A decisive victory has been won for water in Simcoe County, in a struggle that had been brewing for over twenty years. Dump Site 41, the landfill that was nearly built atop the Alliston aquifer this fall, points to major shortcomings in water governance at all levels of government in Canada.

Preliminary work on the dump site was approved in a very close vote in 2007 at Simcoe County Council despite much public opposition. Since then, the artesian spring just under the proposed landfill -- declared by a University of Heidelberg study to contain among the purest water in the world -- was dewatered to allow for construction.