Imagine getting your monthly water bill from a private corporation in charge of your town’s water supply. This might sound like a dystopia from science fiction, but after the introduction of Bill 60, Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, many water rights activists and NGOs fear this is in Ontario’s near future.
Bill 60 faced public criticism when it was passed last November for giving the provincial government the power to create corporations to manage Ontario’s municipal water and sewage services.
These corporations would be directed by the province but have the authority to set rates and impose their own fees, transitioning Ontario’s water supply management from a municipal-led model to one with more provincial oversight and corporate-style management.
“Every time it’s been attempted, we’ve seen privatization drive up the cost for people who rely on these systems, while decreasing infrastructure investments and generally systematically undermining the resilience of water systems,” said Ilham Abdulkadir, the program developer and coordinator at Water Watchers.
“We see it as a very thinly veiled money grab for corporations looking to make a quick buck because water is essential, and essential services should not be privatized or profiteered from in any scenario.”
Following public criticism of Bill 60, the government introduced Bill 98 at the end of March last year. Bill 98 clarifies that the new wastewater corporations will remain under public ownership. However, Abdulkadir said Bill 98 fails to address the main concern: that the government is opening the door to privatization and corporate structures, prioritizing profit over everything else.
“Bill 98 attempts to respond to the public backlash by emphasizing public ownership, but public ownership alone is not enough if private interests can still profit from managing or influencing essential water services. And all of this is happening in the context of communities across Ontario already facing growing pressures in their water systems. We don’t need to look too far to see those concerns playing out. Waterloo has very serious water capacity concerns at the moment, and the privatization of drinking water and wastewater utilities has failed globally,” said Abdulkadir.
The government held a period for feedback on the legislation, which closed last week. During that time, the Water Watchers held a call to action asking the public to share a letter of concern with their MPP about Bill 98. The Water Watcher’s website had a link to a webpage where users can enter information to send their MPP a letter urging provincial decision-makers to stop privatizing Ontario’s drinking water.
In just under a week since launching the letter-writing campaign, Water Watchers had 700 people send letters through their website.
“This is just the second action that we put out; the initial action that we put out at the end of 2025 had almost 800 people take action,” explained Abdulkadir.
“It’s clear that it’s something that a lot of people are concerned about. We’ve seen over the past few months a lot of bills targeted towards the erosion of environmental protections, but also the clear limiting of local governance, with these corporate structures for drinking water and wastewater utilities.”
She cited another problematic part of the bill: giving the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing more power and taking power away from municipalities.
Under Bill 60, the minister can create public corporations under the Business Corporations Act to take over water and sewage services from lower-tier municipalities. The affected municipalities may be forced to transfer their water and wastewater systems to these new corporations. The Minister then decides whether or not to approve or refuse the corporation’s proposed ‘rate plans’ for the municipality, giving the province direct influence over the fees and charges residents pay for water.
Abdulkadir added that this isn’t Ontario’s first-time considering water privatization, and in the past, such privatization has ended in catastrophe.
“We already know what happens when essential public water services are turned over to corporate and profit-driven models, like we’ve seen what happened in Walkerton.”
In 1996, the government stopped testing water in Walkerton itself, allowing private labs to take over without requiring them to report contamination results to the Ministry of the Environment. The privatization, combined with budget cuts, created a recipe for issues to go undetected. In May 2000, this resulted in an E. coli outbreak that killed seven and injured 2,300 in the community.
“We’ve seen many different experiments with privatizing drinking water and wastewater utilities. We’ve seen that lead to skyrocketing water bills, declining water quality, cuts to infrastructure investment and decisions that are driven by profit instead of public need. These models leave ordinary people bearing the cost, and we’ve seen when systems go private, we’ve seen a lot of them going back to public, and there’s a lot of costs involved within that too,” said Abdulkadir.
“We know that water is the lifeblood of our existence, and our provincial policies must honour this reality. We can’t let the privatization agenda proliferate to other Ontario communities, because, again, as we’ve seen, ordinary people will always suffer and bear the cost of those decisions.”
