How the Girl Guides came to the rescue when an Alberta town needed water

On the south bank of the Bow River sits Camp Jubilee, an 34-hectare campground operated by the Girl Guides of Canada.

It's an unassuming riverside camp, flanked on its south by a curving highway that runs into the town of Cochrane, Alta.

It's also the centre of a recent big-money deal that will help, in part, to solve long-standing water issues in the town of around 32,000 residents. The trade? The camp's 1977 water licence, tied to a lagoon and canoeing channel on the property, in exchange for water servicing from the town. 

To understand why the Girl Guides were sitting on such a valuable allocation of water, one must look back to the 1970s. At that time, a box of Guides cookies sold for 50 cents and Alberta's water landscape looked a lot different.

It wasn't so difficult to get a water licence in southern Alberta in the 1970s. The Guides, seeking a 3,600 acre-feet per year licence, would have simply applied, stated their intended use for the water, and received it. 

But over the decades, populations in Alberta's semi-arid south grew. The rules changed. 

Worries grew around an overtaxed supply. Most of the water in Alberta's south came under new restrictions in the form of no new applications for water licences being accepted. Those restrictions created a water market, where water rights are bought and sold.

Suddenly, licences had new value. And as the years went on, officials in communities like Cochrane were facing a big problem.

"We began to realize that our water licence, the allocation we had, was going to be stressed by the amount of folks that we had joining our community," said Mike Derricott, chief administrative officer for Cochrane.

Calgary's bedroom communities like Cochrane and Okotoks have been seeking solutions to their water challenges over the past several years. Those have been exacerbated by Alberta's recent population surge.

Solutions may have been found to Cochrane and Okotoks' immediate challenges. But larger pressures still loom.

Albertans may be thinking more about the future of the province's water supply and infrastructure given recurrent drought conditions and a recent major water main break in Calgary. The bedroom community of Airdrie, dependent on Calgary's water distribution system, was directly affected by that break.

It illustrates the importance of planning supply and distribution properly, said Tricia Stadnyk, a professor and Canada Research Chair in hydrologic modelling with the University of Calgary's Schulich School of Engineering.

"Growth depends on water. Either way you cut it," she said.