WC136 MayJune 2024 - Magazine - Page 28
AQUIFERS
A Snapshot of
Water Use in Canada
Open data is increasingly putting
water use information in front of the
Canadian public.
BY CAROLYN GRUSKE, DATA ANALYSIS BY MATTHEW PARIZOT
C
ANADA IS HOME to a lot of water—but the country also uses a lot.
According to data from Statistics Canada in 2019,
that amount totalled 36.1 billion cubic metres. And
while Canadian households and residences are often
the targets of political programs and publicity campaigns
encouraging the reduction of water usage (by installing
more efficient appliances or fixtures, for example), that same
StatsCan source notes that industrial water usage accounted
for 33.1 billion cubic metres—or 91.7 per cent of the total—
compared with households using 8.3 per cent.
Breaking down that industrial usage, there are five areas
that StatsCan records as being the heaviest consumers of
water: electrical power generation, transmission, and usage
accounted for 70.9 per cent of all water used, crop production
took 5.4 per cent, paper manufacturing used 4.6 per cent,
livestock production ate up 3.7 per cent, while natural gas
distribution, water sewage, and other systems were responsible
for 3.3 per cent.
And while Canada-wide data is important to have, in a
country as large and geographically varied as this one is, it is
also helpful to have a sense of how each province and territory
is using water resources and how much each jurisdiction is
allocating. But given the independent natures of the provinces
and territories, that means chasing down 13 different reporting and tracking systems and figuring out what information
is easily available to the public and what data can only be had
upon request.
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WATER C AN ADA • M AY/JUNE 2024
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
Getty Images
Carolyn Gruske
has won national and international awards
for both her reporting and her editing. She
often writes about how business, science,
technology, and the law intersect.
