Toronto’s sewage woes were in the news last week. The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Sun, and the Toronto Star all ran stories about legal charges arising from a sewage bypass at Toronto’s Ashbridges Bay treatment plant. But the real story here isn’t that charges have been laid. The real story is that charges should be laid far more often.
Preston Manning calls for metering and pricing to conserve water
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In a speech last week to the Empire Club of Canada, Preston Manning addressed looming water shortages in southern Alberta. He called for "a provincial policy requiring Albertans to meter and measure the use of every drop of water consumed in the province and the attachment of a price to that water to conserve and allocate it efficiently."
Feds send mixed messages on sewage pollution
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Environment Minister Jim Prentice has recently expressed serious concerns about sewage pollution across Canada. But the government’s purported commitment to cleaning up sewage polluting seems to conflict with recent actions it has taken on the West Coast. In two cases in the last two years, the government has stayed charges laid under the Fisheries Act by citizens determined to clean up sewage pollution.
Update on water utility privatization in the US
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The Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report 2009, released in August, provides a good snap shot of private-sector involvement in American water and wastewater utilities. Some highlights:
• Public Works Financing reports that 1,336 government agencies contracted out some part of their water or wastewater utility operations in 2008.
• Governments appear to be satisfied with their outsourcing arrangements. In 2008, 95 percent of the water industry contracts up for renewal were renewed with the incumbent contractor, and five percent went to a competitor. Just five percent reverted to municipal operations.
Environmental coalition calls for full-cost pricing of water
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A coalition of environmental organizations and water associations is calling on Ontario to encourage volume-based water pricing to promote conservation.
H2Ontario: A Blueprint for a Comprehensive Water Conservation Strategy, released in August, calls for a "market transformation" that will embed in the economy "the right signals" for citizens, businesses, and communities. It urges the province to do three things to bring about such a transformation: mandate meters; move towards full-cost and volume-based pricing; and increase water charges for water users.
Canadians, wary of drinking water, look to private sector
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A recent poll by Circle of Blue found that 65 percent of the Canadians surveyed were very concerned about the lack of safe drinking water. And 82 percent agreed that solving Canada’s drinking water problems will require significant help from companies.
Ontario’s drinking water: the problems persist
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Every year, Ontario’s Chief Drinking Water Inspector produces a report on the province’s water systems. The current report (for April 2007 – March 2008) came out in June. Despite the Inspector’s assurances to the contrary, the report includes much to be concerned about.
Water exports: debunking the myths
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Several contributors to Policy Options (July-August 2009) dismiss concerns about bulk water exports as largely unfounded. Harry Swain calls fears of US appropriation of Canadian water "largely illusory if only because both we and the Americans price water so cheaply that it cannot bear the cost of shipping or pumping." Frédéric Lasserre maintains that large-scale water export "proposals are not a real cause for concern because of the evolution of the demand and the poor return on investment they offer."
Full-cost water pricing
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The July-August 2009 issue of Policy Options calls attention to the importance of water prices that reflect the full costs of service.
Canadian water prices are among the lowest in the developed world. According to Steven Renzetti and Colin Busby, prices are approximately one-third of those charged in Germany, and just one-quarter of those charged in France. Worse, water costs are often unrelated to water use. About one-third of Canadian households do not have water meters.
Fresh water: Canada’s most important natural resource
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The current issue of Policy Options (July-August 2009) is devoted to Canada’s water challenges. I’ll feature highlights from it in upcoming blogs.
♦ Pollster Nik Nanos reports that Canadians, by an overwhelming margin, view fresh water as the most important natural resource for Canada’s future. A recent Nanos Research poll revealed that 61.6 percent of the 1001 Canadians polled chose fresh water as the most important natural resource.
A General Introduction to Property Rights and the Environment
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In this presentation to Property Rights and the Environment, a student colloquium held in Vancouver in July 2009, Elizabeth Brubaker explains that property rights provide incentives to conserve scarce resources, such as water and fish.
Book Review: Greener Pastures
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This important book builds on earlier work by the same author, Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (1995), which made a strong case that customary common law in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada has been an effective means of pollution control, where and when it has been allowed to work. As that earlier book showed, however, legislative law, often drawn up on the premise that it would promote economic progress or the public good, has often weakened these customary common law remedies to air and water pollution.
This new book applies the same analytical lens to the narrower issue of air and water pollution originating on farms.
From ‘polluter pays’ to ‘polluter gets’
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"What does Environment Probe gain by this display of disunity?" demanded one farmer. His anger, voiced in a letter to the Ontario Farmer newspaper, was directed at our public rebuke of the new Ontario ALUS Alliance, a coalition pushing for a provincially funded program that would pay farmers to provide environmentally friendly "alternative land use services." His organization, a local of the National Farmers Union of Ontario, fears that a debate over the program’s merits could jeopardize its public funding.
ALUS is gravely flawed
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The new Ontario ALUS Alliance proposes incentives rather than regulations to encourage farmers to protect the environment. The Alliance’s market friendly rhetoric obscures its reliance on tools that are antithetical to markets: taxpayer subsidies and violations of rural residents’ property rights.
The commodification of ‘blue gold’
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Water’s value increases as it becomes scarcer. Elizabeth Brubaker, executive director of Environment Probe, says an accurate water pricing system is the best way to promote water conservation.
Book Review: Greener Pastures: Decentralizing the Regulation of Agricultural Pollution
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As researchers in the field of agri-food studies turn their attention to the institutional mechanisms that enable industrial agri-food systems to persist in spite of their ecological contradictions, environmental regulation is likely to become an increasingly important topic.
Right-to-Farm Legislation in British Columbia
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This paper describes the development of right-to-farm legislation in British Columbia and examines the decisions of the board established to hear complaints about agricultural nuisances.
Law and the Environment
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The environment is one of the major concerns of our day, perhaps overwhelmed recently by the economic tsunami that is sweeping the globe, but not an issue that will go away or be easily solved.
Protecting Canada’s water resources with full and fair pricing
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“Whiskey,” Mark Twain famously said, “is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.” And increasingly, fighting over it we are.
Protecting the environment: Are property rights a better solution than legislation?
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Elizabeth Brubaker spoke at the Canadian Constitution Foundation’s annual law conference, Individual Freedom and the Common Good, held in Toronto, Ontario, on October 18, 2008.
Environment Probe 