The first job of the Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Committee was to prepare Terms of Reference - a work plan and preliminary budget for the source protection planning process.

Under the Clean Water Act the Committee had to create two versions, one for the Mississippi watershed and one for the Rideau watershed.

• Terms of Reference — Mississippi (2.30 MB)*
• Terms of Reference — Rideau (3.22 MB)*

What’s in the Terms of Reference?

• A list of tasks to create an Assessment Report by 2010 and a Source Protection Plan by 2012;
• Roles and Responsibilities;
• Timelines; and
• Estimated costs.

How Were They Developed?

The Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Committee completed draft Terms of Reference in May 2008. The public was then encouraged to provide comments, either in writing or verbally at one of our 10 open houses.

In July, the Source Protection Committee considered all the comments they received and revised the Terms of Reference to address as many of them as possible.

• View a summary of the public comments and how they were addressed by the Committee. (73 kb)

The public was invited to submit comments again on the revised Terms of Reference. All comments received by September 5, 2008 were forwarded to the Minister of the Environment along with the proposed Terms of Reference.

The Minister took these comments into consideration when reviewing and approving the documents. The Terms of Reference were approved by the Minister of the Environment on:

• February 5, 2009 – Mississippi version
• March 16, 2009 – Rideau version