Elizabeth May, The Toronto Star, 25 January 2002
The report of Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor on the Walkerton tragedy is clear, forthright and compelling. The deaths of innocents, of people who trusted their tap water because they trusted their governments, were preventable.
The proximate causes of those deaths included the Harris government cutbacks of environmental monitoring within the ministry of the environment. The appalling negligence, ignorance and dishonesty of Stan and Frank Koebel played a huge role. But no system of providing one of life's essential elements should rely on its weakest link. By removing the ministry from water testing, by relying exclusively on private labs — and with the ministry, itself, ignoring evidence there were problems in Walkerton — the government allowed the lives of people in Walkerton to be left to untrained and dishonest employees who did not know that E. coli could kill.
Ministry of environment officials knew that the Walkerton water- works were having a persistent problem with chlorination equipment. But no one from the ministry even checked. As Gary Gallon, who was senior policy adviser to former Ontario environment minister Jim Bradley wrote: "The penny should have dropped at (the ministry of the environment) ... only there was no penny left to drop."
That Canadian society could be brought up short by something as basic as animal manure getting into municipal water supplies would have been unthinkable before Walkerton. Those of us in the environmental movement who issued warnings about the chance we were taking with increased intensive livestock operations were ignored.
One would hope that complacency was the first victim of Walkerton. But the signs that this is not so are disturbing. The Gordon Campbell government in British Columbia has just announced its own version of the Common Sense Revolution with huge reductions of the civil service. The government's attack on the civil service is breathtaking in its brutality, apparently oblivious to the lessons of Walkerton.
In Ontario, we are still allowing the direct spreading of human sewage sludge on farm fields. As the federal Commissioner on the Environment and Sustainable Development pointed out in her December, 2001, report, agricultural manure waste in the Great Lakes basin is a growing and serious threat to environmental health. Livestock operations in Ontario and Quebec produce volumes of manure equivalent to the sewage of more than 100 million people. Animal waste and fertilizer runoff compromise water quality and place human health at risk, according to the commissioner's report.
The main source of nutrient contamination of Ontario's lakes and streams is sewage treatment plants, themselves, but we are not addressing that problem. We do not have the sort of holistic planning and management for safe water that considers the whole watershed and the groundwater systems. Proving the adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Europe has wellhead and headwater protection programs. New York is introducing them. Why don't we?
There are a number of lessons from this tragedy. The one screaming for attention is that we need to restore resources to departments of the environment, provincially and federally. We must have capacity to understand our impact on the environment, to measure contamination, to regulate and enforce those regulations. This means we need to start hiring scientists back into government. The need to restore scientific research capacity is just as desperate in federal departments, such as environment, fisheries and health, as it is at the provincial ministry of the environment.
Another lesson is one that England learned through the so-called mad cow disaster. Cutting back government regulations in the name of reducing "red tape" must not be an end in itself. Margaret Thatcher, Mike Harris' ideological mother, believed that free enterprise was stifled by needless government interference. The profit motive, the unfettered free market, was revered. The assumption, unspoken and unarticulated, was that nothing much could go wrong. So farmers were liberated from unnecessary regulations about what they fed their animals. Boosting growth to boost production led to feeding herbivores dead animals. Worse, it led to feeding them dead diseased animals. It led to mad cow disease and people died. More will die and the British beef industry was dealt a crushing blow.
There is a reason we need regulations. There is a reason we need inspections and enforcement. There is a reason we need government.
And in Canada we need government to do more, not less. Unlike that bastion of free enterprise to the south, Canada has never had enforceable regulated standards for safe drinking water. If you live in Newfoundland, your water may have four times the Health Canada guideline for cancer-causing trihalomethanes — and the government won't even warn you. If you live in Ontario, the water may have high levels of nitrates. Anywhere in rural Canada, your water may have high coliform bacteria. And if you live on a First Nations reserve, your water is likely a scandal. Surely, all Canadians have a right to clean drinking water.
The time for passing the buck is over. The Keobels may be the water treatment team from hell, but they should never have been put in a position where so much rested on their inadequate shoulders. Many, many municipalities in Canada simply lack the resources to ensure safe water. Municipal infrastructure needs expensive overhauls. Provincial government regulation inevitably means a different level of safety is possible from one jurisdiction to another. All of this points to the need for the federal government to take the lead. Isn't it time for a national Safe Drinking Water Act?
Elizabeth May is executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. The organization's Eastern Canada chapter was an intervenor in the Walkerton inquiry.
Elizabeth May was keynote speaker at the inaugural meeting of CREEK.