As far as cabinet shuffles go, this was certainly a major shuffle.  Prime Minister Trudeau announced his new cabinet on October 26th and all were sworn in by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary May Simon.  Of the 38 cabinet ministers named, only 7 were ‘re-assigned’ to their old post, including Deputy P-M & Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of Justice/AG David Lametti.  There were 5 new faces and a few lost from the last team.

Our technical committees are hard at work developing the program for the NWWC webinar series, scheduled for January 11 – February 3, 2022, with webinars taking place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’ve updated our website with the webinar schedule and will be adding information on the speakers and specific topics in the next few weeks.

We’ll be in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2022 and will finally make it to Niagara Falls in 2023.

CWWA member and City of Toronto engineer, Garry N. Boychuk, P. Eng. has just released a new book titled: Project Management in Practice – A Guide for Effective Delivery of Capital Infrastructure.   Find out how he increased output 570% in six years and learn about the practical tools and methods to enable you to do the same. This book should be a great resource for our utility leaders.

You can get more details and order the book at Friesen Press or Amazon Books

Of course we’ll add this to our resource page for our Guidance Document : Towards a Sustainable Utility on our cwwa.ca website

The new Liberal minority government will announce its cabinet on October 26th, with parliament reopening on November 22. We’ll cover the details of the speech from the throne in the next issue. In the meantime we can only look to campaign promises and the direction of policy before the election to predict government priorities.

The Canadian Council for Ministers of the Environment (CCME) posted Canadian Soil and Groundwater Quality Guidelines for the Protection of Environmental and Human Health: Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS). PFOS is an extremely stable anthropogenic compound present in significant quantities in many environmental media. PFOS is present in numerous products such as firefighting foams, insecticides, coatings used for textiles and paper, and cleaning products. It can be released directly into the environment as a result of its production, use and disposal, or it may result indirectly from the biodegradation, photo oxidation, photolysis and hydrolysis of precursor per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

This Framework outlines key concepts and terms that address four distinct climate-related infrastructure challenges: coastal hazards, riverine floods, municipal storm water, and extreme heat. Examples of how Natural Infrastructure Systems can be used to address these challenge areas are also provided. While select infrastructure solutions may be more suitable for application in specific geographic locations (e.g., those intended to address coastal erosion are most suited for coastal regions, including the Great Lakes), the Framework is intended to be applied across jurisdictions, including Canada’s rural and northern areas. The Framework does not provide specific emphasis on use of NBS for fire risk management, droughts, or remote and northern communities, outside of the four distinct challenge and solution areas listed above. While many of the NBS can be applied for those areas and purposes, further work is needed

Newly-published professional practice guidelines from the provincial regulator aim to ensure that British Columbia’s engineering and geoscience professionals are considering natural asset management in their planning and decision-making processes alongside their engineered green and grey infrastructure, says the CEO of Engineers and Geoscientists BC.

BC’s Healthy Watersheds Initiative team has released Our Water, Our Future, an interim report capturing early wins and insights from project teams working to restore and protect BC’s streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands.

Currently 61 HWI-supported projects support climate change adaptation or mitigation. More than $8 million of HWI project funding is contributing to habitat restoration and another $7 million is supporting climate adaptation. The report notes that projects are now taking place on an accelerated timeline. Project work – including permitting, hiring, work, and community engagement – is expected to take place between January 1 and December 15, 2021.

The Hill

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued a proclamation on Tuesday evening expanding the state's drought emergency to include the entire state, following the second driest year ever recorded.

E&E News

The Biden administration today laid out a plan for addressing water quality and infrastructure problems plaguing tribal lands and fueling the spread of COVID-19, a move that advocates cast as a critical step forward.

"People often forget about drinking water when they’re focused on environmental issues," said Heather Tanana, a resident of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. "This is the first time we’re getting the attention and direct recognition by the agencies to address drinking water [on tribal lands]."

Reuters

U.S. authorities said on Thursday that four ransomware attacks had penetrated water and wastewater facilities in the past year, and they warned similar plants to check for signs of intrusions and take other precautions.

Water Canada

Through the Municipal Climate Resiliency Grant, Intact Public Entities and the Intact Foundation are investing $1 million in cities and towns across Canada that are developing practical solutions to protect communities from floods or wildfires.

Wall Street Journal

Distrust of tap water is on the rise in the U.S. In 2018, roughly 60 million Americans didn’t drink their tap water, according to a study led by a researcher at Pennsylvania State University—a 40% increase compared with four years earlier.

Total Water Blog

Final keynote of series as part of NYC Water and Climate, an official Climate Week NYC event.

Nonwoven Industry

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 818 by Assembly Member Richard Bloom into law, requiring all packaging for diaper wipes, cleaning wipes and cosmetic wipes to display clear “Do Not Flush” warnings. The bill is the result of a three-year effort between representatives from wastewater and product stewardship groups and wipes manufacturers to address an urgent pollution problem that has plagued public wastewater infrastructure. The legislation establishes disposal labeling requirements for wet wipes packaging and requires manufacturers of wipes to educate the public on the impacts of flushing wipes improperly.

CBC News

As the people of Toronto flocked to the Lake Ontario waterfront to swim, paddle and generally escape pandemic isolation, Chelsea Rochman's students at the University of Toronto were throwing plastic bottles with GPS trackers into the water.

The research team's goal is to track trash that ends up in the lake, to figure out where it accumulates in the water and where it's coming from in the first place.

AWWA

Scientists at Beaver Water District (BWD) in Arkansas are adding meaning to the old axiom, “It all comes out in the wash.”  

At BWD, a regional water distribution district serving communities in northwest Arkansas, scientists in the environmental quality department are using the presence of synthetic laundry detergent chemicals to help detect human-influenced water quality problems in its source water, Beaver Lake. 

Ottawa Citizen

A family of four’s annual toilet paper use generates about the same amount of carbon as cutting down 27 trees or flying on a jet from Toronto to Vancouver. Those are the kind of statistics that might make you want to sit down, on the throne, perhaps, with a new appreciation of what we’re flushing away. The numbers come from the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group.