Drinking Water Protection

It is hard to focus on the importance of drinking water after suffering rain in biblical proportions, but communities throughout the province are subject to boil water alerts. Residents of Victoria and the Lower Mainland are used to sprinkling restrictions in the summer. If their water quality was as uncertain as its quantity, there might be more political pressure to guarantee that BC would not have a Walkerton type disaster.

In an opinion piece published in the Vancouver Sun on April 21st, Randy Christensen, a lawyer with the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, alerted readers to a discussion paper on future drinking water regulations and warned that it might take a "spate of high profile deaths" before BC learns the lesson of Walkerton. The paper has been out since April 2002 but in mid-April 2003 an "update" (http://www.healthplanning.gov.bc.ca/protect/WaterConsult/water_consultation.html) was posted on the website which mentioned two years of consultation and urged people to read the year old paper.

On page 12 the "white paper on draft regulations" says "Future options are being considered for providing smaller waterworks operators with greater flexibility, which would allow communities served by the systems to manage the risks associated with their systems in the most cost-effective manner." People who worry about another Walkerton would probably talk about minimizing the risks rather than saying "manage the risks" as cheaply as possible!

In addition to the problems identified by Christensen, those who have followed the development of drinking water regulations know that one of the first acts of the Campbell government was to repeal regulations that were established by the former government. It then appointed an independent panel, which on February 13, 2002, reported back with recommendations. That was almost 15 months ago yet the Campbell government has continued to stall. Perhaps that is because the independent panel recommended that government go even farther than the NDP's regulations. It made it clear that drinking water should be protected at its source, and such protection should be given priority over other resource uses. Rather than acting on that strong recommendation, the Campbell government's discussion paper follows a deregulation approach to water safety by saying "activities on these dams or other structures, or within source waters, which are already carefully regulated under the Water Act, would be exempted from the Drinking Water Protection Act."

There were 9 members on the independent panel on drinking water: Chair; David Marshall, Executive Director of Fraser Basin Council; Jim Fyfe, President, BC Ground Water Association; Linda Nowlan, Executive Director, West Coast Environmental Law Association; Robert Hobson, Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM); Bruce Wilson, BC Water Supply Association; Dr. Hans Schreier, Watershed Management expert (UBC); Dr. Andrew Larder, Senior Medical Health Officer/Medical Health Officers Council; Serge Zibin, Chief Environmental Health Officers/Public Health Engineers Council; Dr. William Meekison, BC Medical Association.

Some of the members of the panel, because of the positions they hold, might be constrained in their ability to comment publicly on what the government has and has not done to implement their report. Whether singularly or collectively, some former panel members could perform a service by providing a public assessment of how government is implementing the report. If Christensen's warnings are correct, the panel members might consider it to be their duty to sound an alarm. In the meantime, their silence can be taken, correctly or not, as implicit approval.