It isn't cheap, and it ain't easy
"We’ll have to work harder and spend more to guarantee safe water for the future”
(The Telegram, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador - August 22, 2001)

An invitation to boil up acquired a whole new meaning in St. John’s this summer.

What once was an unambiguous invitation to supper might have been a request for help purifying the city’s contaminated tap water. Sadly, the boil water order that affected tens of thousands of people in the provincial capital is no novelty in Newfoundland.

Residents of the province’s second city, Corner Brook, and more than 200 other Newfoundland municipalities have also been under a boil order. That’s more than double the number of communities boiling water a year ago. Some have been under advisories since the mid 1980s. Nearly 90 communities in Newfoundland have no water disinfection systems in place.

While the wholesomeness of municipal drinking water is a question hectoring so many Newfoundlanders, as the pipes crumble and leak across Canada it’s clear the whole country has an expensive water and sewer problem.

As headlines from Walkerton and North Battleford attest, Newfoundland is neither alone nor suffering the worst consequences of bad water.

Walkerton, where seven residents died last year and thousands were made ill, was only the most tragic manifestation of a nationwide problem of inadequate water treatment. In North Battleford, hundreds fell ill from drinking water contaminated with cryptosporidium. North Battleford wasn’t equipped with the special filtration system needed to eliminate this chlorine resistant microbe.

And although their water sources make the presence of cryptosporidium unlikely, neither Vancouver nor Winnipeg, two big cities that rely on primitive water treatment systems, would protect residents from that same contamination.

Our nation has ignored the condition of the equipment that treats water and the pipes that deliver it. For three decades, Canadians made minimal investment in new treatment facilities, technologies and management. Some communities are still using systems that predate Confederation.

The result is that many Canadian now face a crisis in their water and sewage systems.

From sea to sea to sea, municipalities impose boil-water advisories each year. In Charlottetown and dozens of British Columbia towns, and more than 200 locations last year in Quebec, that quintessentially Canadian resource – water – has been found tainted or toxic.

Elsewhere, the stovetop pots aren’t boiling yet, but the plants and pipes that deliver clean water and treat sewage are deteriorating while local councils fret: where will we find the massive capital needed to upgrade our systems?

It’s a real worry. The costs of essential repairs and expansion in the decade are estimated by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy at $38 to $49 billion. For many municipalities battered by downloading, the cost of responding has been intimidating, if not paralyzing.

This financial reality was set out five years ago by the Round Table, which even then charted the severe deterioration of infrastructure due to under funding since the 1970s.

The Round Table report confirmed Canada has the lowest consumer prices in the world for water. Most Canadian municipalities subsidized 50 per cent of consumers’ cost of water and waste-water services. Nearly two-thirds of Canadian homes did not have a water meter and were simply charged a flat rate regardless of usage.

The report predicted “the health of the country’s water resources will suffer” if new financial arrangements were not adopted quickly. That was five years ago and the results of inaction are seen today in the contamination incidents, and the clamour of municipal and provincial officials for federal help. But the answer may lie closer to home.

It is time to recognize that clean water is a much more valuable commodity than previously appreciated, and that we should price it accordingly.

Two positives will flow from this turn about in attitude. First, full-cost pricing will provide revenues to help maintain the water infrastucture. Second, full-cost pricing will discourage people and business from wasting water so profligately. Canadians now drink about 200 million litres of water per day, and go through another 19 billion litres daily for other purposes – the second highest per capita user in the world.

Full-cost water will mean higher prices. But these are the real prices that we have been avoiding. What we’ve saved in water and sewer rates, we’ve been paying in deterioration of a basic municipal service – clean water – and in ill health and worse.

Competence and cost are the challenges. It is essential to acknowledge that the cash flow demands of Canada’s water infrastructure are so high that many municipalities will have to invite the participation of the private sector.

Government regulation and private sector entrepreneurship could together meet these challenges, and restore our water systems to an even, clean flow.

“It is time to recognize that clean water is a much more valuable commodity than previously appreciated, and that we should price it accordingly.”

David J. McGuinty is President and CEO of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

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