Saskatchewan had forecast a more than $1 billion surplus for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, but fresh budget documents released last month show that surplus has completely evaporated, leaving it with an approximate $482 million deficit for the year instead.
The report notes Alberta's government has already set up a drought advisory panel to begin water usage negotiations, while B.C. Premier David Eby has called his province's situation "the most dramatic drought conditions that we've seen."
Rancher Werner Stump said spring is usually a "season of optimism" for farmers in British Columbia, but worries linger after unprecedented drought last year and another dry season looming.
Real-time satellite monitoring shows that so far in 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have ripped across 11,000 square kilometres of the Amazon, across multiple countries. Never have this many fires burned so much of the forest this early in the year.
Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, said many in Western Canada have an "Old MacDonald image" of farming that is no longer realistic or sustainable.
Across British Columbia's south coast, gardeners are finding dead or damaged plants due to the cold snap that sent temperatures plunging to -13.7 C in Richmond. As spring nears, hydrangeas are bare of buds and evergreens are losing their foliage.
Health care and education came out ahead on Thursday in a generally restrained Alberta provincial budget forecasting a paper-thin surplus that could easily go up in smoke.
Canada needs greater federal leadership on water because adapting to climate change requires national water solutions that bring together provincial, local and Indigenous jurisdictions.