Creating the National Conference

Now is your chance to have a say on your national water & wastewater conference. What topics should we be addressing at a national level? What would you really like to learn about? Better yet, what are you doing that could be of interest to the rest of us, and you can share? We’ve put the call for presentations out there already. We always get a pretty good response. But more and more, we find we are ‘curating’ the program to address the most pressing and relevant issue of our sector. So please let us know what topics you feel we could discuss … and be sure to suggest some great presenters.

We will; have many of our usual topic ‘streams’ to continue our national dialogue on drinking water, wastewater, biosolids, efficiency and climate change. We have been building our Utility Leadership stream each year to speak to all those topics of sustainable utility management.

We are developing a few new ‘streams’ this year to expand the scope of our national conference and, hopefully, attract even more water professionals. We are working with Public Safety Canada on a fuller program on security and resilience that will be very beneficial to those tasked with security in our utilities.

The new stream that I am most excited about (sorry security nerds) is the theme of strategic partnerships. Over the years with CWWA, I keep coming across fascinating partnerships that our municipalities have developed with local universities and research groups. You can read about one such partnership between the City of Calgary and the University of Calgary in our Source magazine out this month. There are similar partnerships across Canada such as: Halifax Water and Dalhousie University, Centr’EAU Quebec and their many partners, Ryerson University and Toronto Water, UBC and MetroVancouver – to name just a few. Not only will this stream of discussion enlighten municipal leaders as to the possibilities, I hope it is a forum for all those within such partners to meet and share with each other on best practices and lessons learned. Do you know of such a partnership? Please let me know who to contact.

We will be in Niagara Falls this fall, November 8-11. Of course we’re already busy planning for the Tuesday night celebration to ensure it is a great networking event and another memorable experience. Networking is the greatest value we can provide at such a national event; something you can’t get by logging in to a webinar or video. We also provide the ‘marketplace’ where our private sector partners can introduce themselves to Canada’s water leaders. Plan to be there!

Robert