Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
A letter from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut Mayor says the community urgently needs its water and sewer infrastructure replaced. MLA for Rankin Inlet North-Chesterfield Inlet, Alexander Sammurtok, tabled the letter in the legislature on March 9. The letter from Mayor Harry Towtongie says the utilidor system has reached critical capacity and has caused council to delay and even stop developments in the community.
A conservation authority is working to update flood hazard maps for parts of eastern Ontario, which will help municipal governments assess the risk of flooding when planning for the future. The South Nation Conservation (SNC), an organization dedicated to the protection and restoration of ecosystems in the region, is leading the efforts to update the maps, which hasn't been done for many years.
Canada is famously home to 20 percent of the world’s freshwater — but how well are we stewarding this supply? WWF-Canada recently reassessed the health of our country’s 25 watersheds to better understand how they’re responding to threats from pollution, habitat loss and climate change. Our 2020 Watershed Reports found that 26 per cent of Canadas’s 167 sub-watersheds received a score of Good or Very Good, which is good or very good news! But what’s bad, or possibly very bad, is that nearly 60 per cent of these sub-watersheds received no score at all because they remain Data Deficient. In other words, we just don’t know. This lack of data is concerning as we need a complete picture to determine which areas need dedicated efforts to protect our freshwater ecosystems.
