Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members.
Thank you for inviting us here today.
My name is Robert Haller. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association. We are the national voice of the municipal water sector.
With me here today is Mr. Hiran Sandanayake, the chair of our climate change committee. He's a perfect example of my membership. He is a professional utility water leader who has dedicated his career to ensuring safe drinking water for his customers and then collecting that water back and releasing it to the environment to ensure that we protect the health and economy of every community.
Water and waste water is the most critical service we provide to every community. You can't have hospitals, grocery stores, factories or homes without that water.
Traditionally, our realm has been within an engineering circle. We pipe water from the river or lake, get it to a treatment plant, make sure it's safe to drink and get it to your home safely. We collect it when you're done and you flush it. We take it back to a plant, take out the biosolids, treat the liquids and put it back into the environment.
More and more we're looking at a larger picture here. We have to look outside of our cycle at our source water, for both quantity as far as drought, and for quality, which includes things like algal blooms, which are concerning to all of us.
Legislatively, water and waste water is typically provincially run. That's handed off to the municipal level. That's us. We are also regulated and created by the provincial level, but the federal government's playing a larger role in our sector.
In 2021, we made a submission to this committee that clearly outlined all the work we're doing with every single department of the federal government that we work with. My report listed some 18-plus federal departments and agencies working on water.
We work most closely with Health Canada on the development of the drinking water guidelines for things like lead, manganese and now PFAS. We work with Public Safety Canada on flood risk and cybersecurity. We're working with Environment and Climate Change Canada on things like the waste-water effluent regulations, microplastics and so forth.
This is where I put in a plug for what I call product stewardship over treatment. We can't keep allowing products that are full of plastics and chemicals to enter our sewer systems. Companies unilaterally label their products as flushable, but they ruin our pipes and systems. They cause fatbergs that cause dangerous overflows into our communities, and they add more microplastics to our biosolids and the river. We need federal support to create an enforceable standard in Canada for what is legally labelled as “flushable”.
As for those 20-plus departments and agencies, we've been advocating for many years, asking that the federal government work closely together. I understand that is one of the goals of this committee and I commend you for that effort.
It's also our greatest hope for the Canada water agency. As we were developing that agency, I was one of the advisers who just kept saying, “Let's get started.” We can't wait until it's perfect. We can't wait until everyone is happy. Let's get it started.
First, start with the federal government. Job one is to get all of those departments and agencies working more closely towards common goals.
Job two is to create a central repository where we can collect all of the information they have and share it across Canada. The provinces and other partners can come in as they please.
One of our strongest jobs is advocating to Infrastructure Canada to tell them how critical our need for financial support is to address aging infrastructure and to implement what all the other federal departments need of us. Our major point of concern is the massive cost of maintaining and replacing our infrastructure. You all know that we own most of the infrastructure in Canada, but we get less than 10% of the access to the tax revenues we need.
We're told to be self-sufficient through our rates, but then we're told that access to safe water is a human right. What does that mean?
We're called upon to replace our infrastructure, expand for population growth and plan for climate change, but then we have to keep everything affordable to the consumer.
We need sustainable and reliable funding to do what we need to do. We're looking forward to a renewed Canada infrastructure plan. We support new regulations, but they always come at a huge cost to us. We need Environment Canada talking to Infrastructure Canada when they introduce costly new regulations to us.
Regardless of the cost, we have concerns with the narrow focus of the effluent regulations and the lack of flexibility available to the minister and the ministry to look at local situations to maybe look at a bigger picture and figure out how we could have a larger impact with the same investment—