LIVINGWATERSHED EXPERIMENTWorking draft · seed data is illustrative · figures provisional
LivingWatershed
The Living Watershed Atlas

Watershed profile · pilot

Smoky / Peace basin

Alberta · Peace–Athabasca drainage · WSC major drainage 07 (illustrative keying)

Territory: Treaty 8 · downstream nations include Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation · transboundary via the Mackenzie River Basin Board

Contested AI-verified · awaiting human review Last reviewed 2026-07-15 · seed data

Two scores, never one verdict

Governance legibility — Moderate

The statutory stack is findable: the provincial Water Act licence, the responsible regulator, and the municipal proponent are all on the public record, and the appeal decision is published. What is not findable: cooling and consumptive-share detail behind the licensed volume, and the basis for the environmental-assessment waiver.

Graded on the public record only. Solid where documented; the gaps are named below.

Consultation integrity — Low

A duty-to-consult trigger is plainly arguable — a large approved water draw in a drought-affected basin on Treaty 8 territory — yet no consultation record is published for the licence, and the appeal by a downstream nation was dismissed on standing rather than substance.

A missing consultation record is scored as an absence, and named as one.

Documentation-vs-consultation gap — wide. Official process documentation is moderate while the consultation record is close to empty and community concern is on the public record. A social silence worth naming.

The loop

One decision, through the governance stack

The read follows a single instrument — the approved industrial water licence — from application to appeal. Stages the public record cannot support are shown dashed, as structural reads: they show the shape of the process while making clear the detail was never disclosed.

Application

InstrumentWater Act licence (AB)
ProponentPrivate venture + municipal district
RecordPosted

Licence application and volume on the public registry.

Structural read

Review

AssessmentEA waived
BasisNot disclosed
RecordPartial

The waiver is on the record; the reasoning behind it is not.

Absence

Consultation

TriggerArguable (Treaty 8)
Haida positionUnassessed publicly
RecordNot published

“Consultation record: not published” is the finding.

Determination

DecisionLicence approved
Volume~6 Mm³/yr
RecordPosted

Approved draw in a basin under agricultural drought declaration.

Appeal

AppellantDownstream First Nation
OutcomeDismissed
RecordPublished

Dismissed on standing; substantive water questions unreached.

Governance, nested

The human layers sit inside the hydrological one

Hydrological base · layer 01 · 90% legible

Basin geometry, flow network, and drought status are public and well mapped. Everything below attaches to this polygon.

02 · Jurisdictional
Legible75%
Consulted40%

Water Act (AB), Fisheries Act, IAA thresholds, municipal district role — all identifiable. Interaction between waiver and federal triggers under-documented.

03 · Rights & title
Legible55%
Consulted20%

Treaty 8 geography is documented; how its water-related obligations were weighed in this decision is not. Boundary rendering awaits rights-holder vetting.

04 · Instruments
Legible70%
Consulted30%

Licence, volume, and appeal decision posted. Consumptive share, cooling detail, and waiver reasoning withheld.

05 · Actors
Legible60%
Consulted25%

Regulator and proponent identified; corporate ownership detail thin; the contact-of-record for consultation questions is not published.

06 · Live process AI-verified · awaiting human review
Legible35%
Consulted

One registry posting associated with licence conditions is currently trackable; no open comment window is published for this basin. Whether that means no process or an unpublished process is itself the open question — logged as an absence.

Portage · worked example

“Who decides?” — answered from the layers

A static mock of the navigator’s contract: every claim cites a source row from the six-layer model, absences are named, and the output carries the human-review pill until someone signs off. No live model is wired to this page.

Portage Retrieval-grounded · answers only from the layers
Who decides whether the water licence in this basin can be expanded, and what's our window to respond?

Who decides. A licence amendment would be determined by the provincial regulator under the Alberta Water Act jurisdictions #07-AB-wa, with the municipal district as co-proponent of record actors #SP-004. A federal trigger under the Fisheries Act is possible at higher volumes but has not been invoked to date jurisdictions #07-fed-fa.

Your window. No open comment period is currently published for this basin processes — no open rows. The most recent registry posting concerns licence conditions processes #SP-112. Consultation record for the original licence: not published processes — absence logged.

What this is. Briefing material for your lawyer or negotiator — not legal advice. The duty-to-consult read for Treaty 8 territory sits in the rights-and-title layer and has not been assessed by a human reviewer rights_areas #T8-07.

AI-verified · awaiting human review Every claim above resolves to a source row; unsupported questions are declined, not improvised.

Community signal · consent-gated

What residents and rights-holders report

Held relationally, with consent and provenance — never flattened into a cold table. Signals without consent to publish are counted toward the gap but not quoted. The examples below are placeholders demonstrating the mechanism, not real submissions.

“We were told the licence was routine. Nobody came to the community about what six million cubic metres means in a drought year.”

SOURCE community submission (placeholder) · CONTRIBUTOR downstream resident · PERMISSION consented to publish, attributed to role only · PROVENANCE travels with the datum

Withheld 2 further signals are held without consent to publish. They are counted toward the consultation-integrity gap above and are not quoted, summarised, or fed to Portage. No consent = counted as a gap, not shown.