FLOW's Top 5 in 5

It’s been 10 years since Walkerton. Yesterday, Ecojustice and FLOW released a report called Seeking Water Justice: Strengthening Legal Protection for Canada’s Drinking Water, a national brief on the status of drinking water quality in Canada. The report’s authors say there’s much that remains to be done in the area of water quality, so we asked FLOW’s program coordinator, Nancy Goucher, for the top five federal actions and accomplishments she’d like to see within the next five years. Here’s what she said:

1. The federal government needs to initiate a roundtable with provincial, territorial and Aboriginal governments on the establishment of legally binding national drinking water quality standards. Unlike the United States and European Union, we do not have legally binding standards that apply to the whole country. Instead, we have voluntary national guidelines called the Canadian Drinking Water Quality Standards. Under our current system, provinces and territories individually establish their own standards. As argued by Justice O’Connor in the Walkerton Inquiry report, drinking water quality standards “should have the force of law.” He stated that “conservative and enforceable water quality standards are an important basis for a multi-barrier approach to water safety.”

All levels of government should come together as soon as possible to negotiate MAC guidelines (the maximum allowable concentrations of potentially harmful substances in drinking water) for Canada. These standards may not necessarily change what is currently happening in provinces that have already legally adopted the Guidelines (Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec) or for those water service providers who go beyond the applicable standards, but it would act as a federal safety net to help raise the bar, providing the same level of health protection for our more vulnerable populations, including rural and First Nations communities.

2. Canada needs to improve the strength of the Canadian Drinking Water Quality Standards so that we have world-class drinking water standards. When environmental lawyer David Boyd compared Canada’s standards to those of other industrialized nations, he found that Canada’s guidelines were generally outdated, weaker and more lenient compared to those of our counterparts in Europe and the United States.

Due to cutbacks, the body responsible for setting the standards has been criticized for its slow progress in updating the guidelines to reflect current science and emerging threats. As a result, there is an unacceptable backlog of outdated guidelines for physical and chemical parameters. Many of the parameters in the Canadian guidelines are currently 50, 100 or 1,000 times weaker than at least one of the other corresponding European standards or Australian guidelines. Our MAC guidelines are weaker than at least one other jurisdiction (European Union, United States or Australia) or the World Health Organization for 53 of the 67 contaminants examined in the Boyd’s study, including microbiological contaminants, chemical contaminants, radiological contaminants, and disinfection by-products.

3. The federal government must invest appropriate resources on First Nations reserves to ensure they can implement the national standards and regulations that will be set. First Nations communities are by far the most vulnerable to waterborne diseases, boil water advisories and associated health effects. As of April 30, 2010, there were 116 First Nations communities across Canada under a Drinking Water Advisory. Between 2003 and 2007, the average duration of a Drinking Water Advisory in First Nations communities was 295 days. To address this inequality, First Nations need resources for appropriate treatment and distribution, wastewater treatment and collection, source water protection, training and ongoing support of water and wastewater treatment operators.

4. The Government of Canada should work with the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and interested parties to develop a First Nations Water Commission – a model the Expert Panel on Drinking Water, the Assembly of First Nations and FLOW has identified as essential for First Nations-controlled drinking water management.

The role of the commission would be to enable First Nations to become fully involved in national water management discussions and decision-making by enhancing their governments’ capacity to exercise their recognized jurisdiction over water management, including drinking water. It would also importantly allow Indigenous knowledge and ideas to be incorporated into decisions that directly affect their quality of life.

5. We need to increase the transparency of reporting on the state of Canada’s drinking water systems. Assessing the safety of drinking water is a significant challenge. It is extremely difficult to acquire accurate, systematic information on important indicators of drinking water health such as boil water alerts, violations, waterborne outbreaks and illnesses. For example, Health Canada does not publicly report the number of drinking water advisories across Canada on non-First Nations lands. Surprisingly, there is no national surveillance system for waterborne disease outbreaks and we lack a standardized approach to collect this type of information.

Consistent and standard reporting mechanisms would increase transparency and track relevant statistics and information about the state of drinking water and wastewater systems through a Federal-Provincial-Territorial body such as the Canadian Drinking Water Committee. This information should be made available to the public through an annual report to Parliament.