This executive summary lays out highlights from the report Where Waters Meet: Incentivizing Collaboration for Canada’s Freshwater Future written by Max Bell School Master of Public Policy students Elena Anceva, Umme Salma, Ayeyi Ohene-Adu, and Rebecca Duncan as part of the 2026 Policy Lab.
Access the summary and presentation below, and read their full report here.
Freshwater access and usability are the backbone of a healthy society and economy. Yet, fragmented water governance across jurisdictions and actors impedes Canada's ability to act urgently on water issues. While considerable work in freshwater management is already underway through a wide range of actors, much of it remains highly siloed and disconnected from the broader watershed ecosystem across the country. Addressing fragmented governance requires adapting to Canada's jurisdictional realities, where a constellation of groups – including Indigenous rightsholders, provincial and territorial authorities, federal government agencies, municipalities, existing watershed institutions, private-sector actors, utilities, and NGOs – are involved in water work.
Despite efforts to increase large-scale collaboration and learning with greater impact in the water sector, significant gaps remain, making the water sector reactive and poorly adapted to the scale of water security risks in Canada. Non-standardised, fragmented data does not allow a full understanding of the scale and nuance of the problem, hindering effective programming, while sustainable watershed management remains unclear. Thus, there is a need for solutions that can, at a large scale, bridge the data gap to enable more informed decision-making, bring together watershed actors to reduce duplication of effort, promote national learning, increase the scale of work to address problems, and secure resourcing for high-priority activities.
We recommend establishing two separate but interlinked programs: a learning mechanism, the National Water Security Hub (“Hub”), administered by the Canada Water Agency; and a funding mechanism, the National Water Security Fund (“Fund”), housed within an existing charitable organisation. The Hub learning mechanism has two components: a Water Resilience Compact (“Compact”) and a Water Data Repository (“Repository”). A Compact, submitted by coalitions of actors in Canada’s water networks, aggregates information at the watershed scale to produce a short but substantive planning document. A Compact submission would inform eligibility for funding under the Fund, thereby incentivising both collaboration and the provision of watershed level information. The publicly accessible Data Repository stores the information collected through Compacts, with the necessary guardrails. In turn, the analysis of this information sets national freshwater priorities which help inform the Fund's selection of projects for resourcing support.
Ultimately, the information and data collected, stored, and shared through the Hub function create an ongoing evidence base for national knowledge-sharing and learning, while the evidence base on urgent watershed needs also informs the Fund's funding priorities. These interlinked programs build upon existing work in the water sector in Canada while encouraging cross-jurisdictional collaboration, data sharing, interoperability, and funding for important watershed activities across the country.
Download the full version of this report here.
Authors: Ayeyi Ohene-Adu, Umme Salma, Elena Anceva, and Rebecca Duncan
