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Bathroom jokes aside, few of us think about sewage, assuming that what we flush away will somehow take care of itself. But such an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude will no longer float, so to speak.

Even eight years after the Walkerton, Ontario, tragedy where seven people died and 1,200 people were sickened by E. coli contamination from sewage leaking into their municipal water supply, Canada is still an environmental bad boy, lagging behind many developed countries in the way it handles its waste water.

Given the overwhelming evidence that what we put into our environment will eventually come back to haunt us, it seems mind-boggling that anyone might actually be opposed to treating municipal waste water, which Environment Canada described in its 2001 report The State of Municipal Wastewater Effluents in Canada as “one of the largest threats to the quality of Canadian waters.”

In fact, some of our biggest polluters are also among the most scenic–coastal cities, where the attitude seems to be that ocean currents will take care of whatever foul things are spewed out.

Failing Grades

One of the worst offenders is the quaint city of Victoria, seat of the British Columbia government. Every year, Victoria and its suburbs dump more than 34 billion litres of untreated sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a fetid soup that includes not only human waste and disease-carrying organisms but also some 200 identified chemicals, many of which are toxic to aquatic life.

Yet despite years of debate, and despite orders from the BC government earlier this year that the Capital Regional District (in which Victoria is the major city) is to begin drawing up plans for sewage treatment, a number of vocal opponents–including local Liberal MP Keith Martin–have risen up to denounce the project.

This head-in-the-sand approach isn’t limited to Victoria, and it is what prompted the authors of the National Sewage Report Card III produced in 2004 by the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now Ecojustice Canada), to state baldly: “Our sewage problems are comprehensive and countrywide–from sea to stinking sea.”

The United States has required at least secondary sewage treatment for all its cities and towns for 30 years now, and the European Union adopted similar standards for its member nations three years ago, according to Christianne Wilhelmson, clean air and water program coordinator for the Georgia Strait Alliance (GSA), an environmental group dedicated to protecting the marine environment of the strait.

But Canada has no national standards, and as a result, major cities such as Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax continue to dump billions of litres of raw or nearly raw sewage into our oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams every year.

According to Ecojustice Canada’s National Sewage Report Card, Vancouver discharged approximately 22 billion untreated litres of waste water from combined sewer overflows into Georgia Strait and the Fraser River in 2001 while Montreal continues to dump 900 billion litres of only primary treated sewage into the St. Lawrence River each year.

A Chemical Cocktail

Meanwhile, development of better sensing technology shows we may have more to worry about than obviously harmful substances such as the mercury, lead, chromium, copper, organochlorine compounds (such as PCBs), and hydrocarbons that are being dumped into our waters along with insufficiently treated sewage.

After a five-month investigation, the Associated Press reported this spring that testing in 61 major US municipal water sources for prescription and over-the-counter drug residues revealed a proverbial cocktail of up to 56 human and veterinary pharmaceuticals or their byproducts, including the active ingredients in pain killers, antibiotics, cholesterol drugs, antipsychotics, hormone supplements, and other powerful medications.

The report said that although some of those drugs were flushed down toilets, most of the residues came from human excretion, a worrisome trend when you consider how many more drugs an aging population is inclined to take.

Although the tests were conducted in the US, Canada is not immune to similar pharmaceutical contamination. In fact, only a handful of Canadian cities, among them Calgary, Edmonton, and Whistler, BC, have tertiary treatment, which is advanced enough to remove most unwanted substances.

No Quick Fix

Renee Blackstone is a freelance journalist who spent 20 years with The Province newspaper as Lifestyles, Business, and Food Editor.

Source: alive #313, November 2008