Safe drinking water is everyone’s responsibility. Managing drinking water supplies effectively from the source to the consumer’s tap requires extensive knowledge and cooperation across a wide range of stakeholders. Among these are governments, corporations, and people like you and us. Keep reading to know what each of the involved parties does to maintain drinking water quality.
Shared Responsibility
The job of making sure that drinking water in Canada is safe is split between the federal, provincial, territorial, and local governments. The provinces and regions are usually in charge of ensuring that the public has access to clean drinking water, while towns are in charge of running the treatment plants on a daily basis. The collective effort lays the foundation for the proper quality of drinking water in the country. It may sound weird to many, but this insignificant factor is one of the key reasons people decide to relocate to Canada and apply for the Alberta PNP. Comfortable living is made of small details, and drinking water quality is one of them.
The Water and Air Quality Bureau of Health Canada is at the forefront of scientific research. Its mission and expertise are to safeguard the health of all Canadians by producing the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality in collaboration with the provinces, territories, and other federal ministries. Every jurisdiction in Canada follows these recommendations, which serve as the foundation for defining drinking water quality standards for all Canadians.
Health Canada is a Collaborating Center for Water Quality for the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization (WHO/PAHO). It helps make WHO standards for drinking water. A lot of information is also shared between the Bureau and other government departments, like the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The Multi-Barrier Approach
One of the best ways to keep drinking water clean, safe, and effective is to use preventive risk management. This means knowing about each water source from where it comes from in nature to where it ends up in your home. The information we have about the water’s properties, how it could get dirty, and the kind of cleaning it needs comes from gathering and analyzing data. There are three parts to the drinking water supply:
- The source water;
- The drinking water treatment system;
- The distribution system.
The latter brings the clean water to homes, companies, schools, and other places. The pipes inside your home are part of the delivery system.
As drinking water makes its way to you, it may get polluted in a variety of ways. The multi-barrier approach to drinking water management is a preventative risk management strategy that identifies all known and possible dangers and ensures that barriers are in place to limit or eliminate the possibility of contamination.
Drinking Water Guidelines
Authorities in charge of drinking water need to set high standards for the water they manage so they can see if their process is working. There are rules that allow drinking water to be tested and analyzed at different places along its path to make sure it is safe to drink. The Federal, Provincial, and Territorial Committee on Water helps set priorities and make the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality.
For some contaminants, like E.coli, which shows that bacterial diseases are present, the rules are very clear and should never be broken because drinking contaminated water will make people sick quickly. Others, like many of the chemical standards, are based on the best science we have access to and give a good idea of the health effects some people might experience if they drink a lot of the chemical over many years.
Materials That Come into Touch With Drinking Water
Products and things that drinking water comes into touch with are another way that it can become dirty. Because water is a solvent, it can take metals and other chemicals out of pipes, fittings, valves, and other things. Health Canada works with national and foreign groups that set standards to create health-based performance standards for these materials and goods. This is done to make sure that they don’t add dangerous chemicals to your drinking water.
Tap water is typically safe to drink in Canada as multiple parties are involved in ensuring the proper quality of drinking water. However, at the same time, it is important to keep an eye out for water warnings issued by your local health authority. A broken water pipe or a fault at the treatment facility might cause temporary pollution.