OTTAWA — Boil-water advisories, often used as a “precautionary measure,” are used in place of treatment in nearly 2,000 neighborhoods and communities across Canada, a Canadian public health engineer said in an April 7 Canwest News Service report published in the Regina Leader-Post.

Steve Hrudey, who served on the research advisory panel that looked into the May 2000 contaminated water crisis in Walkerton, Ontario, was responding to a recently published report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). That report said more than 1,760 neighborhoods and communities across Canada are currently being told to boil their water. Hrudey, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health in Edmonton, commented, “That’s the minimum. There’s probably more than that.”

The CMAJ report, written by Laura Eggertson, said the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia lead Canada in the number of boil-water advisories in effect. Ontario has 679 advisories in effect, followed by British Columbia at 530.

Hrudey said some of those advisories, as well as others across Canada, have been in place for months, and in some cases, for years. “So, clearly in those kinds of situations, the boil-water advisory is being used as an alternative to treatment, which is just not acceptable,” he told Canwest.

The situation exists at least in part, Hrudey writes in an April 8 CMAJ Today editorial, because “providing consistently safe drinking water requires well-resourced treatment systems and highly trained personnel, yet we download this responsibility to local governments. Larger municipalities generally do well, but many smaller and more remote communities simply cannot cope with all the technical and managerial challenges. For example, boil-water advisories — a measure of last resort — are all too common. We are allowing a two-tier system of water supply, roughly split along the urban–rural divide.”

Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians and author of Blue Covenant: the Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, called the number of boil-water advisories “stunning.” She is advocating for a federal-provincial water framework that implements national standards, protects watersheds and outlaws bulk water exports.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities, whose members have direct responsibility for water treatment plants and other municipal infrastructure that ensures clean water, also is calling on the federal government to work with the provinces and territories to develop a strategy that would make clean, safe water a priority, according to Eggertson’s report.

To read the Canwest News Service report, click here.

To read Laura Eggertson’s report in the CMAJ, click here.

For more information on this story, click here.