Legislative Action

Canada: MP tables water bill

Kootenay Western Star.

NDP Agriculture Critic Alex Atamanenko, M.P., BC Southern Interior, tabled his Private Member’s Bill, “An Act to bring the Food and Drug Regulations in line with the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality,” that would require bottled water regulations to be raised to the same standards as municipal water.

“Independent scientific studies have found numerous contaminants in many brands of bottled water,” said Atamanenko.

According to the NDP agriculture critic, industry giants are allowed to tap into ground water while corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola use municipal water systems to produce a product that is often not as safe as ordinary tap water.

“These companies pay little or nothing for water they take from rural springs or public systems then package it in plastic bottles made of environmentally toxic chemicals and then get to sell it at prices hundreds or thousands of times more than ordinary tap water,” declared Atamanenko.

“Ensuring that bottled water meets the same strict standards as the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality is a crucial step towards ensuring we have democratic control of the bottled water industry in the public interest,” he added.

Atamanenko hopes that once people are more aware of the exploitative practices this industry engages in they will change the way they think about water and support the growing movement of restaurants, city governments, campuses and schools that are resisting the bottled water industry.

“There is an urgent need for comprehensive health and environmental regulations of the bottled water industry,” said Zoe Maggio, bottled water campaigner for the Polaris Institute.

“The bottled water industry is vastly unregulated. For example, when we look at health issues, we know that bottling plants only receive government inspections on average every three to five years. We also know that there have been at least 27 recalls of bottled water since 2000. By contrast, tap water is tested very regularly: The City of Toronto, for example, conducts tests every 4 hours for bacteria, and City of Ottawa staff conducts over 125 000 tests per year.”

According to Atamanenko, billions of plastic bottles that require massive amount of fossil fuels to manufacture and transport wind up in landfills every year just to supply consumers with bottled water they really don’t need. “This is a huge and unnecessary impact on the environment which everyone needs to be much more concerned about these days,” he said.