H2 woes
>> The possible privatization of the city’s water opens floodgates of criticism

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Photo by Jason Felker

How badly is the city’s water managed? According to a report by the city’s transition committee, prepared last year leading up to the all-island merger, it was atrocious. It was so bad, the report said, that the city would have to spend a staggering $1.5-billion to stop pipe leakages, which is wasting an estimated 50 per cent of the island’s water. Better, the thinking went (although not spelled out), to privatize the whole system, and let an as-yet undetermined company deal with the repairs.

Hold the flow. According to one water management critic, the system isn’t that bad, it wouldn’t be that expensive to fix, and privatizing this most essential of all services would be catastrophic.

“The report by the transition committee was very badly done. It was very rudimentary, it was never clear, there were no complete numbers,” says Gaétan Breton, a UQÀM management professor and author of the recently published Tu me pompes l’eau, a critique of water privatization. “All it does is cause fear and a rush to privatize. It’s not a strong document.”
Breton takes serious umbrage not only with the report’s shoddy logic and its fast and furious numbers play, but also with how seriously the new city is treating it. While the city denies any plans to forge ahead with privatizing water or its management, Breton believes that just talking about talking about it raises some disturbing possibilities.

At this weekend’s Second Citizen’s Summit, hosted by the Urban Ecology Centre at UQÀM, Breton and a colleague addressed the issue in the company of Alan deSouza, member of the new executive committee at city hall from Ville St-Laurent. One pointed topic of debate at a workshop on water management was deSouza’s recent meeting with representatives from France-based Vivendi, a company which, between dealing with a host of different interests from entertainment to wine, also dabbles in water management.

“That was more of a polite meeting,” a defensive deSouza said at the workshop. “There are no plans to privatize water. The meeting was simply an introduction.” DeSouza told the Mirror this week that the city is not looking at privatizing water or its management and is looking at setting up a “good city water service.”

Still, Breton remains wary. “Eau Secours [a water conservation activist group] sent the city a letter requesting a meeting weeks ago, and we still haven’t heard anything,” he says. “I guess politeness doesn’t work as well for Eau Secours as it does for Vivendi.”
The transition committee report is supposed to serve as a basis for discussion at the Montreal Summit, to be held later this spring. One recommendation the report made was to get rid of the present system of taxing water and to install counters. According to the report, this would lower rents and make people who use lots of water pay for it.

Again, Breton questions the logic behind these assumptions. “Do you believe for a second that any landlord would lower rents? I don’t,” he says. “All studies have shown that consumption drops for two months after the introduction of counters and then goes back to normal. And besides, residential use of water only accounts for 25 per cent of all water used. We should begin by taxing institutions and enterprises, beginning with Molson. You don’t save water by drinking beer.” :