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Mayor Ivan Court will have his chance today to re-open the debate on banning bottled water in city-owned buildings.
Court has long argued a ban would promote the city’s own water system, while encouraging consumers to spend less on plastic bottles that sometimes end up in landfills.
The mayor and Meera Karunananthan, a water campaigner with the Council of Canadians, are scheduled to hold a joint news conference today to outline why they feel the city should reconsider the ban.
“Water is a necessity of life and it’s something that we can’t do without; and it has to be safe and it has to be clean and it has to be affordable,” Court said in a brief interview Tuesday.
“This council defeated a motion about bottled water by a single vote. If it was voted on again, that may change.”
Last year, council narrowly quashed a resolution that would have removed bottled water from vending machines and concessions in city-owned buildings, where tap water was available.
Five politicians voted against the resolution, while another five supported it. Since a majority of votes are required to pass any motion, Court’s bid was scrapped.
Councillor Bruce Court later said he was absent from the vote because he was in hospital, but he would have supported his brother’s resolution, guaranteeing its passage.
“In all of our own buildings, we should be using our own water,” Mayor Court said recently. “We have to get this notion out there that we have safe drinking water. People should be drinking it and there is nothing wrong with our water.”
The Council of Canadians’ stop in Saint John today is part of a broader campaign that calls on municipalities to resist public-partnerships on water projects, promote water as a human right and ban the sale of bottled water in public spaces.
According to the council, 70 Canadian cities have already voted to ban bottled water, something that Karunananthan hopes will convince municipalities like Saint John to reconsider their positions.
“I actually do think there has been such a huge momentum around bottled water bans that I’m confident that municipalities who didn’t think it was viable in the past would be open to reconsidering,” she said.
But Deputy Mayor Stephen Chase said consumers should have the right to choose what they drink, whether it comes in a bottle or from a tap.
“To ban bottled water, all you are doing is taking away the right of people to choose a drink.”
The council’s water campaign, the Blue Communities Project, is a joint venture with the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Ottawa River Keeper and Quebec-based Eau Secours, among other partners.