potential impacts of IBTs, I must reiterate something critical. Opinions are not current and site-specific data. Opinions are not peer-reviewed research. Opinions are not environmental impact assessments. Opinions should be laughably insufficient when it comes to dictating the management of water.

Back to the Act. Ministers can also now undertake whatever “form and manner” of public consultation they deem “satisfactory” for lower-risk IBTs.

Regrettably, Ministers are not required to have background information on or experience in the subject matter of the Ministry they lead. While they are supported by civil servants, many of whom are highly competent subject matter experts, there’s no obligation for Ministers to actually listen to the advice of their staff.

This means you can get folks making extremely consequential decisions on issues they have very little understanding of, and when it comes to managing the watersheds within Alberta and the life-giving resource we all rely on now and will rely on forevermore, I want professionals at the helm.

The Water Amendment Act provides an avenue for IBTs to bypass scrutiny from the legislature altogether, instead permitting the decision be made by a single Minister with as much transparency and public input as they see fit. Is this what “listening to Albertans” looks like?

Combining the Peace/Slave and Athabasca River basins

“The Government of Alberta has given little justification or rationale why the Peace-Slave and Athabasca basins should be amalgamated other than to cite that they meet within the province.”

• Jason Unger, Environmental Law Centre

In their announcement, the government said they were also amending the Water Act to “simplify major river basin boundaries.” Why they needed to be simplified is unknown, but in doing so, they’ve effectively eliminated any consideration given to IBTs (“lower-risk” or not) across a drainage area that covers 53 percent of Alberta and contains 80 percent of the province’s river flows by volume.

Feedback for this amendment wasn’t sought until the second phase of engagement, so we don’t have the public’s thoughts on this consolidation just yet. The decision to combine basins has been publicly denounced by the Dene Nation and Chiefs from Treaty 6, 7, and 8, who expressed concern for the “health of these ecosystems and the communities that depend on them” as a result,  and has been praised by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, who believe “current restrictions under the Water Act create unnecessary inefficiencies for oil and gas projects.”

What the government heard but didn’t listen to

Apart from a single question, the environment was not a main topic explored through the government’s engagement. However, in that question, when folks were asked to select what “the top priorities for the province when considering long term effectiveness of the water management system” should be, environmental protection came out on top.

In fact, the protection of the environment emerged so frequently as a theme in the feedback that EPA dedicated a whole section to it, titled Environmental Flows, in their internal review.

Here, the Ministry notes,

“Participants across diverse sectors –– including NGOs, municipalities, agriculture, industry, academia, and the public –– highlighted the importance of maintaining environmental flows while balancing competing water demands. Key recommendations include establishing science-based Instream Flow Needs (IFNs) to support determination of Water Conservation Objectives (WCOs) for all basins in Alberta, allowing private entities to hold licences for achieving WCOs, retrofitting old licences to incorporate WCOs, and improving monitoring and compliance of licensees to meet WCOs.”

Environmental protection makes an appearance in other sections, too. For the theme of Conservation, Efficiency, and Productivity (CEP, voted as the second-highest priority for government to consider), EPA noted that,

“Protection/preservation of the environment is also seen as both a contributor and benefit of CEP endeavours. Environmental flows provide critical ecosystem services, such as maintaining biodiversity, supporting recreational opportunities, and improving water quality. Recognizing these contributions ensures that natural systems are valued alongside human uses of water.

There is advocacy for restoration methods that work with, rather than against, aquatic ecosystems and natural processes should be prioritized. This includes re-meandering streams, reopening channels, replacing culverts with fish-friendly infrastructure, reintroducing beavers, re-establishing native vegetation and habitat features, removing dams and other in-stream barriers, etc.”

But, as the ABLawg bluntly puts it, the Water Amendment Act “does virtually nothing for environmental protection.”

Instead, the legislation makes changes that intensify the use of water, reduce transparency, limit public oversight, and loosen regulations to ease movement of water between basins, ignoring ecological constraints and negatively impacting the function and health of already overburdened watersheds across Alberta.

I don’t know about you, but I sure feel heard!