SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The Northwest Territories and Alberta are giving notice they will take a hard line on future use of Mackenzie River basin water even though public hearings into a $6.6 billion hydro-electric project on the Peace River in British Columbia are still a year away.

Known as Site C, the 900-megawatt dam and generator have been on BC Hydro's planning books for 30 years. In April the project got preliminary approval from the British Columbia government.

BC Hydro has allotted two years for a public review and wants to begin construction in 2013 to deliver electricity by 2020.

Of no less concern to the GNWT are impacts from a run-of-river hydro-electric project proposed for the Slave River, ever-growing demand from Alberta oil sands developers for water, and industrial pollution of the Athabasca River.

In staking out its plan for the future, the territorial government is looking to its own water strategy and the Mackenzie River Basin trans-boundary agreement that governments have mostly ignored since it was introduced in 1997 as a guideline for water management.

The agreement proposed signatories would manage their water, provided that it "does not unreasonably harm the integrity of the aquatic ecosystem in any other jurisdiction." Disputes were to be resolved "in a co-operative and harmonious manner." Only Yukon and the Northwest Territories signed on.

"We're saying for this to work for all of us we all need legally-binding agreements that will be clear, detailed and enforceable," Environment Minister Michael Miltenberger said in an interview.

"There is some urgency now to get this done before Site C proceeds, so that the trans-boundary agreement is reflected and considered by the folks looking at Site C. All the details would be covered so that as the review proceeds we are more than an intervener; we are a downstream jurisdiction that has legal considerations that have to be addressed the same as aboriginal governments have legal treaties and land claim agreements that have reference to water.

"This is no longer just a case of B.C. being able to move ahead and say 'in case your interested, we're building another dam.' Things have changed dramatically since the days of the Bennett dam and everybody stood quietly by and wondered what happened to the Peace-Athabasca Delta."

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