Golf courses should not be…

Golf courses should not be allowed to take as much water as they do. They are a non-essential service and a complete waste of freshwater. Ontario now faces water restrictions in several municipalities every summer, and billions of people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water. Depleting Ontario's aquifers so that golf courses can have perfect, green, monoculture lawns is not a good use of our water.

There needs to be a system in place to properly regulate water extraction and prevent this kind of wasteful overuse. At the very least golf courses should be responsible for minimizing their fertilizer runoff amounts via natural barriers or collection and treatment processes so that they don't contaminate what's left of our aquifers and cause algal blooms in our lakes.

When approving permits to take water, please consider not only the effect that removing the water from the ecosystem will have, but also how it's being used and how it's going to impact the environment when it's returned in such a contaminated format.