The Ontario government has posted a reassuring message on its website: “When you turn on your tap, you can be confident that your drinking water is among the best protected in the world.”

But a surprising number of municipalities are not testing for lead at the tap after having declared themselves exempt without the knowledge of the provincial government, a Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found.

Many others, including major cities, have been permitted to reduce their lead testing down to a few dozen samples annually.

Ninety per cent of the 175 municipal water systems surveyed by journalists are not testing for lead at the tap — or are testing at dramatically reduced levels — according to their own annual reports and interviews with operators. The exemptions date back as far as 2008.

Provincially published results of lead tests at the tap show that only one in five municipalities have reported any results over the last two years.

“I’m startled that the pullback is so large,” said Theresa McClenaghan, Canadian Environmental Law Association’s executive director. “It shows that something has fallen apart in terms of the ministry’s attention to this issue...We can’t make assumptions that because something was working yesterday, that it’s still working today.”

A provision in the province’s Safe Drinking Water Act allows municipal water systems to stop lead testing tap water — or test only a handful of times — if they have a history of low results.

“Where (lead test) sample results do not indicate a community problem with lead in a municipal system, system owners may decrease the frequency of samples in accordance with the regulation,” reads a written statement from the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.

“Depending on the size of the system, reduced sampling can involve a reduction in the number of samples and/or a reduction in the frequency of samples (from annually to every third year).”

David Juurlink, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, calls lead test exemptions, “hard to justify.”

“Lead is a nasty poison,” said Juurlink, adding that children are especially vulnerable as lead can dramatically affect brain development.

Because the body isn’t good at eliminating lead, it accumulates from repeated exposure. Symptoms may not show for decades.

Offering self-declared exemptions is “a very dangerous mindset,” said Marc Edwards, a leading international water expert based at Virginia Tech.

“When something goes wrong — not if — you end up kicking yourself. And so if you’re going to be doing that kind of exemptions, you’ve got to be very careful that nothing changes with the water supply. Because otherwise you can wake up some few years later and people have been exposed to high lead in water for about two years, and that’s very regrettable.”

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Edwards and his co-authors detailed factors –– from climate change to road salt to water treatment practices to degrading infrastructure –– that can increase the amount of lead in drinking water.

The idea that water quality can improve with time is “scientifically invalid and dangerous,” Edwards said. “I would never trust the water from any home that has a lead pipe. I don’t care how many times I’ve sampled it. It’s like a 30-foot-long lead straw, and even if it’s zero today, it might be 1,000 [parts per billion] tomorrow.”

In Ontario, water systems serving fewer than 50,000 people can stop lead sampling at the tap if fewer than 10 per cent of samples in two consecutive rounds of testing exceed the provincial standard — which is currently 10 parts per billion — during both winter and summer.

These water systems can declare exemptions without notifying the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP).

“Ministry approval is not required for this exemption,” reads the MECP website. “(The exemption) is automatic once the test results have been submitted to the ministry.”

Municipalities larger than 50,000 people aren’t eligible for exemptions, but provincial regulations allow for the reduction in their residential sampling at the tap down to a smattering of tests or even down to zero.

“Such monitoring conditions are typically less onerous, and this condition may include relief from sampling in plumbing,” the MECP said in response to the Star’s questions.

For seven years between 2010 to 2017 — while Toronto Water was implementing corrosion control measures to combat routinely high lead results — the province did not require the city to collect or test any water samples at the tap.

Previously, Toronto Water conducted 200 lead tests a year. Since resuming annual testing in 2017, it has been collecting only 55 water samples for lead testing.

Nearly 26,000 city-owned lead service lines remain in the ground in Toronto and another estimated 30,000 sit on private property.

William Fernandes, director of water treatment and supply with Toronto Water, said the agency would “love to do more.”

“But getting homeowners to cooperate is a challenge,” he said. “There are some challenges. It’s a voluntary process…Getting that collaboration with the homeowner…is hard.”

London, a city of 405,000 residents, has been exempt from the province’s standard lead sampling rules since 2010, when the province approved the city’s corrosion control plan.

Between 2007 and 2010, city staff tested for lead at about 220 homes a year. For the past nine years, the city has been required to test only 25 taps a year.

This year, the city will conduct about 75 tests in addition to the 25 provincially required tests, said the city’s water quality manager Dan Huggins.

“Is 100 enough?” he said. “Is it enough to tell us what people might expect from water coming through lead service (lines)? I’d say yes...But for each individual homeowner, the results from someone else’s home isn’t going to tell them about their home. You do see variability in houses side by side, which is why we offer free testing.”

Most municipalities in Ontario do not offer free testing.

Bruce Lanphear, a leading Canadian expert on lead toxicity, said reduced testing can be a reasonable step but only when municipalities are vigilant.

“If they’ve done tremendous sampling over the past and showed that they have no problem, yes of course, at some point we can say we don’t need to be as aggressive in sampling in the future. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

In an effort to get a better sense of lead results across the province, reporters visited three Ontario municipalities — Bancroft, Petawawa and Pembroke — and took water samples at homes. The results exceeded Health Canada’s guideline of 5 parts per billion at least once in each town.

Bancroft, a town 250 kilometres northeast of Toronto with roughly 3,800 residents, is exempt from testing for lead at the tap, according to its own annual reports. The 2017 report shows the pH level registered as low as 4.48, which could signal corrosive water that can spike lead levels.

Three tests at Bancroft homes conducted by reporters exceeded Health Canada’s guideline, including results ranging from 6 ppb to 7.8 ppb at the home of Jay Nadon.

