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The Ontario Liberals’ plan to charge a little extra for the province’s water is a half-measure that doesn’t do enough to deal with a looming crisis.
Until now, we’ve handled water in much the same way as we’ve handled air: It belongs to all of us, so you can more or less do what you like with it unless you’re doing something blatantly harmful. For that, you need a permit.
Filing an application to take millions of litres of water from a river costs $750. If you have really big plans, getting your permit approved might require you to spend several thousand more dollars supporting a conservation program, or on monitoring the level of the river you’re draining to make sure it doesn’t run completely dry. These are substantially the conditions placed on OMYA before it could take water from the Tay River near Perth, for instance. The water itself is free.
All that the Ontario government is proposing to do is to formalize these contributions, asking major water-takers to pay a nominal fee of $3.71 per million litres to fund conservation projects. They wouldn’t pay for the value of the resource itself. The “giveaway” that Premier Dalton McGuinty vowed to end during his 2003 election campaign would continue. Smaller-time users—even if they take hundreds of thousands of litres—and municipalities would be exempt.
This would only perpetuate a classic tragedy of the commons, because the regulatory system doesn’t always work.
The Jock River in southern Ottawa, for instance, is sometimes reduced to a trickle during dry summers, as people exercise their permissions to irrigate farms and golf courses with it.
The only reason the problem isn’t worse or widerspread is that Canada is so absurdly water-rich that we can be profligate and not notice. According to Environment Canada, which compiles the statistics every few years, in 2001 Canadians used 622 litres of water per person per day. A lot of that use was industrial, but not as much as you might think—335 of those litres went to household uses. Our overall consumption was down a bit over the previous decade, thanks to some green guilt, low-flow showerheads and bricks in toilet tanks, but only from 648 litres per person per day. That ranks us among the sloshingest people in the world, after only the United States.
Even great rivers can suffer the fate of the Jock. The Rio Grande on the Mexican border with the United States is just a creek in some places. The Colorado River is no longer able to meet the needs of the southwestern U.S. states it feeds, and residents of those thirsty places are eyeing the Great Lakes. If they can suck the Colorado nearly dry, we might certainly have a significant impact even on a much larger river such as the St. Lawrence, let alone its tributaries like the Ottawa. Particularly if climate change makes their levels drop significantly even without direct human diversion efforts, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts it will. Our resources of clean flowing water are very large, but not infinite.
No, to distribute this scarce commodity fairly, it needs to have a price much higher even than the token amount the Ontario government is proposing. This wouldn’t be a tax or a regulatory fee, but a payment to the public for appropriating a public resource for private use.
In practice, neither politicians nor voters are likely to go for privatizing rivers or paying somebody to manage access to them, which works well enough for land. Anyway, there’d be terrible headaches in figuring out how to handle the fact that one waterway runs into the next until you get to the ocean and international water; water isn’t quite like a mineral that sits in the ground until somebody takes it out. Charging major water-takers on behalf of the public is the next-best thing.
Auctions for water-taking permits could determine a price. We might choose to give municipalities a break for their treatment operations, since they’d have to turn around and recover their costs from us—but then again we might not, for individual water gluttons are far more of a threat to Canada’s watersheds than any particular brewery or slurry factory.
Does this seem outrageous? The alternative is to follow the same road as some of those rapidly growing cities in the American southwest. Tucson started hiking its water rates in the 1970s and has cut per-capita water use by 20 per cent since then. The water authority that covers Las Vegas is contemplating the water equivalent of brownouts in as little as 15 years, partly because the prospect of hiking fees for municipal water has been a political impossibility. That’ll have to change if the city is to survive, and what a terrible shock it will be.
Like them, we can do this the easy way now or wait and do it the hard way later. But do it we must.
David Reevely is a member of the Citizen’s editorial board.
E-mail: dreevely@thecitizen.canwest.com