Please note…
The series, “13 Things You Can do to Kill Your Community,”
is a set of satirical open letters by
Doug Griffiths
which appeared as individual weekly contributions to
The Wainwright EDGE
during the spring and summer of 2005.
The series is not intended to be taken as instruction
for actually harming your community; rather its critical aim is to
increase awareness of everyday things we may not
recognize as being detrimental to our community.
13 Things You Can Do to Kill Your Community
by Doug Griffiths, MLA Battle River - Wainwright
Ensure a Poor Quality of Water
The first of 13 things that you can do to ensure the failure of your community (remember the purpose of these letters) is to ensure that your community has poor quality of water.
As I said in my introduction, I have traveled all over the province over the last three years, talking to hundreds of organization, thousands of people, but I have also been to 54 different communities. I have said often that I could be blindfolded and driven into any community, walk into any home in town, be given a glass of water to sample, and be able to tell you, with almost perfect accuracy, the condition of the town. If the quality of water is good, I can bet you that there are new subdivisions, new businesses downtown, a clean mainstreet, and so on. If the quality of the water is poor then I can almost assure you that businesses are closing on mainstreet, the downtown core looks decrepit, there are many old houses for sale and so on.
The reason for this is that people are used to good quality household water in this province. People are turned off by water with a poor smell, poor taste, sinks and tubs that are brown with stains, and rumours of ill health caused by water. The populace is not often very vocal but it does view quality water as essential to a quality community. In all reality, whether that opinion is justified or not, we do see people pay more every day for water than they do for gasoline. Often, complaints rage over the price of less than $1.00 for 1 litre of gasoline, but we rarely hear people complain about the price of almost $2.00 for 500ml of water. Quality water is important.
As well, we know the importance of water to economics. A farmer can’t improve or assure the quality or diversity of crops without assurances of water value. It is impossible to grow value-added agriculture, or indeed any value-added industry, without access to water. It is difficult to increase tourism development without access to assured water volumes. It is also impossible for a community to grow to its capacity without access to enough quality water to service the new households and subdivisions.
Comparing the south of the province before irrigation to now, with irrigation, we can observe that there are more farms that are smaller, more labour-intensive, and there is more value-added agriculture and commercial business surrounding those farms, and … there is an entire tourism industry that was completely unexpected because of the presence of surface water.
So, if you want to ensure that your community will fail- if your desire is to see that your community does not grow and does not succeed- then ensure you don’t address the issue of water. It is the most important first step to ensure success. Every community that has been successful has done it, so if you want to fail, ensure water issues are not addressed.
I am determined to see rural Alberta succeed so I will continue to work on water issues, and besides addressing water and waste water issues in our constituency I will also be working on adequacy of supply for primary agriculture (irrigation possibilities), value added agriculture and commercial needs, tourism and community growth.
