Article content continued

The fundamental flaw of Ottawa’s pay more, get less system was flagged by the city’s auditor general in 2008, but council is only now getting around to doing something about it. Apparently it has taken that long to upgrade meters and billing software to handle a new system.

City staff propose a new billing approach that will combine a fixed fee with a charge based on how much a household uses. That will help, but a fundamental question remains: Is the city in the water selling business or the water conservation business?

Politicians, and no doubt much of the public, love the idea of water conservation because, as Mayor Jim Watson put it the other day, it’s good for the environment.

This would be true in drought-stricken California, but not in Ottawa, where we are fortunate enough to be adjacent to a major river. Ottawa’s water needs remove less than one per cent of the flow of the Ottawa River. Even if we took no water at all, the fresh water of our river would continue to dump into the ocean, becoming useless for human consumption. There is simply no meaningful environmental gain from conserving water here.

Nor is there any system capacity issue that should encourage us to use less water. Ottawa’s two water treatment plants have a combined daily capacity of 760 million litres per day. Last year, the highest daily production was 356 million litres.

Nevertheless, the city continues to beat the water conservation drum. The city’s water efficiency strategy actually calls water a “non-renewable resource.” Have they heard of rain?