The freshwater supply is declining in most of the populous areas of Canada. Consequently, more ways should be found to put prices on water consumption, to correspond to the costs. Canada has lots of water, but it cannot be shipped across the country from the wilderness to where the crowds are.
An article by Statistics Canada in its Human Activity and the Environment series, released on Monday, concludes that the water supply in what it calls "Southern Canada" - meaning the set of areas where 98 per cent of the population lives - fell by 8.5 per cent from 1971 to 2005. The lost "water yield" over 34 years is almost equal to the annual amount of water provided to Canadian homes. The decline is especially striking in the Prairies.
The study assigns no blame for these trends, though it measures the various components of the demand for water. Quite properly, it does not propose any policies, which is not part of Statistics Canada's job.
Canada is moving away from flat-rate charges to meters that measure usage, but the process is far from complete. In any case, only about 14 per cent of the water used in Canada in 2005 came by way of the public utilities that charge for it. "About 86 per cent was extracted from the environment directly by the end user," the study says. Only about 9 per cent of water use takes place in houses and apartments, though the residential sector gets about 56 per cent of what public utilities supply.
Methods need to be devised to place prices on direct extraction, or rather on the consumption of water obtained this way, since some of it is returned to where it came from, and some of it is not, to varying degrees in different industries. Charges, then, need to reflect not only usage but also the loss of some of the basic stock of freshwater - an equivalent to the depreciation of capital.
Though some people complain about the "commodification" of water, conservation cannot reverse the downward trend in areas of population density unless it is treated increasingly as a commodity - as long as it is not forgotten that water is a necessity of life.