Not only is this water much more difficult to treat, but in addition the research and development carried out by most cities to provide safe drinking water simply does not exist for rural water supplies. These guidelines were designed to protect city dwellers from the ill-effects of unsafe drinking water. If the efforts carried out by cities were to be matched for rural Canada, research and development laboratories with several hundred people would be required to solve the much tougher and diverse quality problems affecting rural areas. Small communities and individual rural water users are generally using inadequate treatment equipment to deal with these large challenges. Canadian Situation Canada has taken a highly unusual route in dealing with drinking water quality problems.
Drinking water is a provincial mandate, with the federal government only providing guidance.
Many provinces, instead of shouldering the task, have moved the responsibility further down the line to municipalities. This is fine if we are dealing with Toronto, Ottawa or Calgary. The federal government through its devolution of powers to the provinces now plays a minuscule role in the provision of safe drinking water to the nation. The end result has been to leave rural people with the poorest water in Canada and few options to deal with it. Even university and government researchers have shied away from doing research on rural water because, in addition to core funds, these researchers also need to come up with some external funding, which simply is not available from rural communities.