December 21, 2009

Infrastructure

Ontario MPP floats bill to create provincial water regulatory board

IAN HARVEY

correspondent

A private member’s bill seeks to create an Ontario water regulatory board that would oversee standards for water and waste water treatment across the province.

Introduced this month by Don Valley East MPP David Caplan, The Sustainable Water Improvement and Maintenance Act (SWIM), builds on work dating back to 2002 when Bill 175 was passed and received royal assent.

However, as Joseph Accardi, executive director of the Ontario Sewer and Watermain Construction Association notes, the guts of Bill 175 were never enshrined in regulations, leaving it in limbo.

Caplan got involved while he was minister of public infrastructure in 2004 when a Water Strategy Expert Panel urged the creation of a central agency to direct muncipalities on when and how they should treat their drinking water and sewage.

“Water and sewage doesn’t really shine, it doesn’t get a lot of attention,” admits Caplan but says we only have to look at the Walkerton tainted water tragedy to see how deeply it can affect a community.

While private members’ bills don’t often progress in the Ontario legislature, Caplan is confident this one will garner all-party support.

“In the past, my private member’s bills when I was in opposition have done well,” he said.

Accardi welcomed the move, saying it was a complete surprise.

“We’ve been lobbying on this issue for a long time, obviously,” he said. “But we know nothing about this. We’d had meetings with MPs a couple of weeks earlier and Mr. Caplan was not well and couldn’t meet with us.”

“SWIM will reveal the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ aspects of our water and wastewater systems by bringing these often hidden services into broad daylight,” said Caplan and help communities maintain high standards of public health, affordability, and reliability.

“One of the critical aspects is to ring fence the funding so it doesn’t get spent on other things,” says Caplan. “We need to know what it cost to provide a glass of water, so we know what the real costs are.”

By getting a handle on costs of managing and maintaining the system, he says, he hopes the agency will encourage better water recycling, better inspections and more action over constant issues such as leakage within the system.

Accardi said the idea to have a central agency monitor and audit water and sewage treatment goes well beyond the simple issue of water quality.

“We want to ensure that the money collected from customers goes back into the infrastructure, not general revenues or used for non-water purposes,” said Accardi.

Ironically, that’s exactly what the City of Toronto did virtually on the same day Caplan introduced his bill.

It took $100,000 from its “water source protection fund” to retain outside consultants in its continuing legal battle against the latest phase of the York-Durham sanitary trunk sewer, also known as the Big Pipe.

Toronto wants to present arguments against the project at the next phase of the environmental assessment process. A grassroots movement has also mounted an e-mail campaign claiming the project pollutes Lake Ontario and its beaches with carcinogens and biologically active chemicals that it claims will not be adequately treated at the Duffins Creek treatment plant.

The prime target is the plan to incinerate sewage sludge at the plant, with claims this will release toxins into the air. The group wants York and Durham to stop construction and come up with a recycling scheme.

York Region says it needs the pipe to allow further growth and that the current system is close to overcapacity.

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