Community & Labour Action

Canada: Buying, selling water

- The Orangeville Banner.

Residents of the Headwaters region take pride in our natural environment. So no wonder the condition of our water is a cause of concern for many. The Banner is running a five-part series investigating the state of this vital resource in Dufferin. Part five looks at commercial water bottling.
Bottled water is the enemy.

It's an increasingly common sentiment. The rise of bottled water's popularity was meteoric. So has been the rise of a backlash against it. As environmental awareness has increased gratuitous resource wasters have come under fire. And let's cut to the chase: There is something fundamentally stupid and wasteful about bottled water.

Use a non-renewable resource to make plastic bottles. Take a very expensive-to-renew resource, fresh water, and put it in the bottles. Grossly undercharge companies taking the water, but pay the same companies massively marked up prices per litre once the plastic bottles arrive on store shelves (after being shipped in trucks, with commensurate pollution). Drink water. Then recycle bottles -- more resources -- put them in a landfill or, if you really don't give a damn about anything, toss them in a ditch.

Does this strike any thinking person, other than bottled water shareholders, as a smart idea?

The solution seems straightforward: Stop water bottlers from tapping our aquifers and slurping up our municipal supplies. At a minimum, charge them a heckuva lot more for the privilege. But what seems simple can get very complicated when you start digging a little deeper.

The Ministry of the Environment (MOE) might be a good place to begin our discussion.

John Steele is a spokesperson for MOE. He says one source of confusion is the ownership of Ontario's water. The people own it, not the government -- the government can regulate water for the public good, but Steele says it doesn't treat water like a commodity, it can't sell one unit at a time. One of the principle tools used to control water taking is called a permit to take water. Anyone seeking to take more than 50,000 litres of water in a day must apply for a permit. In the case of large operations like water bottlers, the application must include a $3,000 fee. As of Jan. 1, 2009, an additional, modest fee will be levied and applied to administrative costs: $3.71 per million litres. Perhaps "modest" is an understatement.

Some limits are placed on the water bottlers.

"Bulk transfers are illegal in this province," says Steele. A company can't fill up a giant tank on the back of a truck and ship it south of the border, for example. They have to bottle it first.

So far, no complications. The concerned citizen wants to shout out: "Stop the process!" But Steele raises a number of challenging issues related to trade agreements and the constitution. For example, in Canada, everybody has equal rights. Perhaps strangely, every "body" includes corporate bodies. If John Smith has the right to take water, so does Acme Inc. We can disagree with that, of course, but by doing so we open up a much broader discussion about free markets, business competitiveness, and heck, capitalism itself.

The spokesperson also hints at the complications of cavalierly banning water taking for one use. For example, water is necessary for agriculture, and few serious people would suggest that farmers shouldn't have access to water. But how does that equation change if the agricultural product in question is tobacco, asks Steele.

His point is subtle but strong. Do we want our government making value judgments for us? We probably do, actually, to some extent. But do we want them judging each product that comes to market on a bureaucrat's perception of whether or not it's good for us? Producing beef requires a lot of resources -- is that a reason to ban it? Donuts serve no healthy purpose, so maybe we should ban those, too.

Obviously, this argument can be taken to an extreme. It's not a slamdunk justifying the existence of bottled water. But it does muddy what may initially seem obvious.

"The permitting system tries to be egalitarian to some degree," says Sarah Miller, a water policy researcher with the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA). She says people fixate on bottled water -- "It's kind of become a symbol." -- but there are any number of beverages in the same boat.

Again, we get into complications: If bottled water is bad, what makes bottled cola good? Miller's organization's mandate is clearly focussed on protecting the environment, but she resists bumper sticker sloganeering. If we are to rely on government to deal with bottled water, then government must act within the law, and commerce has some protection within that system.

Miller points out that under NAFTA, bottled water is treated like a commodity, and it's very hard to make special rules for one product without appearing guilty of unfair practices. The analyst suspects that an attempt by Ontario to ban water bottling, without changing existing trade agreements, would result in a lawsuit. And she says that, to Ontario's credit, the province has a history of having a lower threshold for requiring permits than other jurisdictions around the Great Lakes.

Miller thinks the issue of water conservation just hasn't been a high priority for most Ontarians. She says we should look beyond bottled water to the way we use water generally. Our building codes don't require efficient fixtures, and efforts to reuse grey water are minimal. "No one even wants to look at a one bath[room] house...it's ludicrous," she says.

She says that indifference to the importance of this resource, only one per cent of which is renewable, is "really criminal." The researcher would like to see everyone paying more for water, with revenues going back into conservation, not general coffers.

The title Bottled Water Campaigner should give you some idea of where Andrea Harden's sympathies lie. She's a representative of the Polaris Institute, and she's staunchly opposed to bottled water. Harden has a laundry list of the reasons she thinks the product is bad. From concerns about the toxicity of plastic PET bottles, to fears that the industry is training people to buy their water thereby diminishing government's commitment to a public water system, bottled water is bad, bad, bad in her books.

Much of her perspective focusses on the alternative, tap water: it's almost free, "more stringently" regulated than bottled water, and almost always gets returned to the same watershed where it was taken.