Ensuring the FLOW
Water Security in Canada and Beyond
On September 25, 2025, Massey College, in partnership with The Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW), was pleased to host Ensuring the Flow: Water Security for Canada and the World, a timely and urgent conference exploring the centrality of water to our collective future—locally, nationally, and globally. =
With climate pressures mounting and freshwater systems increasingly under strain, water security has emerged as a defining challenge of our time. The gathering brought together over 80 thought leaders, policy-makers, Indigenous knowledge holders, scientists, and civil society voices from across North America to examine the role of water in public health, environmental resilience, sustainable development, and peacebuilding.
Our Three Panels
Weathering the Storm: Building Canada’s Water Resilience in an Age of Extremes
Increasing floods, wildfires and droughts are having devastating impacts across Canada. How does our governance need to change to address this?
Growing Together:
Canada and US Water Security
The Canada-US relationship is entering a new, more tumultuous chapter. How can we ensure collaboration to protect our shared water bodies?
From Source to Solution: Canada’s Global Leadership in Shaping a Sustainable Water Future
Canada has a role to play globally. in protecting water resources for global health, prosperity and sustainability. What practices can we share?
Get to know all our speakers, check out their biographies in the programme created for all attendees.
Familiarize yourself with our 2023 high-level symposium “The Future of Freshwater in Canada. This conference brought freshwater thoughtleaders together to help create a strong Canada Water Agency, an efficient Freshwater Action Plan and co-developed the Canada Water Act.
Panel One: Weathering the Storm: Building Canada’s Water Resilience in an Age of Extremes
Create something you're proud of.
Whether you're just starting out or taking things to the next level, we have everything you need to connect, engage, and make something truly yours.
Growing Together:
Canada and US Water Security
Create something you're proud of.
Whether you're just starting out or taking things to the next level, we have everything you need to connect, engage, and make something truly yours.
Keynote Speaker: John Vaillant
JOHN VAILLANT
Bestselling Author, Journalist and Pulitzer Prize Finalist
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian, among others. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world.
His latest book is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023), a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
In addition to winning the British Baillie Gifford Prize (“the non-fiction Booker”), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award, ,the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and Canada’s Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It has been named one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian, among many other prominent publications. The book earned Vaillant a nod as number four on MacLean’s Power List for Climate in 2024.
Keynote Speaker: John Vaillant
Help Us Create a Better Freshwater Future
FLOW’s work is completely funded by grants, in-kind donations and support from water champions like you. Your donations will allow FLOW to continue our work to shape a better water future in Canada.