Scientists call it the Amazon of the North and they fear the Mackenzie River Basin, an extensive watershed three times the size of France, is under threat.
But it's not the massive hydroelectric project that the British Columbia government wants to build nor the Alberta oilsands that pose the greatest risk to the river system that flows into British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan through Yukon and Nunavut, into the Northwest Territories and to the Arctic Ocean.
It's the Canadian Constitution.
"The Mackenzie is to the northwest part of the continent what the Amazon is to South America," said Bob Sandford, Canadian chairman of the United Nations International Water for Life Decade initiative and a member of the advisory board of the U.S.-based Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy.
Sandford was among the scientists and legal experts gathering in Vancouver Tuesday at the invitation of the Rosenberg forum, a think-tank based at the University of California.
"The Mackenzie River Basin is thought to be one of the lynchpins holding North America's water, ice and climate interface together and if the stability of this important eco-hydrological system is compromised, it could have huge impacts on southern jurisdictions," Sandford said.
The basin includes the Peace and Liard rivers in northern British Columbia, the South Nahanni and Peel rivers in Yukon, and the Hay and Athabasca rivers in Alberta, all of which feed the Mackenzie River, an 1,800-kilometre colossus of water that flows into the Arctic Ocean at the rate of 10.3 million litres per second.
The Mackenzie basin accounts for a staggering 1.8 million square kilometres of land, and takes in Great Slave, Great Bear and Athabasca lakes.
It falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government, three provincial governments and three territorial governments - and that is the problem, say proponents of an integrated plan.
The Vancouver gathering is an effort to come up with a suggested management plan for the basin that just might save it from the problems that plague almost every other major watershed in the world.
"We find worldwide and in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ that one of the biggest obstacles to effective water policy reform is jurisdictional fragmentation, where provinces and territories and governments have historically held within their own domains the power to manage small sections of larger systems," Sandford said.
This is "the opportunity to break out of an old mould, and an old jurisdictional trap in which we've been since Confederation - the federated approach to division of powers."
