The Water Haller – Focus and Friends

Just coming back from what I call The Springboard – the semi-annual meeting of your Board of Directors, This year, your volunteer directors from almost every province and territory met in Halifax to review the year past and set a course for the year ahead – actually for the next few years and beyond.

While I am afforded a great deal of authority to manage the day-to-day affairs and activities of the association, it is your volunteer board that sets the big goals and charts our direction. After a review of what had been a fairly successful and healthy 2014, the board directed their efforts to the future. With the support of a great local facilitator, the board discussed the broader questions of who is the CWWA, who are our members and what value do we offer to those members. Then we looked ahead 5 years to who or what we want to be.

While we are called upon to participate in all aspects of "water" in Canada, the Board confirmed that our primary focus is to serve the utilities (municipal or private enterprises) that provide water and wastewater services to communities across Canada. Our membership also includes the private sector consultants and technology providers that support the utilities. We are proud to be THE voice of this utility sector to the federal government, the media and the general public.

All that said, we know we can’t work alone. Amongst that sea of water organizations in Canada, we have a number of critical relationships. First and foremost is with our 6 provincial/regional associations. Working together, we strengthen the voice of the utility sector and support intelligent legislation from coast to coast. At the federal level, we have developed an effective working partnership with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) to provide expert comments on legislation as it develops and to call for sufficient and consistent federal funding of our sector.

Meanwhile, our technical expertise is strengthened by our mutually supportive relationships with other national associations like the Canadian Water Network CWN), Alliance for Water Efficiency (AWE), Canadian Drinking Water Committee (CDW), Canadian Network of Asset Manager (CNAM) and many more. We continue to make new partnerships while strengthening these core partnerships.

Canadian Water and Wastewater Association