As Maude Barlow argues, there is a growing battle between those who see water as a commodity and those who see water as a human right and public resource. Water markets in Alberta; federal and provincial conditionalities for infrastructure subsidies forcing municipalities to explore private-public-partnership; and the bottled water industry’s takeover of community watersheds have made it an uphill battle against the commodification of water in Canada. Last March, the Council of Canadians launched the Blue Communities Project with the Canadian Union of Public Employees to invite municipal governments to resist this trend by adopting a water commons framework. The project guide invites community leaders and activists to resist public-private partnerships, ban the sale of bottled water in public spaces, and promote water as human right at the local level. Since then, we’ve invited other groups such as the Ottawa Riverkeeper, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Eau Secours to join the project and lend their expertise on community water issues. We will soon be producing a new version of the guide with additional information on Indigenous rights and water conservation among other issues. In May, we toured Atlantic Canada speaking to communities about the project and our chapter activists across the country have been actively promoting it with local governments. As a coalition we hope to see this work go much further.
Crunch time for public sewage treatment in Victoria Southern Vancouver Island faces one of the most significant privatization threats in Canada. In Greater Victoria a major project to bring in new sewage treatment has been caught in the crosshairs of the B.C. government’s public-private partnership (P3) agenda. In July 2006 the BC government ended years of community debate, announcing that the regional government, known as the Capital Regional District (CRD), must develop a plan for new sewage treatment. This is a big step. It will be a major project and cost for taxpayers. Estimates are as high as $1.2 billion. Sewage treatment will be funded by all levels of government. But in the end it is the municipal politicians, who make up the CRD board, who will make the final decision. And in the long-term it is CRD taxpayers who pay the operating costs. Despite the fact that almost without exception, Canadian cities have effective and publicly managed and controlled sewage treatment, the B.C. government is promoting privatized sewage treatment — using a P3 model. In Greater Victoria the CRD already successfully and publicly operates secondary treatment facilities on the Saanich Peninsula serving North Saanich, Central Saanich and Sidney, as well as at the Victoria Airport and for the Southern Gulf Islands and Port Renfrew. And there is growing evidence that privatization is risky and more costly than publicly managed services. In January 2009 BC’s most respected forensic accountant, Ron Parks, looked at B.C. P3 projects and said very clearly that public-private partnerships are a taxpayer rip-off. We should heed this advice. On the environmental front, public control is clearly the way to go if we are to make the best use of resource recovery and other technologies to integrate into existing regional services and facilities. Public opinion research and consultation confirms that the residents of Greater Victoria overwhelmingly reject privatization. We expect a decision about how new sewage treatment will be financed, operated and managed to happen in early 2010. Yes, it has been long and complex process. But it is winnable. In 2006 Whistler residents said no to private sewage treatment. And in 2010 we can keep it public in the Capital Regional District. If you want more information please go to www.keepwaterpublic.ca
Multiple crises highlight need for international law to protect the water commons Humanity is at a critical moment in our relationship to the planet. After decades of mass consumption of resources, with little thought to the sustainability of our actions, we are now facing multiple crises. Climate change highlights our inability to responsibly manage the commons, but just as concerning is the global water crisis or our inability to protect dwindling freshwater supplies and allocate them equitably and responsibly. Unequal allocation and lack of access to clean water has created a crisis of sanitation. The raw numbers are shocking, further pointing to a profound impact on overall human dignity and suffering. The UN estimates that 1.4 billion people have no access to clean water. While 2.6 billion people in the world live without toilets and bathrooms and are often forced to defecate in waters from which they retrieve water for drinking. It is little wonder that 2.2 million people, mostly children under 5, die every year from diarrhoeal diseases. The humanitarian crisis around water also directly relates to a concurrent environmental crisis. Drought, desertification and pollution are dominant threats in many parts of the world. These pre-date climate change, but are also exacerbated by its impact. Massive lakes such as Lake Chad and the Aral Sea have all but disappeared. Major rivers, such as the Yellow, Rio Grande, Amu Dary, Syr Darya, Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates struggle to reach the ocean. Groundwater is hidden but fully exposed to these same degradations and exploitation as the major fossil aquifers in the world are depleted yet cannot be replenished. Despite the need for good water governance, in the face of the crisis, there is no overarching homogenous water policy, legislation or laws to protect the water commons. This is apparent in the lack of a global water convention and many countries, with Canada at the forefront, still continue to deny a human right to water. It is also apparent in the subtle takeover of the good offices of our UN agencies by private corporate actors and also of the World Water Forum being run by these same private interests. There is a growing movement challenging this undue and dangerous influence by those who would exploit our water commons for profit. This movement is known as the Global Water Justice Movement. This movement is promoting solutions to these seemingly unassailable challenges. These solutions pre-date many of the false solutions being promoted and are living examples in communities most affected by lack of access to clean water. To find out more about these there is a case studies document highlighting the commons available on the Blue Planet Project website. These show many countless examples of systems which to ensure equal access and sustainability of water resources through informal governance structures, often based on indigenous or traditional systems. We must pay more attention to these examples than our current focus on market-based means of dealing with allocation issues. From the Acequia system in Mexico and the Southern US, to the River Parliament and rainwater harvesting in Rajasthan, India, people and communities are showing the way forward to a sustainable and just future. If we allow what amounts to a modern enclosure of the commons through mechanisms such as water markets, privatization, unfettered water takings from aquifers and other mechanisms which take control of our common heritage from our hands, then we are dooming future generations and ecosystems to have their fates subject to those who ‘own’ our common resources. The reality is that we all own our water and no one owns our water, but to have the kind of future we know must exist we must all take responsibility for our water commons.
