Canada Water Week wraps up in the capital

Across from the National Art Gallery, snow melts in Major's Hill Park

As spring temperatures soared this weekend and melting snow continues to flood roads and rivers, there could not be a better time to wrap up celebrations of Canada’s first national water week.

The Ottawa Riverkeepers participated in the inaugural Canada Water Week by speaking at an event yesterday aimed at educating people on the importance of water.

Meredith Brown heads the Ottawa Riverkeepers and says, people should be getting involved to protect the Ottawa River’s ecosystem.

“We can’t just sit back and assume the government is going to take care of protecting our water resources, it really takes community collective action to do that,” says Brown.

General manager of Ottawa’s Environmental Services, Dixon Weir says his department is putting money towards reducing pollutants in the Ottawa River.

By October, Weir says the city will stop adding chlorine to the treatment of sewage effluent. Currently the city adds chlorine as a disinfectant to the effluent released into the Ottawa River.

Brown says she questions whether the city should even be putting sewage into our drinking water source in the first place.

However, she says the plan to remove chlorine moves us one step closer to protecting the river’s important ecosystems.