Canada’s raw sewage problem grows in 2018

Canada’s old-fashioned city sewer systems dumped nearly 900 billion litres of raw sewage into this country’s waterways over five years, enough to fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool more than 355,000 times.

Data that Environment Canada posted to the federal government’s open-data website earlier this month shows in 2018, more than 190 billion litres of untreated wastewater poured out of city pipes, which carry both sewage and storm water.

That is 14 per cent more than in 2017, and 44 per cent more than in 2013.

Mark Mattson, president of Swim Drink Fish Canada, said the amount should shock people.

He said he is hopeful it will push the public to demand swifter action from governments.

“It shows you the problem,” he said. “It should wake people up.”

But Mattson said it’s also not even close to the full picture of the problem.

“There’s lots of holes in the data,” he noted.

The number does not include wastewater that leaks out from systems that don’t use combined sewage and storm water pipes or any data on non-sewage related pollution that isn’t being treated by wastewater plants, such as pharmaceuticals. Quebec is also excluded from the data in 2018 because that province signed an agreement to report it to Ottawa in a different way.

Some cities also only monitor leaks during six months of the year and many of them use computer modelling to estimate the amount of sewage that leaks, rather than actually measure it. The city of Kingston, Ont., began monitoring real data of leaks in 2017 and found the old computer models had underestimated the amount of sewage that was getting out.

But Mattson is still excited the data is being posted online for anyone to download. It is the first time Environment Canada reported the data this way, something Mattson said his organization has been asking for over the last number of years.