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.