This debate on the appropriateness of pricing water rather than privatizing it, in order to conserve and better manage the resource, is relatively old. It's true that many studies and, in particular, many water governance initiatives, particularly in Europe, include water pricing, not only because water is privatized, but also because it's a lever for changing behaviour and making users pay for the cost of the resource. This is the user‑pay and polluter‑pay idea.
From a strictly economic point of view, it has been relatively well demonstrated that, when you pay for the resource at variable costs, that is to say in proportion to the quantity consumed, and not according to the current fee structure, which is generally a fixed rate, you do indeed see changes in behaviour. I know there are places where rates are set in proportion to the volume consumed, but, contrary to an idea that is widely held in many regions of Canada, there's a fixed rate in most places, including many municipalities in Quebec. People pay because it's included in their municipal taxes, but they often don't know it, so there's no impact on consumption related to water pricing.
So there is a whole debate about the political relevance of implementing this pricing. A frequent association in public debate is that the introduction of pricing could be a first step towards privatization, which is frightening. In fact, there have been a lot of reports on the excesses of privatization as carried out in Europe over the past two decades. However, this association between pricing, which may well be practised by public authorities, and privatization, where resource governance is effectively delegated to the private sector, isn't necessarily justified. We know that the aim of a private company is to make a profit, which is perfectly legitimate, and this means that we sometimes lose control of the pricing structure.