Government falling short on water protection
Last week, a law firm posted an ad in Saskatchewan newspapers advising people who were under the age of 18 and became ill at the time of the North Battleford contaminated water event in the spring of 2001 of a settlement under a class action claim.
In the light of the Husky Oil spill of oil and distillates into the North Saskatchewan River this summer, it is instructive to revisit the 2001 event and see what has been learned since.
Health Canada concluded that cryptosporidiosis, an enteric disease that can cause death or serious disability, affected 5,800 to 7,100 persons from the Battlefords area, along with hundreds more from other communities and other provinces who drank North Battleford water in the period between March 20 and April 26, 2001.
The cause was the presence of Cryptosporidium parvum in the treated drinking water produced at the water treatment plant. Cryptosporidium parvum is a water-borne parasite that can be removed from source waters through adequate filtration and treatment by ultraviolet light. Chlorination is not an effective remedy.
The Saskatchewan government moved quickly to create a commission of inquiry under Justice Robert Lang. The commissioner submitted his report in April 2002.
Justice Laing found that the North Battleford water treatment plant was not “a capable plant by industry standards” and was not operated in a consistent and optimal manner. The city’s council had not invested adequately in plant maintenance and staffing and kept water utility rates well below the average of other Saskatchewan cities.
Moreover, he found the provincial government was negligent in several regards: it had not upheld its legislated mandate to ensure water treatment plants were operating to regulated standards; it provided no co-ordinated watershed protection plan for the North Saskatchewan River; its actions were driven by considerations of cost and not public safety; and it had not ensured “watershed and groundwater source protection, which is the first barrier to the production of safe drinking water.”
Laing spoke about the need to ensure a multi-barrier approach to ensure the safety of drinking water. As mentioned, the first barrier is source water protection.
The Calvert government received the report and agreed with its findings. Among the first actions was the creation of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority (now the Water Security Agency). SWA hired planners who worked with citizens to create source water protection plans for their local watershed. Today there are 11 watershed stewardship groups in the southern half of the province, all with volunteer boards and advisory committees committed to implementing the actions in their source water protection plan. The province provides just over $70,000 to each group in core funding, which is used to leverage program dollars from other sources.
In addition to the many positive local actions these groups have carried out over the past 10 years, they have helped urban and rural municipalities fight invasive plant species and led the call to protect Saskatchewan lakes from zebra mussels. Staff are very active in schools teaching children the importance of source water protection and they work with landowners to reduce the impact of agricultural activities on watersheds.
But other than the source water protection plans managed by the volunteer groups in the 11 watersheds, the province has no plan of its own to protect watersheds. Indeed, the government’s “results-based” approach to environmental protection has effectively turned over environmental oversight to corporations like Husky Oil.
A key finding of Justice Laing’s was “the current riskbased model employed (by the Ministry of the Environment) since 1996 is arrived at on the basis of economics (what it or the government thinks it can afford among other priorities), and has nothing to do with how best to safeguard the health of the population, all of whom consume water.”
The first priority of governments at every level must be public safety. The leak of oil into the drinking water source for the communities along the North Saskatchewan River was a near miss. It was the quick and urgent action of municipal officials that ensured families had safe water to drink. The province did not meet its responsibilities to the public good.