Premier Kathleen Wynne has ordered a review of the rules for taking ground water in Ontario.
Currently bottled water companies are paying the province less than 4 dollars per million litres of water; plus a permit application fee.
“There is the issue of the quantity of the water being taken, there’s the issues of the cost of that water,” says Wynne. “It's not a fair price. They have to pay more."
According to the Canadian Bottled Water Association the money paid to the province is an administration fee to pay for a government program that monitors the water use. The money does not pay for the water itself.
Across the region water protection groups have joined together to argue the current rules are out of date, particularly in a year when the province is experiencing a drought.
“If you are going to take it out it's not getting back into the watershed,” says George Powell from the Blue Mountain Watershed Trust.
Ice River Spring, a bottling plant based in Feversham, Ont., has a permit to take about 3 million litres of water from the ground daily.
The vice president of the company, Sandy Gott, says the industry is willing to pay its fair share. “If the government wants to review, and charge for water, we would just ask that we not be singled out and that we pay what others pay,” she says.
The province says when it comes to its review of the rules, everything is on the table.
“We really need to look at our water policy, extraction, permitting, pricing; all of that is under review,” says the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Glenn Murray.
There is no timeline for new regulations as of yet.
