By Thia James

POLL: Group wants bottled water sales banned at rinks

Mar 26, 2015 | 7:26 AM

The Council of Canadians is asking the City of Prince Albert to ban bottled water sales at its arenas and other public facilities.

On Monday’s executive committee meeting, Nancy Carswell from the Prince Albert chapter of the Council of Canadians asked members of council to consider this request. The group wants the city to become a Blue Community. Communities around the world have signed on to the Blue Communities Project, a water security-based movement.

Becoming a Blue Community would also mean the City would have to agree to recognize water as a human right, promote publicly owned and operated water and wastewater services and ban the sale of bottled water at public facilities and City-run events.

“Banning bottled water is essential to recognizing water as a human right and not a commodity,” she said.

“Becoming a Blue Community requires sacrifice. But any sacrifice is giving up something important for more important.”

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The Council of Canadians’ request led Coun. Lee Atkinson to make note of the broken drinking water fountain outside City Hall.

Atkinson can’t recall a time the fountain worked.

“When I grew up, as a kid, there were publicly fountains that I could use… And we’ve migrated from that, [from] providing those kinds of services and instead, we have bottled water made somewhere from some source.”

He said the drinking water fountain is a shining example of this. On some days, he said, people dip containers into the ornamental fountain.

He suggested that the City should look at initiatives that provide drinking water fountains.

The reasons behind this request for the Council of Canadians aren’t just limited to the environmental effects of producing and disposing plastic water bottles. Selling bottled water makes it a private commodity, Rick Sawa with the Council of Canadians explained on Wednesday.

He added that when bottled water is available in the community, it takes pressure off the municipality to provide good drinking water.

“If people buy bottled water, they’re not going to put pressure onto municipal governments to make sure they have good drinking water,” Sawa said.

“If they can buy it, those that can afford it, aren’t going to complain. And those are usually the people that complain.”

It wasn’t the first time the Council of Canadians asked the City to consider making Prince Albert a Blue Community. The group has made previous similar requests of the City and now they also have petition with about 200 signatures.

Mayor Greg Dionne weighed in, criticizing people’s willingness to pay $1.95 for bottled water yet complain about paying $1 a litre for gas.

“You should put that in your presentation too,” he told Carswell on Monday evening. “Because we all complain about the price of fuel, but at least that gets us somewhere. Where water – and in our city, we have the best water in the Province of Saskatchewan and we should be drinking it.”

The executive committee voted to receive the information presented and file it.

If the city were to become be a Blue Community, it would join Thunder Bay, Welland, Niagara Falls and Thorold in Ontario, Nanaimo, Comox and Burnaby, B.C. , as well as Bern and Zurich in Switzerland.

Thunder Bay became a Blue Community on March 23. Sawa said he forwarded an email about this to city council and said he asked them “what did Thunder Bay know that they don’t know?”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames