“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
W.H. Auden in his poem “First Things First”.
Retired provincial fish biologist, Lorne Fitch, was at “Word on the Street” in Lethbridge on September 19. And he talked about what he and Mount Royal University biologist Jon Mee found when they tested fish from the river below the Oldman dam. Selenium showed up in every fish they tested, in varying amounts. I’ve spent my working life in news, and the first question you learn to ask is who is checking?
Who is checking on our water? The honest answer is less comforting than it should be.
What the fish are telling us
Fitch and Mee analyzed thirty-eight fish from five species, representative of the Oldman River below the Oldman dam. The fish were collected in October 2025 during an annual fish rescue at an irrigation canal.
Ten of the 38 exceeded Alberta’s threshold of 4.0 micrograms per gram, including all six mountain whitefish, and one of those whitefish tested close to 10. Among sport fish, one in three was over the threshold. Alberta lakes untouched by coal mining have fish averaging between 0.3 and 1.5 micrograms per gram, so the authors call the Oldman’s averages high. In the one female rainbow trout tested, the eggs measured 15.8, above the U.S. EPA criterion of 15.1. That is a single fish, but it points to a risk to reproduction.
The limits of this study matter. It is a small reconnaissance report prepared for a local conservation group, Crowsnest Headwaters; not a full survey. The authors say plainly that waterborne selenium isn’t held back by the reservoir and dam, and that upstream sources could be influencing fish downstream. They stop short of proving the link to the old coal mines. What they call for is a more systematic examination, urgently.
The upstream picture is worse. A study led by a provincial scientist found selenium in Crowsnest Lake fish at 5 to 26 micrograms per gram, among the highest documented in the literature, with runoff from the Tent Mountain mine that closed in the 1980s and was partly certified reclaimed. Alberta’s interim advice is that the public should consider limiting consumption of brown trout, lake trout and mountain whitefish from Crowsnest Lake. The advisory I found covers that lake only. Fitch and Mee put the risk to people who eat Oldman fish, including on the Piikani Nation, on the record.
The minister’s position deserves a fair hearing. Grant Hunter says the lake’s water remains safe with low selenium, and that modern coal mining faces stricter standards. That is exactly the problem with selenium. It can be low in the water and still build up through the food chain into fish flesh. If you test only the water, you may be told everything is fine. And concerning the “stricter standards,” no coal mine in the world has been able to restrict selenium to what are considered healthy levels from any open-pit mine … which the proposed Grassy Mountain coal mine would be.
A word for the ranchers and irrigators … what was measured here is fish tissue. Selenium is also a nutrient, and Health Canada notes most people get healthy levels through grains and flours. It comes down to dose. I found no published testing of irrigation water, forage or livestock in the Oldman for selenium. I’m not saying there is a problem there, but I can’t say there isn’t, because nobody appears to have looked.
Coal, Blairmore Creek and a water licence
Grassy Mountain’s legacy mines drain into Blairmore and Gold creeks. Consultant data cited by Fitch and Mee found 4.5 to 10.4 micrograms per gram in trout from those creeks. Now Northback Holdings wants to expand there. In April 2026 it applied for a Water Act licence to divert 185,022 cubic metres a year from the Blairmore Creek watershed. The company says it won’t draw from creeks and streams, but will collect precipitation and mine dewatering, storing it for later, and it cited a term licence of 100 acre-feet. That is roughly 123,000 cubic metres, which doesn’t match the 185,022 in the application. The Alberta Wilderness Association argues the basin’s 2007 closure takes precedence over the 2003 order Northback relies on. No decision has been made, and the company’s full environmental impact assessment report and integrated application aren’t yet public. Any decision should wait for a selenium baseline for the whole watershed.
The rules Premier Smith’s government has changed
Bill 7. The Water Amendment Act came into force in March 2026. Alberta had been the only province requiring a special act of the legislature for inter-basin transfers. Now “lower-risk” transfers can be approved by ministerial order. The government’s case is that the Water Act hadn’t been meaningfully updated since 1999. To be fair, larger, longer-distance or multi-basin transfers still need the legislature. The Act also requires disclosure of prices paid for licence transfers, which matters in closed basins like ours.
The larger change is the merger of the Peace/Slave and Athabasca basins. It covers 53 per cent of Alberta and 80 per cent of its river flows. Within it, transfers are handled as ordinary licence applications. The oil and gas lobby backed the merger. The Alberta Wilderness Association says 65 per cent of organizations in the government’s own engagement opposed changing the basin boundaries. Three First Nations announced a legal challenge in December, arguing the province is avoiding treaty obligations. I don’t know how the courts will rule.
Wetlands and tile drainage. On Aug. 28 the province announced that Water Act approval requirements will be removed this fall for specified agricultural activities involving temporary and seasonal wetlands on private cropland. A tile drainage code of practice, with notification instead of approval, is due in early 2027. The government says water managed under the exemptions must stay on site and not harm neighbours. Downstream landowner consent will be required where drainage could affect them. Farmers face real costs and delays, and after a wet year I understand the frustration. Neighbour consent protects the neighbour, though, not the river or the town downstream. Who is measuring the combined effect of thousands of small drainage decisions?
Who is watching?
Environmental monitoring in Alberta has been reorganized under several governments. The PCs created the independent AEMERA (Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency) in 2014, and it was dissolved in 2016 under the NDP. The direction since is what worries me.
2019: Stand-alone offices for climate change and environmental monitoring were eliminated soon after the UCP government took office.
2020: Under Premier Kenney, Alberta and Ottawa signed a deal cutting oil sands monitoring about 25 per cent, with no field studies on wetlands, fish or insects and no fieldwork on the main branch of the Athabasca River. The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute’s funding fell to $1.4 million from the usual $4 million to $5 million. Its executive director said amphibian, bird and mammal work, and tracking of plant and habitat indicators, wouldn’t be done. Ottawa said the drop reflected COVID field-work suspensions rather than a deliberate budget cut. The result was still data we can’t get back.
2025: A letter quoted by the National Observer objected to proposed major cuts to oil sands wetland and biodiversity monitoring. The minister’s office called “cuts” misleading, citing duplicative work plans.
2026: Under Premier Smith, the Alberta Water Council was told in February that its operating grant would end, after two decades. The government says ending funding for it and the Clean Air Strategic Alliance saves $1 million a year, and that each council’s president was a senior bureaucrat. Hunter says regional water councils can fill the gap. Those councils’ funding had not been reported cut as of May, but they don’t provide province-wide coordination. The Watershed Restoration and Resiliency Program is being wound down and the Land Stewardship Centre’s funding was cut in Budget 2026.
As well … Local Stewardship Grants: Multi-million-dollar grant programs like the Watershed Restoration and Resiliency Program (WRRP) and core operational support for bodies like the Land Stewardship Centre were phased out or defunded, stripping grass-roots community groups of the ability to conduct localized water sampling and stream-bank repairs.
Meanwhile the province has committed $3.8 million to map southern Alberta’s groundwater, due in 2027. That shows how much of the picture is missing.
Data centres and thirsty projects
The provincial approvals director ruled that Wonder Valley, near Grande Prairie, needed no environmental impact assessment because it proposed standard power and water systems. The ministry says permits are still required. Synapse’s Olds campus got the same ruling. A regulator dismissed Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation’s appeal of a licence for six million cubic metres a year from the Smoky River for Wonder Valley. About three-quarters of proposed Alberta data centre sites are in high or extremely high water-stress regions, according to the National Observer. Meta says its planned centre will use closed-loop and dry cooling and less water than a typical Alberta golf course. An engineer notes it’s unclear whether the gas plant next to it has a water footprint of its own. Most have. Most are large.
Declining Fossil and Shallow Aquifers
A large majority of rural Albertans rely on groundwater for drinking water. Hydrogeological monitoring reveals steady water table declines across central and southern Alberta:
Shallow Aquifers: Rely entirely on snowmelt and intact surface wetlands to recharge. The removal of wetland protections and the acceleration of tile drainage intercept rainfall before it can seep into the earth, thereby starving local water tables.
Deep “Fossil” Aquifers: Ancient, non-recharging underground reservoirs are increasingly targeted by commercial feedlots, industrial operations, and deep well injection for hydraulic fracturing. Because these deep aquifers do not replenish on human timescales, extracting fresh fossil groundwater represents permanent depletion.
Financial Downloading: Shifting Costs to Municipal Ratepayers
While Premier Smith’s government promotes “Red Tape Reduction” as an economic driver, the financial burden of degraded source water does not disappear ... it is offloaded directly onto municipal governments and local property taxpayers.
Rising Municipal Utility Bills
As provincial oversight on upstream agricultural runoff, forestry clear-cutting, and industrial discharges is streamlined, raw water entering municipal river intakes contains higher sediment loads, elevated chemical residues, and algae-inducing nutrient concentrations. Municipal water treatment plants must purchase more advanced chemical treatments, install expensive filtration systems, and run more frequent compliance tests to ensure finished tap water meets health standards. These operational expenses are passed directly onto household utility bills.
Private Water Licence Trading
Because southern river basins are closed to new surface allocations, growing towns and cities can no longer simply apply to the province for a new water licence. To support population growth, municipalities are forced to enter a developing private water market, purchasing senior water rights from existing commercial or agricultural holders.
Disclosed municipal licence transfers in Alberta have ranged widely depending on volume from $6.24 per cubic metre to well above that per cubic metre. Towns must spend millions of local tax dollars acquiring these rights ... a direct downloading of infrastructure costs that drives up municipal debt, property taxes, and development levies.
(Image created by ChatGPT specifically for this article)
To Rectify the Current Situation here is What I’d ask for:
Test fish, water and invertebrates for selenium along the whole Crowsnest and Oldman system, as Fitch and Mee recommend: the Crowsnest River, the Oldman Reservoir and the river down to Lethbridge. Test irrigation water, forage and livestock too, and publish the results.
Issue consumption advice for Oldman fish once the data justifies it.
Hold any new water licence for coal in these headwaters until a selenium baseline exists.
Restore independent, publicly reported water monitoring and the Alberta Water Council’s funding.
Require impact assessments for water-hungry projects, and monitor the cumulative effect of the wetland and tile drainage changes.
Treat water as the province’s most precious resource after humans who are number one.
None of this needs ideology. It needs testing. I’d rather be proven wrong by the data than right by accident.
ken moore
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I truly appreciate the fact that you’d take the time and trouble to read this opinion piece. And yes, I know, there are people who will argue that the oil and gas industry are the province’s most precious resource after humans. If you shift your view from immediate market value (which anyone who looks at the books can see is oil and natural gas) for ecological survival and long-term sustainability, water is definitely our most precious resource after humans. Without it, neither people nor the energy industry could exist. And water really is the limiting factor of our province’s growth. Anyway, no matter what you believe, leave a comment and state what you think about the current state of affairs. I’m interested in what you have to say. It’s said that the only people who don’t have opinions are the ones who don’t think.
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Thank you again … ken
Ken Moore, thank you for your research and your heavy lifting in writing this article.
The only rational conclusion is that Danielle Smith leads a government of far-right radicals who manage to combine Alberta sovereignty with the blatant sellout of Albertans' scarce water to foreign grifters. The only thing standing in her way is the constitutional right of the Blackfoot First Nations to harvest healthy fish from ancestral waters.