By Andrew Reeves, Great Lakes Now — May 31, 2022

This is part one in a two-part series looking at the cost of water in Ontario. 

Canadians living in the Great Lakes basin have perhaps become spoiled at the seemingly endless availability of water. In taking it for granted, topics like the material cost of it or the amount listed on someone’s water bill can be seen as immaterial and unnecessary to discuss.

But in many respects, water is also a fairly traditional resource commodity, one that governments have invested billions in maintaining. There’s a cost to all this, and not just for the liquid itself.

“There’s the cost of accessing the resource,” said Livio Di Matteo, a public finance economist at Laurentian University in Thunder Bay, “but then there’s also the cost of treating it, distributing it, and treating the effluent and wastewater.”

When it comes to the cost of water, then, much is determined by the state of pipes and other infrastructure — so much so that it’s often challenging to separate the cost of the resource itself from the infrastructure necessary to use it. This, perhaps more than anything, determines the cost of water in Ontario.

And that cost is rising. Some of the highest rates for water in Ontario are in cities and towns within the Great Lakes watershed, including Thunder Bay on Lake Superior, Windsor on Lake St. Clair, Kingston on Lake Ontario, and Chatham-Kent on Lake Erie.

In Thunder Bay, for example, water costs the average ratepayer almost $1,300 annually.

“It’s a substantial charge,” Di Matteo said, and it’s “growing at about 4% a year.”

This rise is hitting low-income families hard, with more than 130,000 low-income households in 22 of Canada’s largest cities already paying more for residential water use than they can afford.

The problem of aging systems adds up

The vast majority of new water infrastructure in Ontario is paid for by municipal governments, and much of what we use today was laid in the immediate postwar years of the mid-20th Century. Ontario’s population grew dramatically during this time, and with it came a massive residential building boom. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of water pipes were laid beneath winding suburban roads, especially throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

Today, the GTA is now home to 6.7 million people, almost 18% of Canada’s total population. Yet the postwar infrastructure boom didn’t last.

“We’re still living off much of the buried infrastructure that was put in place by our grandparents,” said Patrick McManus, head of the Ontario Sewer & Watermain Construction Association (OSWCA). “Beginning in the 1970s and into the early 2000s, very little money was being invested in the maintenance and rehabilitation of these assets,” he told Great Lakes Now. “Now we’re seeing the impacts of underinvestment from decades past.”

The deteriorating condition of these pipes also impacts what consumers pay for their water. Some estimates suggest that anywhere between 10 and 30% (and perhaps as much as 50%) of water bills in Ontario cover the costs associated with leaky pipes – and with almost one-third of water mains in Ontario at or nearing their end-of-life, it’s a problem that will only get worse.

The OSWCA report also noted that Ontario’s drinking water network is highly fragmented. Four hundred and forty-four municipalities in Ontario offer drinking water services through a patchwork of 665 separate water systems, 80% of which serve populations of less than 10,000. Some systems serve as few as 1,000 individuals. Many rural municipalities don’t have the tax base to upgrade their water networks. It’s a lengthy, expensive, and disruptive process, especially when municipal governments need to coordinate work with private landowners. Without the ability to bulk order pipes or water treatment chemicals, McManus said, it’s impossible to bring costs down.

Combining some of Ontario’s remote drinking water networks into larger systems may keep human resource-related costs down, said Brian Bates, CEO of the Walkerton Clean Water Centre, but we would pay for those larger plants in other ways.

“Obviously it would be nice if we had one giant centralized plant and you could hire experts in every aspect of water treatment to be on site,” he told Great Lakes Now. “But from a distribution perspective it would cost much, much more. When you get into rural areas, including First Nations reserves here in Ontario that can be extremely remote, it becomes very difficult to find skilled operators that know the wide range of things from chemistry to maintaining pumps” necessary to operate a modern water treatment plant.