Our Initiatives

We believe that decisions about our home waters should be driven by community values, not dictated by the interests of multinational corporations. Read more about our goal.

We have come together as local residents with diverse histories in the Fraser Valley. Some of us are First Nations peoples, and our families’ ancestors have lived on these territories for millennia. Some of us have just begun calling the Fraser Valley region home. We are teachers, students, fishers, business owners, gardeners and doctors. We have come together as parents, grandparents and children to protect our shared Home Waters and the wealth they provide. We plan to stay in this region, living together.

‘Wealth’ is having a home that you love and take pride in. Wealth is being connected and living in a community with shared values that recognizes why life in our region is so special.

Our water wealth is all around us. It is the pride we feel in the lakes, rivers and streams that we know so well. It’s spending time with our families at Cultus Lake or taking an evening stroll along the shore of the Fraser. It is the awe of watching millions of salmon run up the Harrison River at Agassiz and then seeing thousands of bald eagles follow them. Our water wealth is in the sudden landscape changes at Hope, where canyon turns into valley; and the time spent knee-deep fly fishing in the Vedder River. It is the rejuvenation that comes through ceremonies with water and the generations of knowledge upheld in the relationships between our families and the local waterways.

Sadly, our water wealth is facing urgent threats:

• The proposed new Kinder Morgan bitumen pipeline that would cut through our waterways and aquifers. Construction will damage the ecosystem, and a spill would be devastating.

• Large-scale gravel mining, and mining gravel straight from the Fraser River. Recent corporate activities are unsustainable and threaten some of the richest salmon spawning locations in the world.

• Unplanned urban expansion and intensive agricultural practices. Without a clear plan, these activities can threaten our drinking water sources and pollute the habitats of countless species of fish, birds, plants and animals.

• Massive groundwater withdrawals by companies like Nestle. BC is one of the last jurisdictions in the world to not have groundwater legislation, which means there is a complete absence of monitoring of industrial uses to ensure adequate protections for aquifers and other underground water sources. We need to bring water law in BC into the 21st century.

We believe in a strong, sustainable economy that it is based on businesses that behave as though we are planning to stay. We are against an economy where large, foreign-owned multinationals extract the wealth and leave our communities to pay the costs.

We recognize that the long-term protection of the home waters that sustain us all can only be achieved through the recognition of First Nations rights and title. We believe collaborative work, using innovative tools, will bring about the needed change to protect against the imminent threats facing the waters which bind us all.

We want to change how decisions happen so that the water wealth we have grown up with is preserved for our communities, and for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.