Editorial Why not sell water?

How often has it occurred to some would-be entrepreneur that if there was a way to bottle the pure, fresh air of a spring morning in the great Canadian outdoors, they would be a millionaire. There’s a resource that’s free, abundant and completely renewable. Who could possibly complain about selling eager buyers a commodity for which they apparently yearned?

But, of course, those considerations fail to account for politics. In reality, the Ontario government has seen fit to propose banning the sale of water, another resource that in Ontario is free, abundant and completely renewable. The reasoning is not too clear.

Why shouldn’t we sell our fresh water? Selling water doesn’t mean giving up control over it any more than selling minerals means we give up control of our mines or selling oil means giving up control of our oil reserves. If there are buyers, why not put a price on it, meter the amount sold and collect accordingly? Anyone who thinks Ontario is in jeopardy of running short probably hasn’t ventured much farther north than Highway 401 in Toronto. If they had, they’d realize that in northern Ontario, water shortages are not likely to pose a problem.

This proposed legislation in Ontario is really nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to the bogeyman of free trade the Liberal government likes to conjure up in search of votes. If these legislators had thought about it in commonsense terms, they would have come up with a different answer.