Transport Committee on Nov. 30th, 2017

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I call to order this meeting of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. Pursuant to the order of reference of Tuesday, February 7, 2017, we're doing a study of water quality.

With us from the City of Welland, we have Sal Iannello, general manager, infrastructure and development services.

From EPCOR Utilities, we have Stephen Craik, director, water quality assurance.

We have everybody by video conference or some other kind of remote communication.

From Ville de Trois-Rivières, we have Marie-Claude Guérin, specialist in drinking water.

As an individual, we have Michèle Prévost, professor, École Polytechnique de Montréal.

Also from École Polytechnique de Montréal is Élise Deshommes.

Welcome to all of you.

We'd like to start with Mr. Iannello, please.

[Sal Iannello, General Manager, Infrastructure and Development Services, City of Welland]

Good afternoon.

The City of Welland, as is the case with many old communities, has lead water issues in a small portion of the city. Our own testing program showed that 10% of the samples exceeded provincial guidelines.

In addition to the city's own replacement program to replace lead services on the city side, in 2008 the city initiated a program to help fund homeowners wishing to replace their private side by budgeting $50,000 to provide fifty-fifty cost sharing to a maximum of $750.

In 2010 the City of Welland and the Niagara Region, which provides the treated water to the city's distribution system, were required to submit a corrosion control plan to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Submitted in November 2010, the plan highlighted that there were still 1,346 known lead service lines in the distribution system; 612 of the lead services were on the city-owned side, and 734 of the lead services were privately owned.

The use of treatment additives was considered in the plan, but the preferred solution was to replace all of the lead services in the system. Presently there remain 296 known lead services on the city-owned portion and 661 on the privately owned side of the services.

The city estimates that it would take about three to four years to replace all of the remaining known city-owned lead services as we conduct our replacement programs. While the city has removed over 51% of the known lead services on the city side, the private side has not seen similar success, as approximately only 10% of the known lead services have been replaced on the private portion. This low uptake is despite the city's efforts to increase—

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

There is no translation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Iannello, please stop for a second. We lost translation for a moment.

Please continue from where I stopped you, Mr. Iannello.

[Sal Iannello]

While the city has removed over 51% of the known lead services on the city side, the private side has not seen similar success, as only approximately 10% of the known lead services have been replaced on the private portion. This low uptake is despite the city's efforts to increase the number of private replacements by 2011, joining with the Niagara Region in a joint effort whereby the Niagara Region matched the city's annual contributions so that a budget of $100,000 was established through which homeowners could get grants of up to $1,500.

The city continues to advertise the lead replacement program to all residents via “Infotap”, a brochure that is sent to residents every two years, and through advertising in the local newspaper and on the city's website as well as on a new large screen monitor located outside city hall.

The city has met with regional public health departments since the development of the corrosion control plan. The health department will, as requested by the city, visit residents where there are vulnerable populations residing and where the owner is reluctant to change the private lead service line. As well, the health department has volunteered to visit residents where high lead concentrations have been detected in plumbing samples, based on the city's testing program.

We remain hopeful that many homeowners will take up the offer, but unfortunately, we believe it will be a long time before the private side is completely converted to non-lead materials. At present, the city is looking at changing the funding to cover 100% of the private side in order to expedite the private side's removal of lead services.

Funding is an issue with the city. As is the case with many other municipalities, we face many challenges due to the age of our infrastructure and the declining industrial base, putting pressure on the affordability of the service. As you no doubt have heard from many municipal governments, sustainable, predictable funding from the federal and provincial governments would aid in clearing up many of the areas of concern not only in water and sewer, but in all the services provided by the municipal governments.

In closing, I would also like to offer aid, should you require it, from the Canadian Public Works Association, of which I am presently the Ontario board member. This association has members across Canada and is part of the American Public Works Association across the United States. We can offer expertise in all aspects of public works.

Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Iannello.

Next is Mr. Craik from EPCOR Utilities, for five minutes, please.

[Stephen Craik, Director, Water Quality Assurance and Environment, EPCOR Utilities Inc.]

I'm Steve Craik, and I'm with EPCOR in Canada.

EPCOR owns and operates the drinking water system for the City of Edmonton. We provide drinking water to a population of about 900,000 for the City of Edmonton and approximately 65 communities in the Edmonton region, serving a population of about 1.2 million. We also operate several small and mid-sized water systems for clients in Alberta and British Columbia.

I'm going to touch on the lead issue in Edmonton, our program, the general challenges we see as a water utility, and the proposed new Health Canada guideline on lead in drinking water.

As with most large utilities, EPCOR has been proactively dealing with the lead issue. We have currently about 3,200 homes and small businesses in the city of Edmonton serviced through old lead service lines. This number refers to the section of service pipe that is owned by the water utility. We estimate that there are about 5,000 homes and small businesses in Edmonton where the service line material on the private property is also lead.

