The Martlet

Living in soggy Victoria makes it easy to take water for granted. World Water Day serves to remind us that the world is on the verge of a water crisis.

Since 1993, the United Nations has designated March 22 as World Water Day. Each year a different water-related topic is addressed. This year’s sanitation theme is relevant to Victoria, but is even moreso to the Global South.

“Half the hospital beds around the world are filled with people suffering from water-borne diseases [influenced by bad sanitation],” said David Boys, a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. “When looking at development issues . . . there wasn’t enough focus on sewage, sanitation, and the many, many deaths caused by the lack of it.”

Boys was in Victoria for a March 19 presentation sponsored by the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition.

Inadequate sewage treatment remains, despite the UN’s Millennium Development efforts to halve the number of people in the world without access to clean drinking water and sanitation by 2015.

“The problem is when you organize the sector for profit, you have too many distortions,” Boys said. “Competition doesn’t exist in this sector, so let’s not fool ourselves and try to apply market theories.”

Instead, Boys sees co-ordination between publicly-owned water utilities as a way to increase effectiveness in supplying water and sanitation. With over 250,000 public water utilities around the world, it’s natural that they have different strengths and weaknesses. But geo-political restrictions have limited cooperation between different municipalities.

“They are not allowed to go out of their geographic boundaries to help somebody else, because then they’d be using citizens’ taxpayer money from one municipality to go help another,” said Boys, who wants to see systematic mechanisms where strong municipalities can help the weak on a not-for-profit basis.

Still, there can be a benefit to private-public partnerships (P3s).

“Take a look at the most effective public utilities. They do source a lot of materials from the private sector,” he said. “But if you want to acquire some expertise that the private sector does have, why would you then sell the whole sector to the private sector when all you need to do is buy one piece?”

The UN has also led a movement to have water declared a human right. Canada has twice (2002 and 2003) been the sole dissenter on UN attempts to pass the right into international law. Boys, a Canadian, said the federal government needs to be more progressive in this sector.

“I think a lot of governments are freaked by the concept of a human right to water under UN structures because that concept brings with it rights of citizens and obligations of governments,” Boys said. “There is a couple of things [Canadians] need to do: one, get off this market-based, market-driven … ideology. And governments need to get off this whole tradition of viewing foreign affairs as a way of enriching your national companies.”

Boys says making significant headway in bringing every citizen of the world clean water and sanitation will require a financial investment. But readjusting some priorities could free that

money up.

“We should have just taken a few military budgets down a couple of notches and put the money into water and sanitation. But the powers that be are never going to let you do that because the military industrial complex is too strong.”