CWWA is always working to strengthen its partnerships and to build new ones. That is why we are so pleased to announce our new partnership with Public Safety Canada and Dalhousie University.  We have joined forces to gather the baseline information we need to strengthen the capacity of our municipal utilities in Canada to deal with emergencies. Public Safety Canada is concerned with the security of all infrastructure in Canada and CWWA represents our Water/Wastewater sector on the national cross-sector round table. Public Safety Canada recently approached CWWA to discuss how they could better support our sector and soon, this project was developed. Our Security and Emergency Management Committee is chaired by Pat Bellemare of Halifax Water who brought in his connections at Dalhousie University to complete our project team. The entire effort has been spearheaded by our own Adrian Toth, CWWA Manager of Government Relations. To get the approval for the federal funding, we had to call upon the support of our longtime partners in the provincial and regional associations as we will need their assistance to ensure the success of the project. The details of this funding announcement are found in this Bulletin.

This partnership announcement falls directly in line with the strategic direction from our Board. The CWWA Board met in Halifax at the end of June and we spent considerable time discussing who CWWA is and what is our purpose. The Board confirmed that our two primary purposes are:

 

• to work with the federal government to provide input that supports good legislation and programs for our water and wastewater sector
• to support information sharing and educate our members

We reconfirmed that we can achieve these goals through our partnerships with other local, regional and national associations. Top among these partnerships is the relation we maintain with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We have worked closely with the FCM on providing input on the Wastewater System Effluent Regulations, the flushable wipes issue and infrastructure funding issues, including the Infrastructure Report Card (latest report due this fall). Meanwhile we have strengthened our relationships with other national water organizations such as the Canadian Association for Water Quality (CAWQ), Canadian Water Network (CWN), Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) and the Canadian Municipal Water Efficiency Network (CMWEN) to name only a few, while we represent Canada to the International Water Association.

We will see these partnerships at work this fall as we host the first National Water & Wastewater Conference in Whistler in conjunction with the CAWQ and CWWEN with the support of FCM and CWN.