The municipal water sector has seen a number of changes over the past five years. This snapshot presents highlights of a detailed 2019 water sector report completed for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Green Municipal Fund on current water management trends, issues and best practices. The information generated will be used to inform FCM's Green [...]
As of April 2016, there are over 157 drinking water advisories in 111 First Nation communities in Canada. For decades, decision makers at the federal level focused on providing technical solutions through new treatment plant infrastructure. However, many now believe that technical solutions that do not meaningfully incorporate a community’s perspective and local knowledge will [...]
To understand the physical and chemical mechanisms regulating lead dissolution in drinking water distribution systems, this project included a detailed analysis of solid lead corrosion scales harvested from lead pipes from communities with different water quality characteristics, dissolution experiments of pure lead species and lead corrosion scales, and continuous pipe loop dissolution experiments using pipes [...]
This project collected information on Liard First Nation’s drinking water access, safety and sustainability in order to help community leaders make decisions about supply, management and policy. Using a community-based research method, researchers tested the quality of 40 private drinking water wells that are not regularly monitored; studied how the area’s groundwater and surface water [...]
The impacts from increased frequency and severity of summer droughts and forest fires in regions like Alberta are becoming a growing concern, as they could lead to increased risks in drinking water system outages, and also have negative impacts on downstream water quality. This project provided an estimate of the monetary value that Albertans place [...]
This project deals with clarifying a common framework and approach to management options, one that can be used by providers and regulators to approach management choices and underpin their commitment to the central task of maintaining a vigilant focus on the following: How best can drinking water providers and their regulators address risk and uncertainty [...]
Source water characterization is an important component in the multi-barrier protection of drinking water, and accurate data on pathogens is critical for treatment design, monitoring and risk assessment. This study determined pathogen loadings from the Grand River watershed and measured pathogen occurrence and concentrations in river water.
Fecal contamination of water is currently assessed by culturing fecal indicator bacterial such as Escherichia coli (E. coli), because indicator organisms are simpler to detect than pathogens. However, these methods do not provide information about source contamination or the presence of microbial pathogens. The goal of this project was to narrow the gap in the [...]
This study evaluated the occurrence of pathogens such as bacteria and human enteric viruses in bedrock aquifers across the country and explored the transport mechanisms that might have led to their presence. The results from this research are relevant for homeowners, public health authorities and provincial regulators.
This research was conducted with the overall goal of improving membrane performance for drinking water treatment in Canadian utilities and focused on two main themes:
fouling abatement strategies (identifying and targeting specific fractions of organic matter present in surface waters that cause fouling of membranes) and integrating membranes with established yet complementary technologies prior to [...]