Dr. Karl Jobst at a PFAS water-testing site in South Pond in Torbay, N.L. PFAS have been linked to cancer, developmental delays and immune disorders.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail
Newfoundlanders living near St. John’s International Airport say Transport Canada has failed to track a plume of toxic “forever chemicals” seeping into local drinking water, leaving residents and a university chemist to do the work themselves.
The town of Torbay is one of dozens of sites near airports and military bases where firefighting foams laced with polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) leached into the groundwater and, in some cases, contaminated the drinking water of nearby property owners.
PFAS have been linked to cancer, developmental delays and immune disorders. Last year, Health Canada lowered the recommended safety limit for PFAS in drinking water to 30 nanograms a litre.
Across the country, Transport Canada has 46 sites with groundwater contamination in various stages of investigation and management, spokesperson Sau Sau Liu said. She said the agency regularly samples the water at the perimeters of airports where PFAS were used in order to understand the potential migration of the chemicals. When test results exceed Health Canada’s recommended safety limit, the federal agency says it contacts residents with drinking-water wells to test their water, and notifies local municipalities and health authorities.
The federal agency has been providing bottled water to residents who test over the Health Canada threshold, including in Torbay, where some people who live near the airport – particularly around the Pine Ridge Crescent subdivision – have been relying on it for months. Transport Canada says this is an interim measure while long-term solutions, such as home water-filtration systems, are being determined on a case-by-case basis.
Eight communities across six provinces are in the same boat as Torbay, with Transport Canada supplying a total of 167 properties with bottled water. (The federal agency refused to disclose where the other seven communities are located.)
But in the case of the windswept town of Torbay, the contamination appears to be more widespread than the sites Transport Canada has tested so far.
In August, Torbay retiree Ken Baird requested Transport Canada test his tap water, but he was rebuffed, according to correspondence viewed by The Globe and Mail. He turned to an accredited lab, Bureau Veritas, which found PFAS nearly 2½ times the Health Canada threshold in his drinking water.
Ken Baird lifts the cover off a well head at his home in Torbay. When tested, Bureau Veritas found PFAS surpassed the Health Canada threshold in his drinking water.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail
Flabbergasted, Mr. Baird relayed the results to Transport Canada via an e-mail shared with The Globe. An environmental adviser, Lynn Power, replied on Sept. 4, saying she was looking into it.
Ten days later, Mr. Baird outlined his concerns in a letter to government officials.
“I am left living in a home with unsafe drinking water,” he wrote to his local MP, Joanne Thompson, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon and Premier John Hogan.
He wrote that he and his neighbours were frustrated that Transport Canada had yet to map how groundwater moves through local soil and bedrock – called a hydrogeological assessment – to understand the extent of the contamination, and that the federal agency had yet to provide him and his neighbours who tested above the Health Canada threshold with bottled water.
“They’re all passing the buck,” Mr. Baird said in an interview. “Every time I think about this, I think of the old ostrich sticking its head in the sand. This issue isn’t going away.”
Water contaminated with ‘forever chemicals’ in North Bay falls between the cracks
On Friday, officials with Transport Canada started knocking on doors in the affected neighbourhood offering to test well water, according to Mr. Baird.
Other levels of government, local citizens and a Memorial University chemistry professor have called for quicker and more comprehensive action from Transport Canada.
Memorial University chemistry professor Karl Jobst found high levels of PFAS in waterways downstream from the airport, leading to a wetland known as The Gully in a residential part of Torbay.
Dr. Karl Jobst and grad student Emmanuel Tolefe offered to test residents’ tap water for free. They found four of 15 residences tested had tap water with PFAS significantly above Canadian safety limits.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail
Earlier this year, Dr. Jobst went door to door and offered to test residents’ tap water for free, out of concern for the community’s health.
The results were troubling. Dr. Jobst and PhD student Emmanuel Tolefe found that four of 15 residences, including Mr. Baird’s home on Salerno Place, had tap water with PFAS significantly above Canadian safety limits.
“I’m not convinced that the extent of the contamination has been fully mapped,” Dr. Jobst said in an interview.
“People need to know that. If you can identify ultimately what areas are impacted, then you can start implementing solutions.”
Dr. Jobst said Transport Canada should accelerate testing to identify the extent of the contamination and better understand how PFAS concentrations in drinking water change over time.
One of the affected homes was Diana Kean’s beige bungalow on Mahons Lane. Dr. Jobst’s lab tested her tap water three times, finding that it contained four to five times Health Canada’s recommended safety limit.
‘Forever chemicals’ in tap water leave these communities in a toxic limbo
Ms. Kean said it was upsetting to learn the results, but that she also felt grateful that Dr. Jobst had offered to test her water.
“I feed my children and my grandchildren – you boil macaroni, you make soup. I was using that water,” she said.
In mid-July, she notified Transport Canada of the test results and received a form response.
“Should it be necessary to conduct sampling at your residence, an environmental consultant on behalf of Transport Canada will contact you,” read the unsigned e-mail she received on July 21, 2025.
Transport Canada spokesperson Ms. Liu said the agency is aware of Dr. Jobst’s testing. She said determining the need for additional sampling and expanding a sampling area is done using an evidence-based, step-by-step approach, based on PFAS sampling results.
Provincial and municipal officials have also criticized Transport Canada’s handling of the issue, and warned that the contamination is more widespread than the federal agency’s treatment of it suggests.
In correspondence obtained by The Globe, the director of the province’s water resources management division (WRMD), Haseen Khan, called on the town of Torbay to demand that Transport Canada collect more comprehensive water-quality data and expand its testing beyond private wells near the airport.
“WRMD has concerns that the current private well testing area may not encompass the entire area that is potentially impacted by a contaminant plume,” Mr. Khan wrote in a letter to the town of Torbay’s chief administrative officer, Sandy Hounsell, on March 31, 2025.
Mr. Khan said the town should demand Transport Canada “fully delineate the area at risk of impacts to human health,” and complete a full hydrogeological assessment “to assess the current extent of the contamination” and future impacts owing to factors such as higher precipitation rates caused by climate change.
Mr. Hounsell agreed with the province’s assessment. He said he provided the letter to Transport Canada days later, adding, “We do concur with the comments in this letter and would ask that Transport Canada follow through with the recommendations the province has requested.”
The intergovernmental friction in Newfoundland is a stark contrast to the situation in North Bay, Ont., where another federal department is addressing PFAS contamination in close collaboration with other levels of government.
In 2017, the Department of National Defence detected elevated PFAS levels leaching from a military base in North Bay and launched regular stakeholder meetings with the province, the city and the local health unit to address the problem. Since then, DND has committed nearly $20-million to remediating the PFAS, which have contaminated the city’s primary source of drinking water, Trout Lake.
The Ontario Ministry of Environment, meanwhile, is studying local hydrogeology to determine how water feeds into Trout Lake, said Karin Pratte, North Bay’s chief water engineer, who has met personally with the Minister of Defence on the issue.