Mr. Chair and standing committee members, I greatly appreciate this opportunity to give evidence concerning safe drinking water for first nations in Canada.
I have previously testified with Grand Chief Stan Louttit to the Senate Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples on March 1, 2011, and with Dr. Harry Swain, on May 15, 2007, concerning our findings in the 2006 Expert Panel on the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations report.
Our report speaks for itself. I don't need to repeat the details of the report here today. My views have not changed. I choose to focus my evidence today on my scientific and professional judgment, based on our research about what makes drinking water unsafe, to allow for understanding of what must be done to keep it safe.
This evidence is conditioned by practical experiences, such as serving Justice Dennis O'Connor on the Research Advisory Panel to the Walkerton inquiry and considering submissions from over 100 parties at hearings held at nine locations across Canada in 2006 while preparing our expert panel report. I have also included a bio at the end of my written submission that covers my other experiences.
I will focus my evidence before you on two matters: what is safe drinking water and how can it be assured, and the vital importance of operational competence in assuring safe drinking water.
Regarding the first matter, Bill S-8 is titled An Act respecting the safety of drinking water on First Nation lands, but safe drinking water is not defined in Bill S-8, nor is it found in the Ontario Safe Drinking Water Act or the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act. This should be a clue for parliamentarians about a major challenge regarding this topic.
Although it is clearly central to the purpose of Bill S-8, legislators elsewhere provide no assistance in defining safe drinking water. The problem is that “safe” as applied to drinking water is not a simple yes or no, black or white, determination. The drinking water at Walkerton, that killed 7 people and made over 2,000 ill, was clearly unsafe. It was black, not white. Most of the conditions that allowed that failure had been in place for almost 22 years before May 2000, when disaster struck.
In hindsight, the Walkerton drinking water supply was unsafe for 22 years because those responsible for assuring its safety failed to recognize and understand the risks to that supply. If they had recognized and understood the risks, and taken some relatively simple measures in response, the Walkerton disaster need not have happened.
Yet, those measures cannot have assured zero risk of drinking water contamination. Rather, safe drinking water must be assured by achieving negligible risk of consumers becoming ill, and by negligible I mean risks too small to worry about or to justify changing personal behaviour. Negligible risk will not be absolutely pure white on the inherently grey scale of safety, but negligible risk is close enough to white for all practical purposes.
While drinking water quality criteria, as captured by tables of water quality criteria numbers, provide an essential reference, such numbers, legislated or otherwise, cannot and do not assure safe drinking water. If those responsible for Walkerton's drinking water had simply satisfied the very limited guidance that was in place for treating Walkerton's water, that tragedy could have been averted. This disaster arose from a failure to do what needed to be done operationally, not from a lack of stringency of water quality criteria.
So how is negligible risk for drinking water achieved? I would suggest four steps: first, by recognizing and understanding what are the threats to a drinking water system; second, by understanding what are the capabilities and limitations of the treatment and monitoring processes available or that drinking water; third, by assuring that the treatment system operates to its capabilities for dealing with threats at all times; and fourth, by assuring that treated water is delivered to consumers without being contaminated during distribution.
These elements are key features of a “know your own system” approach to assuring safe drinking water that has become international best practice since first being proposed in 2004, almost simultaneous by the World Health Organization and the Australian drinking water guidelines. This approach calls for every water system to develop its own water safety plan.
In Canada, some provinces have addressed many elements of this approach. Ontario requires an operational plan and satisfying the quality management standard, but I find the Ontario approach to be too onerous for the smaller systems that invariably face the greatest risk. So far, only Alberta has made adoption of drinking water safety plans mandatory, and its program was intentionally designed to be practical and effective for small systems. Because drinking water systems for Canada's first nations are essentially all small systems, and many also face additional challenges of being remote, the drinking water safety plan approach is inherently the best available option for assuring that drinking water does not become unsafe.
Bill S-8 could, in one modestly bold step, reflect international best practice by making an absolute commitment to addressing a drinking water safety plan approach as its guiding principle.
The second issue in terms of the vital role of operational competence in assuring safe drinking water is that drinking water safety plans cannot assure safe drinking water unless those who are operating the plant possess the necessary operational competence—the training, knowledge, public health awareness, commitment, and functional capacity. The smaller and more remote the entity charged with providing drinking water, the more challenging it becomes to assure competence.
Consider the following image to illustrate my point about competence. Would you be comfortable as a passenger travelling in a plane flown by a pilot being paid minimal wages with minimal training and limited technical support? I wouldn't. Yet in many small communities in Canada, including first nations, we place responsibility for delivering safe drinking water on personnel who are often under-trained, mostly underpaid and generally under-supported for the enormous public health responsibility they must discharge. A serious operational mistake can make an entire community ill.
Evidence that we heard during our hearings in 2006 confirms my belief that even if physical treatment facilities are less than optimal, a well-trained, responsible operator will be able to protect the safety of a community much better than an inadequately trained operator, even if equipped with the best possible treatment facilities when the system is challenged. Providing safe drinking water is a knowledge-intensive undertaking, and must have a support system that equips and supports operators in taking on that challenge.
So I have to ask, how difficult is to recognize where the real problems lie? Canada has made major investments in upgrading water treatment facilities for first nations, with some excellent improvements to show for that investment. Yet to date, the emphasis has been on funding facilities without sufficiently increased emphasis on tackling the more challenging task of training and supporting competent, responsible operators for every facility.
Given the high unemployment that exists in many remote first nation reserves, an emphasis on creating skilled employment should be an obvious priority, even without the vital role that competent operators play in assuring safe drinking water. Above all else, our focus must be on assuring operational competence.
Small and isolated communities in Canada universally face challenges in achieving the necessary level of competent operations, but some communities have been successful in investing in their operators. Several first nation communities have benefited from circuit rider programs that provide regional support for isolated operators, but these programs are too often over-subscribed and underfunded.
Lack of leadership is a major problem for assuring safe drinking water in Canada. Bill S-8 provides a unique opportunity to fill this leadership void with benefits for Canadians in all small communities, not only first nations. After all, who can credibly disagree with the merits of managing our drinking water to the international best practice of adopting a drinking water safety plan and a know your own system approach?
Thank you.