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Water Wells Registry

Privacy Impact Assessment #: ENV-PIA-2020-01
Public Body Name : Environment
Date of Approval: Thursday, February 20, 2020

Tracking and monitoring water wells is part of the mandate for the Department of Environment. The Water Resources Branch (WRB) administers the ‘Yukon Water Well Registry’ (YWWR), which is a collection of forms that are created at the time of drilling a groundwater well. These forms contain information on construction details (i.e. depth and diameter of well, etc.) and subsurface conditions (geology, depth to water, etc.) of a well. Some of the forms also contain information used for administrative purposes or to locate the well.

The driver of the current project was the Yukon Water Strategy and Action Plan (2014) which called to “enhance the centralized groundwater database and make it available through YukonWater.ca”. The action plan notes that at present, there is no legislation in place requiring licensing or permitting of water well drilling, but that the government undertakes groundwater protection through the Waters Act and encourages drillers to follow the Canadian Ground Water Association’s Guidelines for Water Well Construction.

In order to enhance and formalize the existing groundwater program in Yukon, the Action Plan suggests developing and implementing an online process for the voluntary submission of water well drilling logs in the interim while a regulatory framework to make submissions mandatory is developed. In this project, information is data about the water well records.