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August 6, 2009
Municipalities face new rules for sewage plants
OTTAWA – Canadian municipalities will have to bring their sewage treatment plants up to snuff under new regulations to be unveiled by the Harper government later this year.
The new rules will set performance benchmarks, timelines and monitoring and reporting requirements for the country's 4,000 wastewater facilities, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Thursday in Saint John, N.B.
The regulations will cover all wastewater systems operated by municipalities, the provincial and federal governments, and those on federal or aboriginal lands.
"All jurisdictions will now have to maintain, update, or develop new regulatory tools to implement the Canada-wide strategy," Prentice said, according to a copy of the speech provided by his office.
"We have the strategy. We intend to enforce it with the powers of the Fisheries Act to protect the health of Canadians and the environment."
Facilities that can't afford the upgrades or repairs can apply to Ottawa's infrastructure fund or borrow from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Prentice said.
More details will emerge when the government publishes draft regulations in December, which are expected to be revised and finalized next year.
The Conservative government has been criticized for announcing only piecemeal projects instead of the national water strategy promised more than two years ago.
This spring, Canada's environment commissioner told a House of Commons committee the Tories have made negligible progress on a national water strategy.
Scott Vaughan said the Tories have made plenty of announcements about the water strategy but they haven't yet followed up with enough action to merit an audit by his office.
"The position of the office is that we don't examine a program if it's based only on a press release," he told MPs in April.
"We did not see any measurable progress in developing a national strategy or a national framework."
Prentice's announcement drew a rebuke Thursday from Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, the party's water critic.
"The Harper government has no vision on this pressing issue," he said in a statement.
The government has ignored Parliament's calls for a national water strategy, he said.
The new wastewater rules come as a soggy summer in some parts of the country pushes sanitary and storm sewers to the brink.
Heavy rainfall in Ottawa has clogged city drains and spilled millions of litres of sewage into the Ottawa River. Beaches have been closed because of high levels of bacteria.
Sewage spills aren't uncommon in Canada.
Oyster and quahog fishing was banned along a six-kilometre stretch of Prince Edward Island's East River in June after a sewage leak was discovered at a treatment facility in a nearby trailer park.
On the West Coast, politicians in Victoria, B.C., recently approved a plan to build four treatment plants to handle the millions of litres of raw sewage the city and surrounding suburbs now dump every day into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
And a recent report by the environmental group Ecojustice analyzed figures from Ontario's Ministry of the Environment and found billions of litres of untreated sewage have been dumped into the province's waterways.
© 2009 The Canadian Press