Our program consists of an annual notification of all residents in homes where we know there are lead service lines. We make an offer to test for lead levels at the tap in all of these homes and businesses. We also offer to provide a point-of-use filter that removes lead. As well, we offer to replace the utility side of the service line serving the property, and we provide customer education on the lead issue through web material and other communications. Recently, we also introduced a random testing program on lead for all homes in the city.

EPCOR's policy is that we'll replace the utility section of the lead service line provided the property owner has replaced their section. We will avoid partial service line replacements, as we understand that this can result in an increase in lead levels at the tap.

As for some of the challenges we face with our program and the issue of lead in drinking water, the first is dual ownership. The property owner owns the section of the service line on private property and they alone are responsible for maintaining that section of the service line.

Another is customer awareness and motivation. Property owners are usually surprised to learn that they own a piece of lead pipe and are generally reluctant to spend money to replace it. In Edmonton, the cost of private lead service line replacements can be as high as $8,000 to $9,000.

Another challenge is rental properties. Many lead service lines are attached to rental properties, and the resident of the home has little or no control over service line replacement.

Poor records are also a challenge. While the utility maintains electronic records of the service line material portion that's owned by the utility, there is no database on service line material on private property, so we rely on estimates.

As well, although we have a policy to avoid partial lead service line replacements, we are often compelled to replace the pipe because it has failed or is connected to a water main that is being renewed.

In terms of filters, while we do provide filters for the use of customers with lead service lines, we consider this a short-term measure.

Also, there is lead from other sources. Our random sampling program has shown that lead levels can sometimes exceed the current guideline, even in homes where there is no lead service line.

Finally, there are the sampling and testing protocols. The outcomes of any lead monitoring program are greatly dependent on how the samples are collected and tested, how many are collected, and when and where they are collected. There seems to be a lack of consensus in the industry on this issue, and this is somewhat confusing for water utilities.

Last, on the impact of the proposed Health Canada guideline revision, as a water utility we agree with the need to revise the guideline, and on matters of health risk, we trust the experts at Health Canada.

Over the long term, the guideline will drive the removal of lead and a reduction in lead in service lines and at the tap across the country. However, for many utilities, we will not be able to meet the guideline in the near term, and we may be out of compliance with our provincial regulation when it is released. That's a concern for us. The guideline should also clarify proper sampling and testing protocols for water utilities and requirements for monitoring programs.

There's a final message for the committee. We feel that lead in drinking water is a very important public health issue, probably one of our most important public health issues at this time, but it's very complex, with no easy and rapid solutions. It will take many years to completely remove the sources of lead, and any new guideline or regulation should therefore consider an adjustment period for utilities.

Finally, larger water systems are probably more prepared to manage the issues associated with lead, and most have some kind of program in place already; however, small and mid-sized water utilities I think will be much less well prepared.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Craik.

Via telephone, we have with us Marie-Claude Guérin, who is of course a specialist in drinking water.

Are you there, Marie?

[Marie-Claude Guérin, Specialist in drinking water, Public Works, Ville de Trois-Rivières]

Yes, I can hear you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

The city of Trois-Rivières has a population of 136,000. We have 965,000 kilometres of water pipes. Since 2013, we have been working to improve method of our water sampling in order to detect the presence of lead and copper. We have taken a number of samples and we have had only a very few results that were outside the norms. Our anticorrosion system is effective and we monitor the pH level in the water quite well. We conduct interesting research and we have gained some definite expertise in water systems and in supplying houses with water according to their construction dates.

Only a few samples have revealed the presence of lead. We then retested the samples at longer intervals. Perhaps we did not do the sampling correctly, in terms of the time required to let the water run before the samples are taken.

So everything was fine when we reviewed our work. In 2017, the results of the samples analyzed did not exceed the standards in any of the six systems that supply the city of Trois-Rivières.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.Merci.

[Marie-Claude Guérin]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We'll move to Michèle Prévost from École Polytechnique.

[Michèle Prévost, Professor, École Polytechnique de Montréal and Industrial Research Chair, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, As an Individual]

Good afternoon.

I'm a professor of civil engineering at the Polytechnique de Montréal, where I hold an industrial chair on drinking water, co-funded by NSERC and by the utilities in the greater area of Montreal that are serving about three million customers.

I've conducted research on water quality and distribution systems since about 1990 and have been involved in research on lead since 2005. I was the principal investigator of two multi-university and utility partnership initiatives to reduce lead at the tap across Canada through a suite of laboratory field studies and field studies funded by the Canadian Water Network, which was present at your last meeting, represented by Dr. Conant.

These studies were also completed by an epidemiology co-study on 302 kids in Montreal showing the impact of lead in drinking water on the blood lead levels of Canadian children. More recently, I've been advising the Hong Kong inquiry on excess lead, the Pew foundation, which I'll refer to later in my intervention, and the U.S. EPA for modelling and sampling methodologies.

Today I am accompanied by Dr. Elise Deshommes, a research fellow at my research chair. Dr. Deshommes has nine years of experience on lead in drinking water. She has published several papers on sampling, monitoring, and partial replacement, has participated in the EPI study, and has provided technical support to various committees, including at Health Canada.

