Canada must reconsider how it 'gives away' water to be bottled, sold: activists
Canada should not be "giving away" its water to be bottled and sold outside the country, activists said Thursday as they celebrated a partial victory against Nestle Canada Inc. and its plan to tap a southwestern Ontario community for 3.6 million litres of water every day for five years.
While Ontario's Environment Ministry did renew Nestle's permit to take up to 1.3 billion litres of groundwater a year from an area near Guelph, Ont., it reduced the term of the deal from five years to two. The ministry said it considered 3.6 million litres a "sustainable" amount for Nestle to take daily.
Activists said they appreciate that the Ontario government reduced the term of the permit and ordered Nestle to pay for increased monitoring and testing of its operations, but questioned the logic of letting an international conglomerate pump Canadian water out of the ground for only the cost of a $3,000 application fee.
As of Jan. 1, 2009, Ontario law will also require that companies pay $3.71 per million litres of water as a conservation fee, but that amount is still paltry, said Mark Goldberg of the Wellington Water Watchers, which spearheaded the fight against Nestle's plans.
"This is our grandchildren's drinking water and we are basically saying, 'Help yourself!"' Goldberg said.
"There's no cost other than a very, very small levy, and then it's put in a plastic bottle and sold back to the public for more than the price of gasoline per litre. Can you think of any other business that gets their feedstock for free?"
The case is "probably the best example" of groundwater conflicts that could emerge in the years ahead as cities grow beyond their means and compete for resources with commercial interests, said Gord Miller, the province's environment commissioner.
"We see increasing competition in a very small part of the landscape for groundwater uses ... and there's a lot of anxiety around that," Miller said.
The bigger question, he said, is whether Canada should be exporting bottled water at all.
"It is illegal to export a tanker truck of water and sell it, say, in the U.S., but if you put that same amount of water in 20-litre containers and put it in a tractor-trailer, it's completely legal to export that as bottled water."
Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians said she considers the sale of bottled Canadian water to be a contributor to growing waste problems and the first step toward the privatization of our water resources.
"It's creating mountains of garbage," she said. "People don't need bottled water - we can drink tap water. We have good, clean, regulated tap water, and I just think this is a mistake and we'll come to regret it."
Nestle can appeal the reduced term of its permit, and the public can seek leave to appeal if it doesn't agree with the government's decision.
Nestle's permit application was posted on the provincial Environmental Bill of Rights registry last April and received more than 6,000 comments on the company's plans, which the ministry called a "significant response."
Goldberg said he has mixed feelings about the Nestle permit, but is encouraged that his group was able to influence the government's decision.
"We're delighted because instead of granting a permit for five years, the ministry gave Nestle a permit for two years, so that's three years of water-taking at 3.6 million litres a day that we're not giving away of a public resource," he said. "That's a major victory."
