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What are we to make of the fact that the sixth anniversary of the Walkerton tragedy passed relatively unnoticed last week? Have people forgotten those unsettling days in which people fell ill and died from drinking tap water? Do editors only care about anniversary dates that can be divided by five? Or is it that the lessons of Walkerton have become so ingrained that no one needs to make a fuss any more?
Happily, it’s that last answer that applies. The events at Walkerton in 2000—seven people died and another 2,300 were made ill after drinking water contaminated with E. coli bacteria—were an enormous wake-up call. Governments seemed to have responded effectively. A few quibbles about the latest piece of legislation are coming down the pipe, but the environmental movement is onside. No one, least of all Environment Minister Laurel Broten, will say that a Walkerton could never happen again, but there’s a broad confidence that proper public policy is being put into place.
“I think things are certainly moving in the right direction,” said Bruce Davidson, vice-chair of Concerned Walkerton Citizens. His optimism is echoed by Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence. He praises a government bill to protect water at its source as “a paradigm shift in the management of water in Ontario.”
The response to the Walkerton tragedy began with an inquiry by Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor, who was appointed reluctantly by the former Progressive Conservative government. The judge concluded that the town’s water was contaminated by manure spread near a well. He blamed inadequate management of the local water system, but suggested that budget cutbacks in the Environment Ministry also played a role.
In 2002, he made 121 recommendations so that drinking water from the tap would carry a risk so negligible that an informed person would feel safe drinking it.
The Conservatives, to their credit, responded by quickly passing legislation dealing with water treatment—including better training and inspection of local officials—and distribution, and supplemented that with regulatory standards for the management of farm manure. The initiatives were a dramatic shift from their attitudes of just a few years earlier.
Now, the Liberals have followed that up with Bill 43, the Clean Water Act, which has passed second reading. The legislation follows 22 of Judge O’Connor’s recommendations by protecting water at its source before it gets to municipal distribution systems. It is based on natural watershed boundaries and, with the support of existing conservation authorities, places the responsibility for assessments of supplies and threats to those supplies with municipalities and local parties. The law would trump all zoning provisions that threatened water supplies.
Jessica Ginsburg of the Canadian Environmental Law Association believes Bill 43 would go a long way to preventing problems with water supplies from arising in the first place. She gives it a solid B grade. Mr. Smith said the bill “makes a lot of sense to us.”
The main reservations about the bill centre on the cost of its implementation. The government has already put up $120-million for technical studies, but farmers and municipalities worry that they will be stuck with extraordinary costs for protecting wellheads or enforcing the law.
Ms. Broten says the full costs won’t be known for a couple of years, but cautioned that Waterloo Region has found source-water-protection programs cost only about 76 cents a month for each household.
Jim Smith, Ontario’s newly appointed chief drinking water inspector, believes the distribution systems that serve four of every five people in the province are providing a safe and high-quality product.
In his first annual report this spring, he said that 99.74 per cent of the 850,000 microbiological and chemical water tests submitted by municipalities in 2004 and 2005 met Ontario’s standards. And he believes Bill 43 would strengthen the safety net. “It gives us a source-to-tap framework to assure the public that everything that can be done to safeguard the water is in place,” he said.
This is one of those rare cases where government corrects the errors and omissions of the past and does it well. We should be grateful.