Blog of law articles

(BY HUGO)

An article by Kelly Cryderman from the Calgary Herlad reports on what appears to be a truly endemic problem in water law and management: deficient implementation and compliance monitoring. According to the article:

«The Alberta government is not systematically following up on whether water licence holders -- including irrigation collectives, corporations or towns and cities -- are illegally withdrawing too much water or breaking other laws, says the province's auditor general»

The report from Alberta's auditor general can be found here (see p.53).

Despite the apparent recurrence of similar problems everywhere, it could be argued that this is not an issue inherent to water law. Rather, it might more probably be caused by lack of political will and/or insufficient funding of enforcement agencies.