Ontario's environment ministry scrutinizes water-taking charges
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
by SUSAN MANN
The Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change is reviewing its water-taking charges, but it has no plans to alter the rules on how the water permit process works.
Ministry spokesperson Kate Jordan says the ministry is “looking at options that would enable us to more fully recover the costs of managing the permit program as well as our water quality programs. We will be consulting with stakeholders on future options.”
Jordan says, “our (water-taking) charges apply to highly consumptive commercial and industrial water users. They don’t apply to agricultural operations.”
The ministry regulates water through the Ontario Water Resources Act. A person or facility taking more than 50,000 litres of water daily, including farmers using water for crop irrigation but not for giving to livestock or poultry, must get a permit. Currently only the highly consumptive commercial and industrial water users, such as bottled water companies and ready-mix concrete producers, have to pay a charge of $3.71 per million litres of water they take.
The fees don’t apply to agricultural operations, which historically haven’t been considered to be highly consumptive or commercial/industrial users, she says. The administrative fee to process the permit application, which is separate from the $3.71 per million-litre water charge, also doesn’t apply to farmers.
The permit process itself is not under review, Jordan notes.
Ontario’s acting Environmental Commissioner Ellen Schwartzel was critical of the low fee water users pay in her 2014/15 annual report issued Tuesday, saying it works out to less than $10 for the water to fill an Olympic-sized pool.
She also said the government hasn’t made any progress on recovering the full costs of its water programs from users, including making sectors like agriculture that currently don’t pay anything, pay for their water. The government only recovers 1.2 per cent of the $16.2 million it spends on water quality programs.
In her report, Schwartzel says as of March 2015, there were more than 6,000 active water-taking permits. The maximum volume permitted to be taken annually by the water taking permit holders was more than 500 trillion litres.
Jordan says of the 6,000 permits, 35 to 40 per cent are for crop irrigation. “The majority of the permits, more than 55 per cent, are for short-term projects at construction sites, quarries, product manufacturing and other commercial uses.” Ten per cent of the permits are for municipalities for drinking water.
Don McCabe says “when it comes to agriculture and the use of water, water permits are not a direct correlation to the water used. The permits are just an indication that you might want to use that water.”
McCabe says it’s important to remember that God predominately irrigates agriculture, as a whole. “We purify a lot of water by sending it to aquifers and back out to lakes. We keep it flowing.”
Schwartzel’s suggestion that farmers should pay for the water they use “is not valid,” McCabe adds. “The government is not doing anything more than issuing a piece of paper. What service is the government offering, other than doing an accounting for their own purposes?”
In her report, Schwartzel also says the environment ministry needs to be more open and transparent when issuing water-taking permits. Currently only one-quarter of all permits are posted for public comment on the province’s Environmental Registry. Permits for municipal or agricultural users or ones that last less than a year are never shared publicly, and many of these are “high risk users.”
In other environmental commission news posted on its website, noted environmental lawyer Dianne Saxe was chosen by unanimous agreement of Ontario’s Legislature to be the province’s new environmental commissioner. Her appointment is effective Dec. 1. BF