Water supply and sanitation in Canada is nearly universal and generally of good quality. Water use in Canada is high compared to Europe, since water tariffs are low and 44% of users are not metered.
Despite a commitment by the federal government to promote increased cost recovery, only 50% of the cost of maintaining and operating water infrastructure is actually being recovered from users through tariffs, the rest being financed through taxes.
Access and service quality Edit
Access to water supply in Canada is nearly universal. Concerning sanitation, nearly 75% of Canadians are serviced by municipal sewer systems. The remaining 25 percent of the Canadian population is served by septic disposal systems.[2]
Service quality Edit
Water supply Edit
Canada is surrounded on three sides by the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans and has over 243,000 km of coastline. This, combined with the characteristics of Canada’s topography and climate, results in abundant freshwater resources.
Canadian drinking water supplies are generally of excellent quality and supply is continuous.[3]
On occasion, however, despite the best efforts of water suppliers and in some cases for reasons beyond their control, municipal water supplies can become contaminated either chemically or biologically. If this occurs, residents typically are advised to take precautionary measures, such as boiling water before consuming it.[4] In an average year, some 500 boil water advisories normally of 3 to 4 day duration, are issued in respect to municipal water supply services, often following severe environmental conditions affecting the quality of the water supply source.[5]
An unusually extreme case of poor water quality has been The Walkerton Tragedy, a series of events that accompanied the contamination of the water supply of Walkerton, Ontario, by E. coli bacteria in 2000. In 2001 a similar outbreak in North Battleford, Saskatchewan caused by the protozoan Cryptosporidium affected at least 5,800 people.
Sanitation Edit
In many cities and communities across Canada, treatment of waste water is either insufficient or non-existent. Although some communities have advanced waste water treatment plants, many others are dumping untreated or poorly treated liquid waste into natural water systems. Fifteen percent of inland communities undertake only primary level waste water treatment. Coastal communities face the greatest challenges, with the majority having only primary treatment, and some, no treatment at all. And even when there is adequate waste water treatment, storm water can cause the sewer system to overflow, allowing raw sewage to spill directly into rivers, lakes, and oceans.[6]
In 1999, 97% of the Canadian population on sewers received some form of waste water treatment. The remaining 3% of Canadians served by sewage collection systems were not connected to waste water treatment facilities in 1999 and discharged their untreated sewage directly into receiving water bodies.[2]
Link to water resources
Water use Edit
Residential consumers in Canada used 343 litres per person per day, or roughly twice as much per person as in other industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States.[1] and Australia. According to one source water use in Montreal, where there is little metering, is particularly high at 1,287 liter per person per day in 1999.[22]
According to the Environment Canada, the following sectors account for the following shares of municipal water use:
52% residential users
19% commercial users
16% industrial users
13% leakage.[23]
However, a different part of the same web site of Environment Canada states that leakage losses are actually much higher at "up to 30%".[24]
See also: Non-revenue water
Standards
Responsibility for water supply and sanitation Edit
While the responsibility for the provision of water supply and sanitation services in Canada lies with municipalities, the provincial governments and the federal government also have important responsibilities related to the setting of standards, research, economic regulation and water resources management. As all levels of government hold key policy and regulatory levers which apply to water and sanitation, a central challenge is to ensure that these levers are developed and used collaboratively. The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment - which consists of the 14 environment ministers from the federal, provincial and territorial governments - plays an important role in the development of national strategies, norms and guidelines for water supply and sanitation.[26]
The need and the difficulty to collaborate between different levels of government is apparent in the discussion of a proposed national municipal wastewater effluents strategy. According to the Canadian Water and Waste Water Association
"Canada faces a variety of provincial and territorial approaches (to wastewater and biosolids) that ar