You Have No Inherent Right to Clean Drinking Water in Canada
Most of us, at least in developed countries, take water for granted. Most Canadians rely on large municipal systems for drinking water supplied by rivers or vast underground aquifers. The cost to ensure that water supplies are safe is spread among many residents making it very affordable. But for residents living in the BC southern interior, this is not the case. This region has one of the highest concentrations of small water systems in all of Canada. Within the Interior Health Authority (IH) region, there are nearly 2,000 small permitted systems, compared to larger systems serving tens of thousands. These are just the permitted systems. Many households rely on smaller, often privately owned, micro water systems. The Drinking Water Protection Act along with the Drinking Water Protection Regulation, outlines requirements for water suppliers to ensure safe drinking water. Small water systems and First Nations Reserves face unique challenges, including protection of watersheds and affordability, which are NOT addressed by local governments or IH.
There is a growing focus on the sustainability of small water systems in theory, however, the Drinking Water Protection Act does not guarantee the human right to clean drinking water. This is a huge problem. If this basic right was enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our government would then be responsible for protecting the environment including watersheds. Instead, our drinking water policy only regulates the disinfection of water. It does nothing to protect water sources. Since the Walkerton crisis, health authorities have doubled down on enforcement that essentially offloads the risks of waterborne illnesses and the cost of treating polluted water onto the individual. Citizens that live in municipal areas that have large established water systems enjoy reliable, safe access to clean drinking water. The cost is shared among hundreds of users. The systems are easier to manage with paid experts to monitor treatment and distribution. Yet, for thousands of small water system owners and operators, the cost and responsibility of meeting the health authority’s requirements is simply overwhelming. Many are managed by volunteers who lack training, expertise and funding.
The Walkerton water crisis forced the government to address drinking water regulations. A public inquiry established that the causes of the outbreak included improper practices , systemic fraudulence by the public utility operators, the privatization of municipal water testing, the absence of quality of testing, and the lack of provisions made for notification of results to multiple authorities. Although, the inquiry helped the government pin the blame on someone other than themselves, it did nothing to protect the actual water source. The fact remains that the disaster occurred because industrial agricultural activities were allowed to operate too close to an important water source. Had proper environmental protections been put in place, the water source would not have been contaminated in the first place. Lives would have been saved but the water would still have been contaminated. Even with proper chlorine treatment, the water may still have been undrinkable. This is important to understand.
Instead of establishing a framework to protect the environment, and ultimately protect water sources, the government doubled down on water treatment. The health authority does not want to be blamed and therefore, established policies to help them offload the risks, and costs, onto users. All water systems must comply with minimum treatment and water quality standards as outlined in the Drinking Water Protection Act. If an operator fails to comply, the health authority can send them to prison or impose significant fines. If members of the public do become ill or die from contaminated water from that water system, the blame will fall squarely on the operators shoulders because they failed to meet treatment requirements. The health authority is absolved of any responsibility. To ensure operators take full responsibility, advisories must be posted and must be users notified if water quality is compromised.
But, there is a problem with this. Let’s take a look at waste management for comparison. The BC Government banned pit toilets years ago and established new requirements for septic systems on rural properties. You can’t get a new development permit without including a septic system. To make it easy to comply, the Province supplies a list of certified waste treatment practitioners to choose from. You can only design and install a system by working with one of these specialists. The entire process is very seamless. The practitioner handles all the technical expertise ranging from assessments, design, permit applications and inspections. Costs estimates are provided making it easy to budget and build financing into your plans. This is not the case with drinking water. Interior Health’s guidelines are vague, they state that a water specialist is required but no specific credentials are provided and there is not a list of authorized professionals to choose from. There is not even an Environmental Health Officer in our region that is able to offer constructive advise. You’re really left on your own to find someone to design your water treatment system and help you apply for the mandatory water construction permit. An officer will not come to conduct a needs assessment to help you in your application nor will they inspect a system once installed. As long as you are able to satisfy Interior Health’s requirements on paper, you will be issued with a permit. Once installed, you will be responsible for operation and maintenance regardless of your qualifications. You will be offered a series of optional webinars that may or may not give you the knowledge necessary to maintain your water connection and treatment system including handling chlorine chemicals and regular water sampling. If something does go wrong, it will be your fault.
If you are finally able to meet Interior Health’s guidelines and get your system running, IH will require weekly water samples to be tested and screened for pathogens and bacteria. This is to ensure your system is properly disinfecting your drinking water. They do not test for chlorine residual levels. If there is too much chlorine, you won't know. Nor will they test for any other toxic chemical byproducts are in your drinking water. The water sample collection stations are questionable at best. We drop our samples off at a community health building in Nelson. There is an old cooler to place samples in to keep them cool. The cooler is not large enough to handle all the samples and the cooler is overflowing by late afternoon. In the summer, temperatures can get quite hot in the building and this allows bacteria to grow in the water samples. This means you may receive a water sampling with elevated bacteriological counts that may not be attributed to your water supply. It is negligent that IH does not have a fridge for water sample collection.
