Agriculture will have to be front and centre in any provincial government effort to protect prairie wetlands, a conference on wetland management was told recently.
Patricia Farnese of the University of Saskatchewan told civil servants, engineers, hydrologists, environmentalists, municipal staff and elected officials attending the Wetland Policy and Mitigation Workshop that new regulations shouldn’t disproportionately disadvantage rural landowners.
“Farmers shouldn’t suddenly be forced to pay for a new and enhanced public interest. The new rules will have to reflect some form of compensation for mitigation.”
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However, she also said new regulations will need to be enforceable and should be outside of ministerial exemption. She said Saskatchewan’s current rules can be exempted by the environment minister, but since 1972 only five development proposals have been denied.
Steve Eggers of the United States Army Corp of Engineers agreed.
“There is too much monetary pressure to make these laws optional or voluntary,” he said.
“It has been tried in some parts of the U.S. and it fails miserably.”
Dale Hjertaas, executive director of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority, said Saskatchewan government policy statements are conflicted when it comes to wetland preservation.
On one hand, he said, the government says wetlands should be preserved and on the other hand the province strongly states that business and agricultural development need to fostered.
“New legislation will need to balance both.”
He said friction over the new regulations will occur where private landowners’ rights meet with public interest in wetlands.
Millions of acres of small Saskatchewan wetlands are located on private farmland and most are exempt from regulation. However, officials say protecting wetlands against drainage or modification doesn’t necessarily mean that no development or change can take place.
Alberta is developing a mitigation land bank that allows the province to restore wetlands and then sell their existence as a credit to those that are destroying wetlands in another spot.
If a developer or farmer wants to destroy a wetland, then an equivalent credit for a wetland in the same area and of the same type can be bought to offset the loss. If a similar wetland cannot be provided, a complex set of rules is invoked to calculate how much of another wetland would be needed to balance the loss.
Ian Rudland of Alberta Environment said these efforts are moving Alberta toward a policy of no net loss of wetlands.
Eggers said Minnesota’s no net loss law for wetlands has benefited farmers. In that state, farmers can reflood or take wetland soils out of production and sell them to the state wetland bank.
“Farmers typically get from $3,000 to $50,000 per acre for their wetlands, depending on their location and type,” he said.
“They get out of having to manage these difficult soils and are often able to replace them with better land for cropping or grazing.”
While Saskatchewan is starting to analyze its wetlands and create public policies to protect and enhance them, Alberta and Manitoba have already started the process. Both provinces have chosen a path to no net loss of wetlands, which matches current federal policies.
The knob and kettle landscape that forms much of the topography of Western Canada’s grain belt is filled with water.
The last ice age formed this environment when glaciers applied tremendous force that pressed the clay and soil into a highly compact and often water-impervious surface. As a result, water has pooled in these small depressions of glacial till.
Michael Hill of Ducks Unlimited Canada said 80 percent of these prairie sloughs are 2.5 kilometres or less in size. If they run off, they tend to drain into the next depression farther down the slope rather than entering a larger river basin.
Farmers have drained 40 percent of these seasonal and semi-permanent pools over the past 100 years of settlement, but thousands remain across Western Canada.
Laws governing drainage, especially on the Prairies, are often vague on what can be done without a permit.
All water that accumulates is either federally or provincially controlled if it drains into a larger basin or moves from one private landowner to another or to public land.
Many of the wetlands, where water accumulates or where soil often remains saturated, do not fall directly under the control of the upper two governments’ control.
Often municipalities will govern water if it moves between landowners, but won’t control drainage that remains within agreeable boundaries.
No matter how it occurs, drainage reduces wetland acres and the presence of plants and fauna that might otherwise exist, said Lisette Ross of the Manitoba Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, an arm of Ducks Unlimited Canada.
“It all results in lower waterfowl numbers.”
