Mr. Speaker, I am here today on behalf of the government to address MotionNo. M-425 put forward by the member for Comox-Alberni. It calls for a country-wide program of improving the treatment of municipal sewage to a minimum standard or at least that of primary treatment facilities.
A basic weakness of the motion is that it proposes to solve the problem of municipal waste water through the use of a specific directed technology. Since when have Reform Party members believed in imposing the use for every province of a uniform method when they do not even believe in the consistent application of a basic health care principle.
What we should be concerned about is not the process used to effect treatment of municipal waste water, but the quality of the final product and its subsequent short and long term effects on humans and the ecosystem. The shortsightedness of this bill is typical of many Reform motions: immediate, quick fixes that show the lack of experience that comes from not really understanding how other jurisdictions of government work, how the municipal political mind works.
While the Canadian Federation of Mayors has been consistently requesting an infrastructure program, the first government to take the request seriously was the Liberal government. A minister was put in charge of the program who has been a well respected, long serving mayor and he tailored the program to suit the unique and individual needs of all municipalities, municipalities that are fiercely protective of their jurisdictions.
Under the federal Fisheries Act, for example, no person including a municipality, is allowed to discharge water where fish are found or treated water which contains any substance that is harmful to fish. The focus should not be on what technology is used to treat municipal water waste, including domestic sewage, but on the final quality of the water.
As a technology for treating municipal waste water, primary treatment is a physical, mechanical process, very simplistic at best. It can remove material like sand, grit, stones, twigs and larger objects like wood and plastic. It can settle out the heavy organics of domestic sewage, but that is about all primary treatment can achieve.
A fundamental concern related to municipal waste water is how much oxygen demanding matter it contains. Oxygen demanding matter takes up oxygen from its environment to decompose. A primary treatment system, if efficiently designed and operated, can only reduce up to 40 per cent of the oxygen demanding substances found in municipal waste water. The remaining 60 per cent will be discharged into the system.
It is important to remove as much organic matter as possible that requires oxygen to decompose from municipal waste water so it does not consume oxygen that fish need to thrive. Such matter does not then demand heavy chlorination and subsequent disinfection processes.
Primary treatment cannot address concerns related to toxins, including removal of heavy metals that are commonly found in Canadian municipalities.
A country-wide program of improving the treatment of municipal sewage to a minimum standard of at least that of primary treatment facilities will not in all cases adequately conserve and protect the environment. More important, in the jurisdiction of water treatment, municipalities will, en masse, cry foul if the federal government presumes to tell them how to achieve a technology that many of them have to this date perfected in an extremely economical manner.
I would not like to be the federal politician who attempts to tell Mayor Hazel McCallion of Mississauga, a mayor well known for her strength of character, how to treat her water system rather than what minimal standards should be maintained coming out of Mississauga. In fact, when the current infrastructure program was designed and offered to Mississauga, the city council did not request money for water treatment. The basic structures were in such good shape that Mississauga requested a one-third portion contribution for a living arts centre which created, as an aside, 950 jobs.
The standard of water in Mississauga is absolutely one of the highest in the country. No government has ever told the city how to do this.
Improving the treatment of municipal sewage is a commendable objective, but it does not fully address the issue of conservation and effective management of Canada's water sources. What is urgently needed at the municipal level is sewer use bylaws to restrict access
to the sewer systems of substances not amenable to treatment. Also municipalities should charge water users the full and true cost of both supplying drinkable, usable water and treating waste water after its use, as is done in Mississauga. At this very time water charges in Mississauga are double, water amount going in and water amount going out.
Municipal water in Canada has traditionally been underpriced in comparison to other utilities or essential services. Many years of water prices set at artificially low levels by municipalities have not allowed Canadian communities to accumulate adequate reserve funds for renovation and upgrading of water infrastructure. Also low water prices have offered no incentive for technological advance. Thus, the municipal water industry has been left with old technologies, inefficient plants and very low levels of innovation.
A country-wide program to improve sewage treatment to at least the level of primary treatment would still leave all current pricing problems intact and without resolution.
According to 1991 statistics, which are the most recent figures available, the level of revenues collected by Canadian municipalities for water use and sewerage charges is in the order of $3.3 billion. With the probable exception of property taxes, revenues from water use are the largest source of income for municipal governments. At current prices, for many Canadian municipalities this revenue source is still insufficient for municipalities to operate and maintain their water infrastructures.
What are Canadians to do to deal with this apparent shortfall? Surprisingly, researchers have found that as the price of water increases, the demand decreases. This is not witchcraft. We have all seen this in the pricing of many commodities.
In accordance with the polluter pays principle, municipal water customers should pay for waste water treatment according to their level of water use. The federal government cannot be big brother and pay for all minimal water treatment across the country. Treatment according to the level of water use is the most important product of proper water conservation.
Similarly, industries that use municipal sewers and treatment as their primary or only method of waste water abatement should pay for the extra stress they place on water treatment plants. Perhaps municipalities should even pay their provinces in proportion to the level of contamination of their effluent for the right to deposit their waste water in lakes, rivers, and other communal waterways.
Cheap water in Canada has led to unnecessarily high water usage. Higher water usage has led municipalities to install water systems that are larger than would be needed if realistic pricing policies were implemented by Canadian communities to bring out true water conservation.
I believe water conservation is the real way of the future. Pricing based on quantity of water used provides each user with the incentive to conserve water. This leads to cost savings by water consumers as well as municipalities themselves in terms of their capital expenditures and maintenance costs of waste water treatment plants. It also encourages less reliance on unpredictable purification chemicals, which in the future may cause other problems.
Let me emphasize that there is wastage by the consumer, who has no incentive, financial or otherwise, to conserve water supplies. In addition, public utilities find it cheaper to process and pump more clean water through the system than to find and repair expensive leaks. In some areas of Canada, system leakage accounts for 40 per cent of total pumping. Country-wide primary treatment for municipal sewage, as proposed by the hon. member for Comox-Alberni, will do nothing to correct that.
If I may call the attention of the hon. members to the 1987 federal water policy, the concept of full cost pricing, which includes extra sewer charges for industrial waste and the promotion of universal metering, is a cornerstone of that document. The infrastructure related components of the federal water policy accord well with the policies outlined in Creating Opportunity , our Liberal plan for Canada.
The 1987 federal water policy is based on a user pay principle. This means users should be responsible for funding a particular service in approximate proportion to their consumption. User pay wherever possible is an appropriate principle for our times and one this government endorses.
To monitor the progress of implementation of the 1987 federal water policy, Environment Canada undertook in 1991 a survey of water piping practices among Canadian municipalities of at least 1,000 inhabitants or more. The results were somewhat of a disappointment. The Government of Canada had spent the four years since the release of the 1987 federal water policy promoting the benefits of full cost pricing as a means of water conservation and adequate financing of water infrastructure programs. Environment Canada found, however, that half of the surveyed municipalities were still charging a flat rate for water use.
Under such circumstances there is no incentive for water consumers to lower their consumption. In addition, water customers often have no idea of how much water they are actually using, as there is no meter attached to their facility or home, counting and then compiling the number of cubic metres of water used.
In summary, a country-wide program that would have the sole goal of improving municipal sewage treatment to the minimum level of primary treatment will not solve Canada's problems in the area of municipal waste water treatment. Minimal chemical purification and ultimately a serious concern for conservation of this valuable resource is the true direction this government should be taking. Therefore I will not be supporting a very shortsighted bill at this time.
