By Canwest News Service

More than 1,760 neighbourhoods and communities across Canada are currently being told to boil their drinking water, the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports.
"That's the minimum. There's probably more than that," said Steve Hrudey, a public health engineer who also served on the research advisory panel into contaminated water crisis in Walkerton, Ont. Seven people died and at least 2300 people became ill due to an outbreak of E. coli in the Walkerton water supply in May, 2000. While boil-water advisories are supposed to be used as a "precautionary measure," Hrudey said it is obvious the advisories are being used in place of treatment. "A lot of those advisories have been in place for months and in some cases years. So clearly in those kinds of situations, the boil water advisory is being used as an alternative to treatment, which is just not acceptable," he said.  A spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care also told the CMAJ that public health units in Ontario, for example, do not always report all their advisories to the Ministry, nor do they always report when an advisory has been lifted.
"We've got a situation in Canada . . . where we've downloaded responsibility for providing drinking water to municipalities and small regional districts," Hrudey said, "and they're the least well-equipped financially and otherwise resourced to do the job." He said other countries, such as Australia, have state-wide corporations that are responsible for providing safe drinking water, "to get around this problem where you have all these really small entities responsible who really can't handle the job."
The CMAJ said Ontario, at 679, and British Columbia at 530, have the most boil-water advisories in effect. While poor water quality in Canada is often seen as an issue primarily on First Nations reserves, the CMAJ said none of the 93 boil water advisories currently in place in those communities are included in the 1,760 advisories elsewhere in Canada. Boil-water advisories are issued for various reasons, including adverse taste, total coliform count or a breakdown in chlorination equipment.
"What the public health officials are doing by issuing a boil water advisory is they're downloading the responsibility onto people and saying well, we can't assure you the water is safe so you have to take matters into your own hands and boil it. So if people follow that advice then they're protecting themselves . . . it is an unacceptable situation." Hrudey also said that as long as Canadians believe drinking water should be free or cheap, they're allowing this situation to continue. "It's still cheap, compared to cellphones and high speed internet. There's lots of places in Canada where people are paying two-three hundred dollars per year for their drinking water. Which is cheap. And if they're not getting good quality for that, I think they could afford to pay a bit more."

"We do not take care of our water," Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians and author of Blue Covenant: the Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, told CMAJ. She called the number of boil-water advisories "stunning."
"We haven't updated our national Water Act since the 1970s," she said. Barlow said she wants a federal-provincial water framework that implements national standards, protects watersheds and outlaws bulk water exports.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is also calling on the federal government to work with the provinces and territories to develop a strategy that would make clean, safe water a priority. "We're in favour of upping the quality of water and ensuring that it meets a certain standard right across the country," federation president Gord Steeves told the CMAJ