I'll try to present my ideas in two ways, first as a reaction to the five micrograms per litre proposed by Health Canada, and then I'll try to summarize the main findings from the research I've conducted.

On the topic of the proposed new health guidelines, we all agree that lead is a recognized national issue, and I support the guidance proposed by Health Canada. I'd like to stress to the committee that this is a change from 10 micrograms—10 parts per million after six hours to five parts per million after a shorter stagnation—so basically, it is a tightening of the guidance, but not that much of a tightening, without going into technical details, when you look at the sampling protocols.

I base my support on two other things. First of all, there is the study of the Pew foundation in the U.S., which did a large study on the health and societal impacts of childhood exposure to lead. It is really useful. The study shows a large benefit from reducing lead at the tap from a value of 11 micrograms per litre, on average, to five micrograms on average, which is very similar to what Health Canada is doing. They scoped out the benefits in terms of the return on investment and showed $2.5 billion across the U.S. for the interventions aiming to remove the lead service lines throughout the U.S. This is an important number to remember.

My support is further justified by the result of the Montreal EPI study on the 303 kids, which showed that when the levels of lead are below 5 micrograms, the presence of a lead surface line does not impact or increase the blood lead levels of the children significantly.

Those are some remarks on the new Health Canada guidance, so now let me try to address three issues that I can take positions on, based on research results.

First of all, I heard in previous committee meetings a lot of questions about what the presence is across Canada, and I heard my colleagues from municipalities testifying. We completed a form survey with 21 utilities from six Canadian provinces to understand the presence in terms of how many LSLs, lead service lines, are present and what are the management practices across Canada.

What we found was quite striking. There could be from anywhere from none to 70,000 lead service lines in one given utility. Even more striking is that they can represent less than 1% to over 36% of the connections. In some utilities it's really a big problem. In others, it's much smaller.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Ms. Prévost, could you do your closing remarks so the committee can have time to ask some questions, please.

[Michèle Prévost]

Yes.

On the impact of partial lead service line replacement, we have conducted two series of studies, both of which suggest that partial replacements are not the preferred solution, but they do not cause an increase in the amount of lead over the long term. This is an important piece of information, since utilities have a legacy of these partial connections and, as many have stated, it is difficult to obtain a complete replacement with the owner's participation.

Finally, to close, I would also like to add that my group has completed work to quantify the benefits of interventions for utilities to consider, whether it's removing lead service lines or changing bad faucets and connecting piping in schools, which is a very hot topic in Canada. I would like to say that with regard to the work we've done in quantifying the exposure in the lead service lines in homes and the partial lead service lines in homes and the schools, it is very clear that priority should be given to removing the lead service lines and, if possible, removing all of the service lines, even more so than—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much. I'm sorry to cut you off, Ms. Prévost.

Now we'll go to our questioners. For six minutes, it's Mr. Chong.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for their testimony today.

This is largely, if not entirely, a provincial area of jurisdiction: the standards of drinking water for communities across this country, with obviously the exception of on-reserve drinking water standards.

The one question I have is this: is there sufficient coordination among the 10 provincial governments and three territorial governments, or are there mechanisms that need to be improved to ensure better coordination of these drinking water standards as they apply to lead?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Who would like to answer?

We'll start with you, Mr. Iannello. Would you like to try to answer Mr. Chong's question?

[Sal Iannello]

I really can't comment on that. I'm not familiar with the other provincial standards. In Ontario, we basically deal at our level of government. It's probably more of a question for the Ministry of the Environment as to what kind of coordination they do with other provinces. I'm very familiar with only the Ontario standards, having worked in the Ontario system for over 30 years.

I would guess that maybe the professor would have a better answer than I would, because she's done studies across.... We just follow the guidelines. The Ministry of the Environment actually puts us under an order to address the issues to their standards.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you.

Perhaps through you, Madam Chair, we could have the professor respond.

[Michèle Prévost]

Perhaps I could offer a partial answer to your question. I was involved in drafting the Ontario regs.

Yes, there's quite a bit of difference among the regulations in the different provinces. To give you a striking example, the Quebec regulation calls for a flush sample; you let your water run for five minutes, and the probability of finding a high level of lead is very low. On the other hand, Ontario has a 30-minute type of stagnation, which brings out a higher number.

It should be said that there's a lot of discrepancy among the ones that follow Health Canada's guidance, Ontario regulations, or Quebec regulations, and some provinces have very little enforcement of any kind. Yes, there is a lack of common regulations, or even common goals, in reducing lead across Canada.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

In the United States, is it a federally regulated standard or is it regulated state by state?

[Michèle Prévost]

It is a federally regulated standard. It's not an MCL, like it is in Canada and in most provinces that have moved ahead. It is a treatment. It's an objective, an action level. It's very different. But that standard or regulation, the lead and copper rule, is being reviewed as we speak. It should be done in 2018. Obviously, the 15 micrograms per litre at the 90th percentile action level will be changed.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Do you think there needs to be better intergovernmental coordination mechanisms or—

[Michèle Prévost]

You're asking an academic to delve into politics. This is not in the script.