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Much of Alberta and Saskatchewan relies on water from melting snow in the Rocky Mountains for replenishment of waterways in the summer. But John Pomeroy — director of the University of Saskatchewan's Coldwater Laboratory in Canmore, Alta. — told CBC that this past winter provided one of the lowest snowpacks he's seen. The snow also melted about six weeks earlier than anticipated, fuelled by the unseasonably warm weather.
In 1967, when the Gardiner Dam backed up the South Saskatchewan River to create the 200-km-long Lake Diefenbaker in the middle of Saskatchewan, the plan was to irrigate 500,000 parched acres. To this day, the giant T-shaped lake — named after Saskatchewan politician and Canada’s 13th Prime Minister, John George Diefenbaker — irrigates only 100,000 to 150,000 acres. “The Dief” is, one might say, an untapped resource, a ’60s-era feat of engineering stuck in vaporization mode. (It is said the lake loses more water to evaporation each year than it gives up for crop watering.)
One of the cornerstone announcements in the last year for the Saskatchewan agriculture sectors has been the launch of the Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Expansion Project by the provincial government. The April 6 budget was the first provincial budget since that announcement, but so far, the dollar figures are relatively small – just $18.9 million this year for the Westside Expansion Project. But Premier Scott Moe sees a big future, a little further down that water pipeline, as it were.
