Safe Drinking Water Policy for Canada - Turning Hindsight into Foresight

Much of Canada lags international leaders in adopting management systems for assuring safe drinking water. Despite some clear progress in individual provinces, Canada, and small communities in particular, need a system that better promotes and rewards competence among drinking water providers. In much of the developed, industrialized world, including most of urbanized Canada, public drinking water poses a negligible health risk. But in the wake of a series of management failures with severe negative health consequences, Canada’s drinking water regulation is still managed in a fragmented way that leaves us vulnerable to water-quality failures, most likely in small systems. The problem is not that numerical water safety criteria are inadequately stringent; the documented failures have been caused by an inability to operate water systems effectively, pointing to poor operator competence and inadequate support systems. Canada needs the universal adoption of a “know your own system” water safety plan approach, based on a tangible demonstration of operator competence in understanding and delivering safe drinking water.