Tougher rules for lead in drinking water would cost too much, Ontario says

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Ontario cabinet ministers and officials have declined to publicly explain why the province has not followed others in adopting the federal guideline. Over the past month, reporters from the IJB tried calling or emailing environment ministry officials more than 40 times. The queries were unanswered. Queries to the office of Environment Minister Todd McCarthy also went unanswered.

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The new internal documents are “the first time I’ve seen them put [their reasons] in writing,” said Julie Mutis, community outreach worker with the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

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“If Ontario is one of the only provincial or territorial governments that thinks the cost of protecting children’s health and adopting the five parts-per-billion limit is too high, they should be transparent with parents about what those costs are.”

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Julie Mutis is with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which recently issued a report on lead levels in drinking water. Photo by Paul Morden /Sarnia Observer

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Ontario’s Ministry of Health did not respond to detailed questions about the health impacts of maintaining the current guideline or the costs of lowering it. An unattributed statement from the ministry said, “Ontario requires operators of schools, private schools and child care centres to flush the plumbing regularly and sample the water to test for lead.”

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Queries to the office of Health Minister Sylvia Jones went unanswered.

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Michèle Prévost, a professor at Polytechnique Montréal specializing in the study of lead in drinking water, said costs associated with implementing federal guidelines on lead levels in drinking water include servicing or replacing problematic plumbing infrastructure, which is a key source of lead leaching into drinking water.

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“But you would think that for municipalities to keep lead levels down in households would be more than desirable,” she said, calling it a “moral obligation.”

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Schools have a particularly strong “duty of care” to protect the health of children from lead and its pernicious effects, said Prévost, “because they serve young children, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of lead.”

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Education officials with several school boards in Quebec, British Columbia and Manitoba told the IJB they willingly made the shift to the tougher federal standard.

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Sébastien Lecompte-Ducharme, spokesperson for the Fédération des centres de services scolaires du Québec, which represents all 61 francophone school boards in the province, said when school boards were asked to meet the stricter federal guideline there was a strong desire to comply.

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“I don’t think there was any anger. Just a feeling of urgency,” said Lecompte-Ducharme.

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In Ontario, Ottawa has consistently shown some of the highest drinking-water lead levels in schools and daycares, according to the IJB tracker.

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Between 2019 and 2025, nearly 31 per cent of tests exceeded the federal standard at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board — the highest rate of any board in Ontario. Twenty-one per cent of tests at the Ottawa Catholic School Board exceeded the federal standard.

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At the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School District, one school with a troubling history of lead test results was St. Francis of Assisi, a Catholic elementary school in Mississauga with about 425 students.

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From 2019 to 2025, the school was tested 52 times for lead in its drinking water with 23 of those tests exceeding the federal guideline of five ppb. Fourteen surpassed the provincial limit. In 2024-25 alone, St. Francis of Assisi had seven tests exceeding Ontario’s directive, and nine that were over Health Canada’s safety guideline.