Topic: Municipal ban on bottled water sales
By John Chilibeck
Telegraph-Journal
September 1, 2008
Don’t be surprised if a council near you soon passes a frivolous and tedious motion to restrict the sale of bottled water in your city or town hall or even the local golf course.
Banning bottled water is the rage among city councils across Canada these days. Officials in London, Ont. voted 15-3 earlier this month to get rid of bottled water in all municipal properties which already have water fountains, including rec centres, arenas and golf courses.
Ottawa, Vancouver and Kitchener, Ont. are considering similar bans. Closer to home, Saint John Mayor Ivan Court also wants a prohibition. He’s put it on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.
Bottled water has been assailed for being environmentally destructive and an affront to municipal water systems, which deliver a product that’s supposedly as good if not better than the stuff consumers buy in a bottle.
It takes a gazillion litres of oil to produce those plastic bottles and ship them around the world. The discarded bottles often end up in landfills, another byproduct of the wasteful.
To make matters worse, a lot of bottled water these days comes from municipal drinking supplies – spring water has fast been supplanted by re-mineralized water, tap water that’s been re-filtered.
But banning the sale of bottled water at places like a hockey arena won’t actually do much other than annoy people. You can’t stop them from buying bottled water at a store and bringing it in if they don’t like tap water. And what are municipal officials going to replace the dispensing machines with? More obesity-producing soft drinks?
Rather than berate people for drinking bottled water, politicians like Court should ask why they turned to these products in the first place. Many municipalities, Saint John included, have neglected their water systems so long they’re now running into big, expensive problems. This is directly the result of politicians who secured votes by keeping water rates ridiculously low at the expense of upgrades to their systems.
A succession of boil orders have been issued in Saint John over the last few years due to system shortcomings and failures.
Some areas of the city get murky, brownish water because of tuberculation – a build up of gunk – on the interior of pipes.
Thanks to loose provincial rules, boats are still allowed on the water supply, as are swimmers and dogs that poop and urinate in the water.
The city’s system has no protection against cryptosporidium, a bug that can cause serious epidemics similar to the one that sickened thousands in North Battleford, Sask., in 2001.
It offers only partial protection against giardia, a nasty intestinal parasite most commonly called beaver fever that causes eggy burps or worse in its victims. Only heavy chlorination and testing protects people, and if chlorination doesn’t work, as it hasn’t three times this year, people get to take their chances on whether or not they were tuned to the local radio station or looked at their e-mail notification for boil warnings.
And don’t forget about tryhalomethanes – that awful byproduct of chlorination – which, over the long term, may cause cancer.
Municipal officials often go on about the superiority of their testing regimes. There’s one little detail they overlook: bottled water never killed anyone in Canada. The same can’t be said for the publicly run water system in Walkerton, Ont., which killed seven, debilitated many, and sickened thousands of residents and visitors on the May long weekend of 2000, thanks to an E. coli outbreak.
City leaders don’t need to lecture about wastefulness either. How about some real action, such as installing fountains for the public and city employees alike?
The mayor’s motion is ludicrous considering under his 10-year watch as a councillor there was a fountain closed off on the second floor of the municipal operations building on Rothesay Avenue. The water it released was considered unfit to drink. And that’s just a little thing. Try fixing the entire system before ballyhooing against bottled water.