The province should disallow…

The province should disallow the large-scale pumping of groundwater for use by multinational water bottlers.

The precious, clean groundwater of Ontario is our society's patrimony. It is irresponsible and shortsighted to allow bottlers to remove this resource from our province. While I recognize that bottled water has a role to play in, for example, communities in which the water supply has become contaminated, it is consumed at a scale whole orders of magnitude beyond what is needed to support human life. The bottled water industry is one of the greatest generators of non-reusable plastics, it encourages wasteful consumption of an essential resource, and should be heavily regulated and restricted.

While giving local municipalities more say in bottling operations is a good first step, it is a small one. The province should charge significant fees (on the order of 1,000 X what it currently does by volume), impose bottling caps, and ban the export of significant amounts of bottled water outside the province's borders.

When this vital resource is gone, we will miss it, we will not be able to get it back, and we will remember and blame those who permitted it to be stolen.