Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 04/02) - Domestic need is driving water hungry Alberta to re-evaluate its water strategy.

At the centre of its strategy are rights to water in the Mackenzie Basin.

Alberta has "taken renewed interest" in their agreement with the Northwest Territories and the federal government, said Jack Van Camp, executive director of the Mackenzie Basin Secretariat -- a body overseeing a multilateral agreement between provinces and territories.

After four years of drought in southern Alberta forced, the provincial government has resurrected the 30-year-old Prairie Rivers Improvement Management and Evaluation Plan (PRIME). It is an ambitious plan that could see water diverted from Northern Alberta watersheds to the bone dry south.

Under PRIME, the Peace and Athabaska rivers --which feed the Mackenzie -- are slated for diversion south.

This could have a major impact on water levels on the Mackenzie Delta depending on the volume of water Alberta chooses to divert, said Bob McLeod, deputy minister for the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development.

It is estimated that 89 per cent of the water flowing through Alberta heads north to the Arctic.

The Alberta Social Credit government came out with the PRIME project in 1965. It planned to use all 16 water basins in the province from the Peace to the Oldman in the south.

The Socreds lost in 1971 to the Conservatives but the project didn't die.

The Conservative government built on the project and actually outlined an inter-basin transfer scheme that would have diverted thousands of cubic kilometres of water, enough to cover three quarters of Great Slave Lake to the depth of one metre.

That was before the Mackenzie River Basin Trans-boundary Master agreement. It was signed in 1997 after 25 years of negotiations.

Within this master agreement, governments hold bilateral agreements with each other to set water flow standards between each region; restricting development on watersheds which span provincial or territorial boundaries.

The territorial and Alberta governments have not hammered out the exact numbers of acceptable water flow volumes, said McLeod.

"We have to maintain things as they exist," said McLeod. Something as ambitious as the PRIME project would never fly with the territorial government, he said.

A spokesperson with Alberta Environment said the PRIME project is one of many options the province is entertaining.

Val Mellesmoen, director of communications for the department, said 15 government experts recommended the project be reviewed again.

"But you never know, it's on the table," she said.

Alberta is beginning public consultations this month and hopes to have a plan ready by October, said Mellesmoen.

Kevin O'Reilly, spokesperson with Ecology North in Yellowknife, said the Northern public should be involved in the consultation process since most of the water flows into the territory.