Every single year, Nestlé Waters Canada bottles 265 million litres of water from aquifer supplies underneath Hope, British Columbia. That’s enough water to keep a family of four thirst-free for, oh, about 70,000 years.
They sell this water to us in grocery stores and coffee shops, and they do it remarkably well — according to Statistics Canada, in 2008, three out of 10 Canadian households used bottled water as their main source of H2O. So how much does this big-name corporation shell out for the privilege of plundering our most basic of resources?
Nothing. Not one penny.
Sure, they pay their employees and their taxes, but otherwise, the multinational corporation isn’t charged a single cent for access to these aquifers. It gets worse: they’re not even breaking the law. Unlike the rest of Canada, BC has absolutely zero government regulations on the use of groundwater. This is due to the BC Water Act, passed over a century ago, which specifies no obligation to pay for or keep track of these withdrawals.
Nestlé, along with the myriad other corporate giants making six figure salaries in the bottled water market, are taking full advantage of this opportunity. It’s not hard to see why: in our increasingly urbanized and polluted world, safe water is becoming more and more of a precious resource. The bottle water business is, as a result, becoming more and more profitable.
However, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream for team Nestlé. Just last month, the company made national headlines after bowing to pressure from activist groups in Ontario to accept new terms on their renewed ownership of a large well in Hillsburgh, Ontario.
Basically, they were outraged that their new rules included a mandate that, in the event of a drought, the company’s access to the aquifer will be restricted. “It’s unfair,” Nestlé spokesperson John Challinor told reporters. “But it is what it is.”
“We want to have the whole universe, the whole of the Earth, owned.” — Michael Walker
Given that grassroots environmentalists were able to take down the corporate Goliath just four provinces East, it’s a shame that we in BC have been comparably quiet on the topic of Nestlé slowly draining our province of its natural resources. The Ministry of Environment has claimed that policy changes are on the way, with vague references to a Water Sustainability Act to be implemented next year.
But these half-hearted promises are hardly enough to satisfy engaged, socially conscious British Columbians who see Nestlé’s actions for what they are: another in a seemingly endless string of corporate attempts to privatize the most basic of our human rights.
This neoliberal business strategy is expressed perfectly in the views of Michael Walker, the self-proclaimed libertarian founder of the right wing BC think tank, the Fraser Institute: “We want to have the whole universe, the whole of the Earth, owned.” In the opinion of Walker and companies like Nestlé, anything can, and should, be privatized. There’s nothing in the world, not even water, that doesn’t befit a price tag.
I shouldn’t have to tell you why this is problematic. I shouldn’t have to cite the same tired statistics: that overseas transportation of bottled water contributes to greenhouse gas emissions; that studies conducted in Toronto have shown that only half of water bottles consumed are being properly recycled; that bottled water plants are inspected much less frequently than municipal water sources, and are therefore more susceptible to potentially dangerous contaminants.
What we should be focusing on now is making our voices heard: telling big corporations like Nestlé that we’re not interested in them stealing and selling our own water back to us. Water should be a human right, not a commodity. We all deserve to be able to drink however much we like, without having to pull out our wallets to do so.
Bottled water like this comes under the Food and Drug Act and these facilities are inspected periodically. Municipal water is inspected daily.
I refill my plastic bottle from the tap in the morning before I head out.