A dam at Lake Geraldine, the reservoir for the Iqaluit’s drinking water in October, 2021.Pat Kane/The Globe and Mail
Clear, cold water is as basic to summer as warm sunshine. Swimming pools are being filled, garden hoses are helping flowerbeds bloom, sprinklers are making lawns grow and children scream and laugh.
While water usage spikes in the summer, it is hardly as if Canadians are models of restraint the rest of the year. In residential use alone, Canadians guzzle more water per capita than any other country in the developed world, behind only the United States, according to the Program on Water Governance at the University of British Columbia.
Canadians use 223 litres of water per person, each day in their homes – enough to fill 665 cans of pop. The average American uses 310 litres a day.
In Great Britain, average daily use is just 150 litres, while in Germany the number is even lower, at 128 litres.
Canadians’ let-it-flow philosophy is based on a number of factors. Chief among them are a general lack of awareness about the pressures placed on the country’s water supply, the lack of a strong conservation ethic and “the myth of water abundance,” says the Program on Water Governance.
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As the world gets hotter and disputes over water become ever more likely – earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told then prime minister Justin Trudeau he wanted to rip up the agreements that lay out how Canada and the U.S. share the water in the Great Lakes – new conservation efforts are called for.
More widespread adoption of water meters is one option to consider. Only 40 per cent of Canadian households with municipally supplied water have a water meter, according to Statistics Canada.
Metering means being able to measure water consumption, which by doing so aids in sustainable water management. There is good evidence to show that metering also leads to less water usage – unsurprisingly, households use less water once it costs money. Households with meters use 73 per cent less water than those on flat-rate pricing schemes, according to a survey by Environment Canada from 2009.
Between 1991 and 2011, as the number of Canadian households equipped with a water meter rose to 58 per cent from 52 per cent, average daily water use dropped by 27 per cent.
The fact that only 40 per cent of households with municipal water supply had meters as of 2021 shows that metering has not kept pace with population growth.
The costs associated with adopting metered price schemes may be to blame. Some municipalities have raised rates to compensate for lost revenues, and to cover the fixed costs of their water systems.
A broad increase is an unimaginative approach, and one that diminishes or even erases the incentive to conserve water. A better way would be to freeze rates below a certain level of consumption, and then increase them for heavy users.
Then, households who did not want to reduce their water use would be the ones to bear the cost of their extravagance – not their neighbours.
The power of pricing is the most effective tool in constraining water use. But there can be a role for incentives, such as higher rebates for Canadians who purchase low-volume toilets and showerheads. Less than half of Canadian households have either, and the percentage of households with them dropped between 2013 and 2021, the last year for which data is available, according to StatsCan.
A low-volume toilet alone can reduce the average household’s water usage by 35,000 litres a year.
But why bother shelling out for water-saving devices, or even think about saving water, when Canada has so much of the stuff? The answer is: We don’t.
Yes, Canada is home to approximately 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, but only 7 per cent of it is renewable. That is still more than most other countries, but the world’s fresh water supply is drying up.
The United Nations and other bodies are warning that global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40 per cent by 2030.
Here in Canada, the myth of abundance has hampered the need to be more conservation-minded. Having more fresh water than other countries doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to be responsible stewards of it.
Prices, in the form of water meters, are the most effective way to demolish that myth, and for Canadians to realize their let-it-flow philosophy has run its course.