The Water Account, produced every two years, describes the use of the natural resource input of water and of water accessed through municipal water supply or irrigation systems by industry, governments, institutions, and households. The unit of measure is thousand cubic metres.
The main data source for this account is a set of three Statistics Canada surveys administered as the Industrial Water Use Survey. This set of surveys covers direct water intake and the use of municipal water by the mining, thermal power, and manufacturing industries.
Water use by the agriculture industries is taken from two sources. The primary source is the use of water for irrigation in Alberta, the largest consumer of irrigation water, which is taken from estimates published by Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. Other provinces are estimated based on the Agricultural Water Use survey from Statistics Canada combined with precipitation measures for the growing season produced by Agriculture Canada. Water use for livestock is based on livestock estimates from Statistics Canada combined with water use coefficients for watering and cleaning provided by Agriculture Canada.
Water use in the oil and gas industry is provided from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It includes both fresh and saline water used in oil and gas extraction.
Household water use is based on the municipal water supply from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Drinking Water Treatment Plants combined with an estimate from the producers of the proportion of this water supply that serves households. In addition, the water use of households not served by the municipal supply is estimated based on average household consumption figures.
Estimates of the amount of municipal water supply lost to leakage are based on historical data from Environment Canada’s Municipal Water Use Database and more recent survey information from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Drinking Water Treatment Plants. This leakage amount is recorded as water use by the water supply industry.
The amount of municipal water use that is not residential and not assigned to industries in the Industrial Water Use Survey is distributed across the remaining industries based on expenditure data for water supplied through mains from the Input-Output Accounts.