IH’s enforcement approach without proper supports and funding in place to help small water system operators comply is creating a number of other problems. First, water sources are not being reported. Citizens who rely on small systems are not disclosing information about their water sources for fear that the health authority will crack down with unaffordable requirements. Second, because water sources are not disclosed, we have no idea just how much water we are using. This is happening at a time when drought is negatively impacting our region. It is hard to determine conservation measures without an accurate inventory. Finally, a focus on enforcement, without funding, does not actually ensure drinking water is safe. It only ensures that Interior Health is absolved of responsibility. Most small water system users struggle to afford to meet system disinfection and distribution requirements. As a result, there are currently over 400 permanent 'boil water', 'do not consume' and 'severe shortage' advisories in BC alone. Many more micro water systems are completely unaccounted for. Did you know that there is a moratorium on any development without a water connection that meets the health authorities drinking water disinfection requirements? Access to clean drinking water is a barrier to building new homes!
Finally, the risks of water contamination that occurred in Walkerton are not necessarily risks that small water system users have in the BC southern interior. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. Many of these small water system users have been consuming untreated water for generations without incident. These systems could conceivably continue to supply clean drinking water with minimal filtering if the their sources remained protected. This is especially true of our water spring that we have been protecting from industrial activities such as agriculture, logging and mining. The health authority only started enforcing the implementation of a two barrier treatment system on all water systems after the Walkerton tragedy.
The most common and widely accepted treatments are chlorine with UV. Every water treatment specialist that I contacted, said UV treatment is more than adequate and discouraged the use of chlorine, especially for smaller systems. The government has recognized that funding these treatment systems is a significant barrier to meeting heath authority guidelines yet, no meaningful progress has been made to ease the financial burden, despite it being listed as one of the main contributing factors to the Walkerton disaster!
The health authority responsible for ensuring safe drinking water for the public is so underfunded that a ‘one size fits all’ requirement is applied to every system no matter the size or source of water system. They simply do not have enough staff to provide the services necessary to properly assess all of these systems. UV alone may very well be adequate if there were enough officers on the ground to conduct water source assessments. Our current environmental health policy is narrowly focused on risk management rather than water protection. Chlorine treatment is the mostly widely used and the world wide standard yet, comes another set of risks that our health authority blatantly ignores.
Throughout human history, we have been drinking untreated water from lakes, streams and springs. Sometimes we got sick. It was a necessary risk we had to take for survival. Although not omnipresent, waterborne illnesses have been endemic throughout human history. But, it’s important to note that when populations were lower, the introduction of infections from water were far less likely. Many indigenous groups around the world regarded water as sacred and took great care to protect it. Human waste was purposely kept away from water and buried. The Blackfoot were forbidden to harvest or consume any plants or animals that live in water for water protection. It was forbidden to pollute water. Peoples of the plains were acutely aware that water was in short supply in their homelands, and as such, took great care to protect it. They understood that protecting watersheds, and the plants and animals that lived within them played a vital role in maintaining clean drinking water.
Human settlements have always needed access to clean drinking water to thrive. Indeed, civilizations have always established themselves beside lakes, along rivers and close to springs bubbling from aquifers below. Some civilizations went to great lengths to provide clean drinking water to its populations with varying degrees of success. The Romans built giant aqueducts using lead piping to move water to residents. Although lead pipes purified the water killing harmful microbes, people eventually succumbed to lead poisoning that leached into the water. The Mayans build great cities around cenotes. A cenote is a “natural pit, or sinkhole, resulting when a collapse of limestone bedrock exposing groundwater. The term originated on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, where the ancient Maya commonly used cenotes for water supplies.” Ironically, severe drought was considered a major factor in the collapse of the Mayan civilization. Today, the descendants of the Mayans still live in Mexico and Central America but, not in the great cities that thrived before them, although cenotes are still a source of fresh water in some regions today.
In Europe, as cities grew, so did demand for clean water and the need for better waste management. In the Middle Ages, rivers flowing through cities were treated as natural dumping grounds for waste. Before widespread sewage systems were built, this waste seeped into the groundwater and even flowed through the streets. In fact, in medieval Europe, people simply threw their human waste out the window onto the streets creating a breeding ground for a host of nasty diseases. Before the 1800s, the river Thames was a rich habitat for both fresh and saltwater aquatic species, which made it a natural home for a significant fishing industry. With the advent of the industrial revolution and growth in population, rivers and the tributaries leading to them became dumps for human and industrial waste. Growth of industrialization in the last few hundred years made chemical waste in rivers, lakes and oceans around the world a problem too.
Europeans struggled with diseases for hundreds of years, unable to make the link between outbreaks and contaminated drinking water. By the 1850s, research conducted by doctors such as John Snow showed a direct link between repeated cholera epidemics and contaminated drinking water. Basically establishing that the disease was not airborne as previously thought.
The first use of chlorine was conducted in 1897 when a bleach solution was added to disinfect drinking water during a typhoid outbreak in Kent. Regular use of chlorine as water treatment began around the beginning of the twentieth century in Great Britain.” Chlorine use was eventually expanded to the United States in 1908 and Canada by 1917. Chlorination is the most popular method of disinfection today and is used for water treatment all over the world. Chlorination of drinking water is considered one of the greatest achievements in public health.
