On October 20, Ontario’s Ministry of Red Tape Reduction introduced the Building a More Competitive Economy Act. Part of the act involves reducing regulations around drinking water systems.
“Ontario’s current process for making routine changes to established source water protection plans, such as adding a new well where protections to source water already exist, is overly complex and slow—delaying the expansion of drinking water systems and placing unnecessary burden on municipalities and Ontarians seeking to use these expanded systems,” the government said in a statement.
This new legislation—if passed—will make amendments to Ontario’s Clean Water Act. The goal of the Clean Water Act is to protect existing and future sources of drinking water. It was introduced in 2006 in response to the Walkerton E.coli outbreak. In May of 2000, heavy rain caused cow manure to contaminate the municipality’s drinking water supply, killing seven people and leaving 2,300 seriously ill.
A public inquiry at the time led by Justice Dennis O’Connor revealed that public utilities staff were inadequately trained, the municipal well was improperly constructed, and there were insufficient reporting requirements to the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation, and Parks.
To ensure nothing like this happened again, O’Connor called for a multi-barrier water management approach. This includes appropriate training, water treatment, water testing, and water distribution. Under the Clean Water Act, Ontario created 19 source protection committees spread across the province to ensure these standards were upheld.
These committees have created source protection plans that prevent municipal drinking water from becoming contaminated. But under the newly proposed Building a More Competitive Economy Act, the Ontario government will peel back several regulations around these plans.
In a statement, Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner said: “The proposed changes to the Clean Water Act put Ontario’s drinking water and communities at risk by removing critical checks and balances and politicizing the water permitting process.”
However, Keith Taylor, a project manager for the Trent Conservation Coalition Source Protection Committee, says he’s been advocating for these changes for the last year and a half. “We were pleasantly surprised that they’re a reflection of what we’ve been asking for,” he says.
His committee is responsible for the largest source protection plan in Ontario, stretching from Trenton, Ont., to Minden, Ont. And he sees the proposed amendments as strengthening drinking water protections rather than weakening them.
The changes to the act focus on eliminating redundancies. Taylor explains that when the act was passed in 2006, there was an effort to make it overly protective so that nothing like Walkerton happened again. But over the last 20 years, the source protection committees have found that some of the act’s regulations hinder more than protect.
Taylor points to consultations as an example. Under the current act, if a new water system is being built, the source protection committee must perform a 30-day consultation period with private stakeholders, such as municipalities. Once that’s complete, the committee must then perform another 30-day consultation with the public. This public consultation, however, also includes the private stakeholders. A proposed amendment would combine these two consultation periods.
Also, if a municipality’s water system needs to be replaced, under the current act, the committee has to treat the replacement as if it’s a brand-new build, even if the site has already been okayed under the source protection plan. With current regulations, the Ontario government says that it can take 21 months to make even a minimal change to a drinking water site.
Alongside these amendments, the Ontario government has also proposed strengthening the Clean Water Act’s prescribed instruments. These are tools, such as permits and approvals, that help committees better control activities in vulnerable drinking water areas, including waste contamination, snow storage, and a long list of other things.
“I’m feeling pretty good about these changes,” says Taylor. “I think the Ministry was listening.”
Taylor notes that source water protection plans typically apply to municipal drinking water sources, not private sources, such as cottage wells. To protect a private well, the federal government recommends testing for bacteria every six months and testing for other contaminants, such as nitrates, every other year. Cottagers can find drinking water testing sites through their local public health agency.
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