IT'S ALL SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Yesterday's Waterloo Region Record carried the following story titled "Expired water permits remain in effect". After reading the article and all the excuses as to why the Ontario government are both making a big deal out of allegedly having new requirements, new demands and more research while at the same time telling the industry to take their time and keep on pumping water out of the ground; it seems obvious to me. It's all a political show. This is the Ontario Liberals doing little or nothing while trying to please both sides of the issue. They are misleading the public and pretending that they are actually protecting our groundwater while at the same time clearly letting the bottled water industry know that Ontario are open for business.

I have seen decades of psuedo scientific reports from client driven consultants that allegedly determine the proper environmental course of action. I've seen raw data that clearly points in one direction while the company's consultants come to subjective and client-serving conclusions that always seem to protect their client's pocketbooks. Hence greater research done by company paid consultants is a joke.

Not only are we the public not being given all the facts but even those we have can not be fact checked. The reality is that bottled water should be at best a tiny industry with the vast bulk of drinking water coming from tap water. Yes tap water has issues including chlorine taste and odour as well as, in my opinion, testing for far too few industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals. Home tap water can be filtered however with a Brita filter to remove chlorine taste and hopefully more.

All of us use groundwater mostly in Waterloo Region and that groundwater comes from wells. Other communities may use a much greater percentage of surface water (rivers/lakes etc.) but remember that that surface water is recharged from groundwater. Therefore letting the few essentially take the publics' resources essentially for peanuts and for their own profit is unconscionable.