First Nations and environmentalists in B.C's interior want the provincial government to stop letting private companies from bottling water for export from the water-stressed region.

The province banned water exports in 1996, but has no plans to change the exemption that allows for water in containers of less than 20 litres to be bottled.

Is it unethical to allow water exports from the tinder-dry region struggling with prolonged drought and facing a new climate normal that includeds constant threat from wildfires that can help degrade water quality?

There appears to be a lack of information about the status of B.C.'s groundwater reserves province wide and about the rate of which they are naturally recharged by precipitation. The concern is the recharge of the aquifer, which plans are all based on outdated data.

We don't know what the future recharge or depletion of the aquifer will be. The landscape is changing rapidly. There is climate change and the question of accountability. Who is monitoring the aquifer. It doesn't appear that a lot of thought has gone into it.

A thought... there are still a lot of First Nations communities in Canada that don't yet have clean drinking water. Maybe until such a time as every First Nations community has clean drinking water we should not export even one drop of water that has been extracted from their traditional terrirtories.

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