But, chlorine use comes with a downside. Like the lead used in Roman times, chlorine creates a whole slew of dangerous chemical byproducts that have long term consequences on human health. Although Interior Health insists that there is no evidence that chlorine disinfectants are harmful to people, there is plenty of research indicating that it is. Even worse, our reliance on chlorine disinfection has enabled societies to continue to contaminate water without any effort for prevention. Chlorine is also toxic to plants and animals.
The risks involved with the use of chlorine byproducts are halogenated trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs) are two major classes of disinfection byproducts (DBPs) commonly found in waters disinfected with chlorine.These toxins render water undrinkable. "In other countries, especially in Europe, chlorination is not used as frequently, and the water is still safe from waterborne illnesses. In my opinion, we need to evaluate when chlorination is really necessary for the protection of human health and when alternative approaches might be better," says Prasse from an article in Science Daily.
There is lots of evidence that chlorine in drinking water has adverse health effects. Some effects still being studied include the effects of chlorine on microbiome development in our stomachs. Links to studies, articles and stories indicating poor health outcomes when chlorine is used to treat drinking water are found below:
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/60903/
https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/10/1/10
https://mywaterfilter.com.au/blogs/learning/does-chlorinated-water-kill-gut-bacteria
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/case-against-chlorinated-tap-water/
https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/west-kootenay-elementary-school-set-to-have-clean-water-for-first-time-in-5-years/
Since analytical chemists discovered, as early as 1974, that trihalomethanes form as byproducts of chlorine reactions with natural organic matter, studies have shown associations between consumption of chlorinated tap water featuring elevated THM4 concentrations and adverse health outcomes, including bladder cancer, children born small for gestational age, and miscarriages. The most consistent association has been for bladder cancer. For example, a meta-analysis for European males indicated that bladder cancer was 47% more prevalent among those consuming water with higher concentrations of THM4. These chemicals are now also associated with colon cancers. With estimates of about 60 000 new cases per year, bladder cancer is the fourth most common cancer among U.S. males. The Canadian drinking water guideline for total THMs is 100 micrograms of THMs per litre of water but our health authority does not test for this. I have heard water specialists tell me they found unsafe levels of these chemicals in drinking water deemed safe by our health authority. Some countries have taken note and are now moving away from chlorine treatment. The Netherlands is one such country. Here interesting paper on how the Netherlands treats water without chlorine: https://dwes.copernicus.org/articles/2/1/2009/dwes-2-1-2009.pdf
Many of the problems described above would not be an issue if the right to a clean environment (including drinking water) was enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although Canada has not legislated the right to water, in 2012, it recognized the UN declaration on human right to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. We have made some progressive policies on sanitation, as I mentioned above, but access to clean drinking water still needs addressing. The UN states that the right to water entitles everyone, without discrimination, to have access to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water for personal and domestic use. Last year some progress was made with Bill C61. Sadly the bill only made it to the second reading before the Trudeau government fell apart.
First Nations face disproportionately higher numbers of drinking water advisories, and are subjected to these advisories for longer periods of time than non-Indigenous people. Just like small water systems in the BC Souther Interior, his is due to inadequate and chronic under-funding, regulatory voids, a lack of resources to support water management and lack of protection of water sources.
In 2021, Teck, a Canadian coal-mining company, was fined $60 million for contaminating the Elk River with toxic waste from its operations. The fines for large companies like this are a small cost of doing business. They continue to pollute the river because they can afford to pay the fines. But, they leave the cost of clean up on the public. This is not an isolated incident. It’s happening all over Canada and we need to stop it.
Even worse, in 2019, the Glade Watershed Protection Society took the Interior Health Authority, ATKO Wood Products and Kalesnikoff Lumber to court on the grounds that the community’s right to clean water was threatened by clear cut logging in their watershed. A B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled that the group from Glade, a rural community near Nelson, had no inherent right to clean drinking water. Our only recourse is to apply public pressure on the government.
As it stands, the forest, mining and agricultural industries can pollute our watersheds without penalty while we pay the price for cleanup. The right to water is non-partisan and should be an election issue. We need to demand that the human right to clean drinking water be enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Indeed, there is no life without water.
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FUN FACT:
The Great Plains of North America, home to the Lakota, the Blackfeet and other tribes, is a dry, arid place. The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to control and retain water in this “Great American desert,” as it was described in the early 19th century.
Geologist John Wesley Powell, an early director of the U.S. Geological Survey, pointed out in an important 1878 government study that the defining characteristic of the Great Plains and the West was its lack of water. He attempted to promote land ownership that was based on watersheds, instead of dividing land into the rectangular lots still in use today.
Powell also recommended that America adopt a new type of land development – one that worked with nature, so everyone had access to water.
The U.S. government, however, ignored Powell’s ideas.
If we had followed Powell’s advise on land development based on watersheds, the Columbia River Treaty wouldn’t even exist. Ironically, this is exactly how the Indigenous Peoples arranged themselves throughout North America.
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