Will Prentice's plan promote privatization of wastewater treatment? We are yet to see the details, but Jim Prentice warned Canadian municipalities in early August that they would have to bring their sewage treatment plants up to snuff under new regulations that would be announced later this year. The environmental movement has been calling for national sewage standards for decades now. Improving Canadian wastewater treatment should be a priority given Canada currently dumps billions of litres of raw sewage directly into our waterways. The worst offenders are coastal cities. Victoria, the worst offender, discharges all its raw sewage untreated into the ocean. A 2004 Ecojustice study revealed that eight Canadian municipalities including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton alone generated 3.0 billion litres of minimally treated sewage per day! Prentice of course, did not make clear what the federal government was willing to contribute financially to make this happen. Canadian municipalities currently face a $31 billion deficit in water and wastewater infrastructure funding alone according to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The Harper government's strategy for municipal funding, the Building Canada Plan, forces municipalities seeking $50 million of federal funding or more to explore private sector investments. The Building Canada Plan also includes a $1.25 billion public-private-partnership fund. The question is whether the Harper government's plan for sewage treatment in Canada will include a transfer of funds to enable municipalities to build, upgrade and maintain public infrastructure for sewage treatment or whether this is a strategy to force cash-strapped municipalities to resort to privatization. Piecemeal legislation can be harmful if it is not part of a broader strategy to protect both environmental needs and the public interest. What Canada needs is a comprehensive national water policy.
The dangers of corporatizing municipal services in Winnipeg In the fall of 2008, Winnipeg city council voted to explore a new local water and wastewater governance model.This new governance model would consist of two major components. A new Municipal Corporate Utility (MCU), as it was then called, would be constructed to "operate city-owned utilities" including water, wastewater treatment, and a few other public services. Additionally, the City would procure what it called a “strategic partner,” specifically a privately owned corporation, to work with the city to design, build, finance, and potentially operate at least two of the city's water pollution control centres. On November 19, the mayor and nine out of 15 councillors voted in favour of this plan and established a time-table that would include a search for potential private partners. Local groups and members of the community began to express concern about this proposal. For starters, the process that the City representatives used for implementing this new water governance model didn't quite pass the democratic “sniff” test. For example, the proposal was implemented based on a recommendation from the accounting firm of Deloitte and Touche, it had not gone through necessary council committees, and the proposal was also rushed through with very little public scrutiny or debate, and virtually no meaningful public consultation. It had only been on the city agenda for two weeks before being voted on. The invitation of a private, for-profit entity to co-manage Winnipeg's public services sounded the alarm that the City might be privatizing, in some fashion, assets that should be controlled by the public. The Council of Canadians in particular is sensitive to this possibility, as the privatization or commercialization of water, health care and other public services can trigger clauses under existing free trade agreements that allow corporations to prevent any return to the previous public system, even if a future government determines that such a move would be in the public interest. Based on the experiences of other municipalities, public-private partnerships (P3s) often result in rate hikes, deteriorating quality of service, and layoffs, allowing private interests to make money from public infrastructure while offloading the costs to the public. The involvement of private sector interests in the management of a public resource also raises serious concerns about transparency and accountability, as private companies enjoy confidentiality privileges aimed at protecting trade secrets. Such provisions can and have been successful in blocking Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Access (FIPPA) requests, as was the case with EPCOR, a similar corporate utility in Edmonton. The plan is to have this arms-length corporate utility run by a board of directors without the representation of any elected officials, and to operate according to a business model, meaning it would be driven by the need to secure profits for investors, rather than protecting the public interest or the environment. For example, the utility is likely to sell water and wastewater services to lower-taxed bedroom communities outside the city, thereby facilitating urban sprawl and frustrating proper urban planning. The MCU was eventually adopted by council on July 22 despite growing popular opposition in Winnipeg. It now falls on the shoulders of the provincial government to make amendments to the City of Winnipeg Charter in order to legalize the creation of the MCU. Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger has paid lipservice to shaping this process in the public interest to ensure transparency and accountability, but has so far not committed to blocking or delaying the passage of regulations which would allow the MCU proposal to move forward. Meanwhile, according to the Winnipeg Free Press, exactly three private partners have been shortlisted for consideration: CH2M Hill, Veolia, and Black & Veitch. These companies, particularly Veolia, have a record of underming the public good in the name of profits. Veolia in particular is well known to water activists for its predatory practices of entering communities in the Global South and taking over their water systems. Concerns about these companies abound, both from a human rights perspective and from a water stewardship perspective. A final vote on the private partner is expected to be held in council at the end of January. Water Watch, the Council of Canadians and its various partners will be directing its efforts to preventing the passage of this vote and, if possible, reversing the tide of water privatization in Winnipeg.
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The Council of Canadians
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