Twenty-five years ago in the quiet town of Walkerton, E. coli in the drinking water poisoned more than 2000 people and tragically claimed seven lives. It was one of the worst public health disasters in Ontario’s history.
Under Premier Mike Harris’ “Common Sense Revolution,” Ontario’s Environment Ministry was gutted in half, provincial water testing was privatized, and the system was left with fewer inspectors and weaker reporting regulations.
In Walkerton, warning signs were missed. Test results were not acted on and the workers running the system were left without the kind of support and supervision that should have caught the contamination before it reached peoples homes.
The landmark Walkerton Inquiry subsequently reshaped how the province thinks about drinking water, and established Ontario’s modern source protection system. Justice Dennis O’Connor formally recommended a multi-barrier approach to drinking water safety. He targets being protected at the source, before contamination ever reaches a well or intake. In response, the conservation authorities that already managed our watersheds were formally designated as source protection authorities, made responsible for guarding the drinking water sources that serve more than 95 per cent of Ontarians. Out of this inquiry came the Clean Water Act, which created watershed-based source protection regions, local multi-stakeholder committees, and source protection plans designed to identify and reduce threats to rivers, lakes, and groundwater before they contaminate municipal drinking water.
Walkerton was supposed to be a line in the sand, a promise that we would never play politics with drinking water again.
25 years later, another Conservative Premier is dragging us back into the past.
Last Fall, the Ford government announced plans to slash the number of conservation authorities from 36 down to just nine. He plans to put them under a new provincially controlled “Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency,” turning community watchdogs into a centralized permitting machine built to clear the way for developers while cutting out local expertise. The result is a system where a single regional authority will be responsible for dozens of municipalities, sprawling across multiple watersheds with different risks, histories, and plans. Communities will lose direct representation on boards that once included their local councillors and neighbours.
Meanwhile, Bill 60 and a cluster of related omnibus laws quietly rewrote the rules for how Ontario’s water and wastewater systems can be run. Bill 60 created new “water and wastewater public corporations” structured under the Business Corporations Act, ominous entities that can be opened up to private financing and will operate with a legal duty to prioritize profit. “Walkerton taught us that cuts, deregulation, and privatization have deadly consequences,” CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn warned. “The Ford Conservatives can call it whatever they want, but the language of Bill 60 makes it clear that they are privatizing our water.”
The people of Walkerton didn’t ask to become a cautionary tale. Their suffering forced Ontario to admit that shortcuts and profit have no place in something as basic as a glass of water. Twenty‑five years later, Doug Ford is testing how much of that memory he can erase.
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