Thank you.
Honourable members of Parliament, I truly appreciate this opportunity to share with you my experience and knowledge about drinking water as you review Bill C-326. I've outlined my qualifications and experience in my written brief, so I won't repeat them here. My evidence is based on authentic experience with drinking water safety. I hope to make a case that you'll want to ask questions about. My written brief contains many published references that elaborate on the evidence for the case I'm going to argue.
Bill C-326 appears to aim at ensuring safe drinking water for Canadians. That aim is praiseworthy, but based on a substantial body of evidence, I am obliged to testify that Bill C-326 is most likely to be misinterpreted and, as currently drafted, may only distract from achieving its noble aim.
Almost 18 years ago in May 2000 in Walkerton, Ontario, Canadians witnessed seven consumers die and over 2,400 made ill—many seriously so—because their public drinking water became contaminated. If it had been law before May 2000, Bill C-326 would not have prevented that disaster. You may well ask why not? Walkerton was a failure to meet the numerical regulatory limits that were specified. Requiring a more stringent numerical limit would have made no difference.
Justice O'Connor, in his landmark inquiry reports, recognized that ensuring operational competence is the critical factor for ensuring safe drinking water, not specifying more stringent numerical limits. Justice O'Connor was informed in his judgment by parallel international advances made by the World Health Organization and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. These are now captured in what's called a “drinking water safety plan” approach that focuses on operational competence rather than just tightening numerical limits. Those numerical limits are already set with considerable margins of safety. Failures like Walkerton are caused by inadequate operational competence to ensure safe operations.
Despite the Walkerton incident being 18 years in the past, such fatal operational errors have continued to occur in affluent nations. Just last year I was retained by Water New Zealand to give evidence to a government inquiry into a drinking water disaster in a community called Havelock North that caused four deaths and 5,500 cases of illness in August 2016. This disaster occurred in a modern, suburban community of about 15,000 residents for reasons similar to Walkerton's disaster—because the operational personnel responsible for drinking water failed to do what needed to be done.
In my evidence for New Zealand, I reported on case studies of 38 outbreaks of serious drinking water disease that have occurred in 13 affluent countries: nine in the U.S.; seven in Canada; six in England; three in Finland; two each in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland; and one each in Australia, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and Scotland. These resulted in a total of 77 fatalities in nine fatal outbreaks and caused over 460,000 cases of gastrointestinal disease.
While the majority of Canadians are routinely provided high-quality drinking water that is safe by any international standard, assurance of that achievement is less secure as we move to smaller and more remote communities, including first nations communities. The bottom line for ensuring safe drinking water is the competence—the training, knowledge, public health awareness, commitment, and functional capacity—of the water provider. The smaller the entity charged with providing public drinking water, the more difficult it becomes to ensure adequate competence.
Consider the following example to illustrate my point. Would you be comfortable as a passenger travelling in a plane flown by a pilot being paid minimal wages and who has minimal training and negligible technical support? I expect not. Yet, in many small communities in Canada we place responsibility for delivering safe drinking water upon personnel who are often undertrained, and are mostly underpaid and undersupported for the enormous public health responsibility they must discharge. Adopting more stringent numerical criteria in the guidelines for Canadian drinking water quality, which are already intentionally cautious, will do nothing to improve drinking water safety in these communities.
I'd like to thank member of Parliament Scarpaleggia for the references he made to some of my writings. We had a discussion on these issues, and I'm pleased that they've been taken note of. However, I'm commenting on what's in the bill.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I welcome your questions about what is needed and what will improve safety.