Ontario's water source-protection process gropes forward on new ground

Thursday, May 26, 2011

by PAT CURRIE

Nineteen bulky committees in as many "source-protection regions" across Ontario are slowly feeling their way through a thicket of regulations and requirements, breaking new ground all the way, as they grope toward an ultimate goal of formulating new provincial laws that will prevent a repetition of the Walkertown polluted-water catastrophe.

Seven people died and another1,286 were sickened in May, 2000, after bacteria seeped into the town’s well. It was the deadliest consequence of water pollution in Canadian history.

"The investigation which followed exposed an alarmingly unstable waterworks system made fragile by government cuts," the CBC reported in a national newscast.

Now, 11 years later, the process of ensuring that the Clean Water Act enacted in 2006 will have the teeth and the tools to safeguard water supplies in Ontario’s municipalities and on First Nations reserves is getting closer to its goal.

"We’ve already spent three years collecting the science. Now the rubber is hitting the road," in the 47-municipality area covered by the Upper and Lower Thames Valley and Sydenham River watersheds, said Teresa Hollingsworth, spokeswoman for the Thames-Sydenham and Region Source Protection Committee.

"The committee is now developing discussion papers that outline policy options for the source- protection plans. The committee has notified landowners who may be engaging in activities that could be a significant threat to municipal drinking water sources that the development of the plan is under way and invites them to join in the review of the discussion papers later this year," she said.

Starting Monday, May 30, the Lake Erie Region Source Protection Committee, which includes the Grand River Conservation Authority (GRCA), will launch a series of five public meetings to give residents an update on the laborious process. The meetings, all scheduled from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., will be held May 30 in Aboyne Hall in Fergus; May 31 at the Best Western Brant Park Inn in Brantford; June 1 at the GRCA office in Cambridge; June 7 at the community centre in Grand Valley and June 9 at the Italian Canadian Club in Guelph.

Drinking water for 780,000 people in the region’s watershed served by 49 municipal and reserve water systems will be studied over the next year to law the groundwork for policies and programs to be included in a source protection plan to be submitted to the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) by August, 2012.

"Every one of the 19 source-protection regions across Ontario has the same deadline," said Cathy Brown, source-protection project manager for Ausable-Bayfield and Maitland Valley conservation areas where the public-meeting part of the process has already been completed.

However, that is not the end of public input before legislation is finally enacted, probably sometime in 2013-14, , Brown said.

"We don’t want people asking ‘Where did this come from, out of the blue?’" she said.

"Next year we will have a 30-day public consultation process and before that, this September, we will hold what we call an early-engagement process during which we will visit vulnerable sources in our area that face significant threats (of pollution).

"We can do that because we have only 39 municipal and reserve well systems in our area," far fewer than more heavily-settled area such as Oxford County, Brown said. BF