Perhaps the biggest, most immediate problem with Canada’s water infrastructure is buried, literally, under our cities and towns. The thousands of kilometres of underground pipes that move water from treatment plants to our taps is leaking — spewing 13% to 30% of clean, drinkable water into the ground. At the same time, waste water and storm water systems can’t keep up and are allowing pollutants to flow into rivers, lakes and oceans.
In 2007, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) and McGill University released a wake-up call to policymakers and Canadians. Titled Danger Ahead: The Coming Collapse of Canada’s Municipal Infrastructure, it pointed to a water infrastructure deficit tied to water supply and waste water and storm water systems on the order of $31-billion. This was the estimated amount needed to repair aging infrastructure largely put in place in the 1930s and 1940s and maintained using under-funded budgets for decades. The FCM estimated another $56.6-billion was needed to build new infrastructure to meet the demands of a growing population and new provincial and federal regulatory requirements.
“We are in a lot more trouble than we know,” says Bob Sandford, chairman of the Canadian Partnership Initiative in Support of the United Nations’ Water for Life Decade from his office in Canmore, Alta.
“The current state of our water infrastructure tells us we are vulnerable to our own institutional approaches to managing infrastructure. There is typically no incentive for municipalities and regions to operate and maintain water infrastructure efficiently. We have this myth that we have an overabundance of water. Our population is in the south and most of our water is in the north and our populations are growing. You are already beginning to have limits on all the purposes we want to put it to. It suggests to us that we ought to manage water infrastructure assets differently in order to be able to properly maintain and replace them in a timely way.”
To be clear, this is not a bunch of engineers asleep at the switch, says Duncan Ellison, executive director of the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association in Ottawa. Part of the problem is natural wear and tear. For example, metal pipes corrode. The other part is funding. “Typically, the management strategy has been fix it when it’s broken,” Mr. Elllison says. “The frequency of water main bursts was the signal that a pipe needed to be replaced. In the last 10 to 15 years, technology has improved considerably in terms of the means of detecting when a pipe is likely to leak. These include things like inspection cameras and ultrasound equipment. Some municipalities have adopted these technologies and techniques, but city engineers have to live within a budget based on revenues that are not up to the need. So the level of service drops, the frequency of breaks increases and people start complaining.”
Still, this is only one of the challenges facing Canada’s water infrastructure. In fact, says Tony Maas, director of WWF-Canada’s Fresh Water Program in Toronto, there is a suite of problems that needs to be addressed.