We pay for phone calls, electricity, natural gas, video signals and most other things that come into the home by wire or pipe in proportion to how much of them we use. If the worry is that poor people would run dry, let's give everyone a yearly income-tax rebate when we do switch over to metering. It might once have been argued that metering would have been far too expensive, that the resources it required wouldn't have been worth the water saved. But this is the age of the microprocessor. Metering costs have plunged.
Technology is no longer an obstacle to making people pay for their water.
Last Monday, I moderated a session of the Canadian Transportation Act Review Panel, a five-man federal group charged with making recommendations on how to improve Canada's transportation system. The subject was competition in rail, and the session featured a lot of back and forth among railway companies and shippers about just how much competition there actually is and what could be done to increase it. Sure, truckers pay lots of taxes, especially for fuel. So do railways. But trying to establish rough equality between taxes paid and benefits received from free roads is another case of second-best gone mad.