“I think we should be testing more often,” says the 33-year-old who bought his home in Bancroft with his fiancée in August 2016. “It falls on the provincial government… to mandate municipalities to be testing their water.”

Perry Kelly, manager of public works for Bancroft, said he can’t recall any testing at the taps of homes in recent years despite a water system that dates back to the 1950s.

“I don’t recall anyone ever going out and testing at the tap,” said Kelly. “I’ve never had that question asked of me.”

Duane Forth, project manager with Veolia Canada, a private contractor managing Bancroft’s water system, said there hasn’t been testing at the taps in Bancroft for five years because of a ministry exemption.

In Pembroke, a historic town of 14,000 on the Ottawa River, reporters tested two homes with one test registering an exceedance of 6.1 ppb.

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Officials with the town’s water service did not respond to requests for comment.

Just down the road in Petawawa, testing showed lead levels at 12 ppb –– more than double the federal guideline –– in a house occupied by a member of the Canadian Forces and his young family. His wife has been drinking the water throughout her pregnancy.

“Finding this out is a big concern for us,” says the husband who asked not to be identified since his employer is also his landlord. “Going forward with the knowledge we have, we’ll probably be drinking bottled water and trying to figure out how exposure is going to impact us.”

Petawawa’s base, which has 1,600 residential houses where about 4,000 military members and their families live, is managed by the Canadian Forces Housing Agency (CFHA), a branch of the Department of National Defence (DND).

The agency sends letters to residents when they move in, stating: “This is a reminder to occupants of DND Residential Housing that it is standard procedure to run your tap water for at least 20 minutes if your home has been left unoccupied for more than two days,” adding that Health Canada recommends this practice for “any older housing units that have been constructed with lead pipes.”

“We were never told more than that,” says the service member. “We never asked more than that.”

His wife said that she’ll be taking precautions. “We’re going to put a filter on the tap and switch to bottled water for the baby’s sake,” she says. “Because there isn’t a lot of knowledge about lead, I kind of brushed it off to the back of my head...Now it’s on my mind.”

In a written response, the Department of Defence said that while there is no lead plumbing in the distribution system on the base “it is possible that there are lead-containing components such as solder joining the pipes,” which is communicated to residents in letters.

“Tests at the tap are not conducted on a regular basis, only upon request and following maintenance and/or repairs of underground infrastructure,” reads a written statement in response to questions.

The last tap water test in Petawawa was conducted in 2017 and did not show any concerns, the statement reads. Based on information brought forward by the investigation, the agency said it will conduct a new round of testing.

Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech lead expert, said historical lead readings provide little indication about current levels.

“The presumption behind this exemption plan does not correspond to reality,” she said. “The idea that the circumstances and all the factors in these areas remain constant and stable across years and seasons and times is really not supported by how the world works.”

The province can order municipalities to resume lead testing “if changes to water chemistry” increase lead levels. In some cases, municipalities are ordered to resume sampling after a specific period. But the investigation found wide variances in the application of this rule.

Some Ontario municipalities that stopped or reduced testing under provincial exemptions have later shown lead issues.

Atikokan, a town of 2,753 roughly 200 kilometres west of Thunder Bay, qualified for reduced sampling in 2014 and 2015.

For two years, no tests were conducted at Atikokan homes, according to provincial data, and the town’s annual water quality reports show no results for 2016 and 2017.

“Reduced sampling for lead resumed in the Winter 2018 sample period (i.e. December 15, 2017 to April 15, 2018),” reads the 2018 annual water quality report. “Unfavourable lead results from this sample period indicated that the system had to return to the standard lead sampling schedule.”

More than 16 per cent of Atikokan’s lead tests exceeded Ontario’s limit — 10 parts per billion — that winter and nearly 10 per cent failed the following summer.

Jason LeBlanc, chief administrative officer for Northern Waterworks Inc., which manages the town’s water system and nine other small northern Ontario communities, said sampling requirements are routinely reviewed and updated.

Of the 10 communities, only Atikokan is currently required to test for lead.

In Barrie, a city with a population of nearly 200,000, no testing has been conducted at a residential tap since 2011. The result is that the city doesn’t know how many lead service lines exist: “I would not be able to estimate this number for you with any accuracy,” Jeanette Dumais, project coordinator with the water utility, wrote in an email.

Chris Marchant, manager of water operations for Barrie, said that while the city does keep an eye on water chemistry changes by testing in the distribution system, he acknowledged that those results don’t flag high lead levels on private property.

The city does sample the city’s treatment plant, in industrial buildings and fire hydrants, officials said.

But experts say they’re looking in the wrong place since test results from fire hydrants and treatment plants fail to capture the reality at the tap.

“Why would you test at a hydrant, anyways?” said Edwards. “At best, it’s a waste of time, and at worst, it can be … willfully misleading.”

The risks of lax oversight have been powerfully proven in Ontario.

In two weeks in May 2000, seven people died and 2,300 got sick when E. coli contaminated the town of Walkerton’s drinking water supply. The event, and subsequent inquiries and investigations, led to sweeping regulatory changes in Ontario and sent two utility managers to jail.

Blame was passed between the water operator, municipal authorities and the province. Civil lawsuits were filed against the province and settlements were reached.

The cost of the tragedy was estimated at more than $155 million and public confidence in essential services plummeted.

The Walkerton Inquiry eventually concluded that the tragedy could have been prevented by the province and the town’s water operators.

“It tells me there’s this massive gap happening,” said McClenaghan of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. “We dealt with that and now we’re not paying attention to it, we’re onto something else. They need to get back to it.”