The South Saskatchewan River runs dry   (Page 2 of 4)

The river is the lifeblood of the prairies, but its future flow will be determined by a supply-demand equation — and the math doesn’t look promising

By Allan Casey with photography by Nayan Sthankiya

See photos from in and around the drying South Saskatchewan River

Our last day afloat, the artificial lake plays tricks with our sense of place. Around Riverhurst, the sandy, flat banks resemble those of the Nile seen from a felucca, minus the pyramids. And then we seem to find ourselves in a regatta off the California coast. In the widest part of the reservoir, deep-keel yachts sail out of the farming-turned-marina town of Elbow. A flooded coulee now serves as a snug harbour, where the collection of pricey boats and their owners could be on Catalina Island.

Nothing so transforms a place like water.

Saskatoon is the de facto capital of the Saskatchewan River Basin. Other cities are graced by the river, but nowhere else are urbanites so inordinately proud of it. We cross and recross the river, often many times a day in the “City of Bridges,” and delight in the elegant view. It is an imposing, dramatic presence in an otherwise demure landscape. Yet the river kindly lowers its normally fortress-high banks as it passes through the city, yielding an intimacy with the water. We ride our bicycles along its willow banks and mark the arrival of spring by the return of the pelicans that fish every day in the eddies below the weir. If you ask a Saskatonian what she loves about her city, she will likely say, “The people … and the river.”

The city is home to the closest thing that exists to a river head office. Headquartered in a squat building near the Traffic Bridge is Partners FOR the Saskatchewan River Basin, where I find managing partner Susan Lamb sharing the lobby with two dozen boisterous schoolkids on a field trip. The kids are there for the same reason I am, perhaps, to see whether someone is minding the store.

“Nobody told the river there are borders,” says Lamb from her glass-walled riverbank office. “We must start thinking of this river as a whole system, not in terms of political boundaries, if we are going to manage it sustainably.” The Partners organization tries to do just that, bringing together government water agencies from the three prairie provinces, special-interest groups such as Ducks Unlimited Canada and individual citizens from across the west.

Thinking about the river as a whole system is one thing; actually managing it that way is still a far-off dream. A jumble of government agencies, such as the Prairie Provinces Water Board, wield partial control over the river. Federal, provincial and municipal governments have spun a tangled web of legislation and programs to manage the river for a thousand uses: safe drinking, powerboat racing, industrial development, bird habitat, to name a few. Add in hundreds of NGOs or quasi-government advisory groups — like the basin Partners — and you have more cacophony than chorus. To be fair, such jurisdictional fragmentation is the main obstacle to sustainable ecosystem management gen - erally, not just with the South Saskatchewan River. Lake Winnipeg infamously fell between the government administrative cracks for 30 years until a band of citizens joined forces to rescue it (see “Forgotten lake,” Nov/Dec 2006).

“We are taking a third of the river for irrigation already. There’s no way we can double that.”

Maybe we can someday reach a promised land called integrated water-resources management in the South Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, says Lamb, we still have glaring gaps in our most basic knowledge.

“We know virtually nothing about actual use or consumption of water,” she says. “No one does.” Her assertion catches me off guard. Having waded through hundreds of pages of river studies and reports over the years, I’ve seen water-consumption figures cited exhaustively, used in graphs, equations and, that staple of water literature, pie charts. Consumption figures are even noted in the Partners’ own 2009 state-of-the-basin study, “From the Mountains to the Sea.” Lamb is a very bright person, but in this instance, she must somehow be mistaken. Surely our actual water use is too widely discussed, too vital a statistic here in Palliser country, to be an unknown.

“Certainly actual use is rarely measured,” confirms Robert Halliday, author of the Partners’ report, when I go to see him for clarification. Halliday, former director of Environment Canada’s National Hydrology Research Centre, says that we measure river flows at about 2,500 monitoring stations across the country. The Saskatoon station is not far from Halliday’s house, just upstream from the weir in a little brick building. But beyond this thin data-gathering network, everything is guesswork.

There are nearly 12,000 licensed users of river water and 80 percent of the water allocated under these licences is withdrawn in Alberta’s sprawling irrigation districts. Users typically meter their intake pipes, but the standards for reporting are lax, and withdrawal numbers alone cannot tell us actual water use. Some water is taken up by growing plants, some evaporates or is lost from leaking canals, and much simply flows back to the river. Since none of this is measured, actual consumption is just an estimate based on assumptions.

Our estimates are accurate only on a large scale. Humans currently withdraw about 50 percent of the total South Saskatchewan flow. Actual consumption — withdrawals minus return flows — is about 33 percent.