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Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin
Domestic Water Use: The Relevance of Rurality in Quantity Used and Perceived Quality
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Introduction
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Water supply and management is a growing concern for residents of rural and urban municipalities in Canada. Over the past few years, several cases of water contamination and an intensified debate on environmental problems have increased the attention of the general public to water issues. In decision-making, as well as in the public debate, there are two major dimensions that come into play: growing water demand and ensuring good water quality. With the expansion of urban agglomerations, the management of this natural resource is also becoming a new area of potential tension and/or collaboration between municipalities that typically have different patterns of water utilization and management systems, such as rural and urban municipalities.
Concerns about water scarcity have global and long-term implications. However, in a local perspective, as water is normally supplied by municipal governments, "scarcity" assumes a specific connotation. The constraint on water supply is typically determined by the conditions and capacity of municipal infrastructures. The status of these infrastructures has become, or is expected to become in the near future, a limiting factor to further growth for some municipalities. It is a dilemma that municipal governments have noticed, and they have begun to take action to manage water demand (Kingston Whig-Standard, 2006; Munro, 2004).
There is often a heated debate about which policy focus, or which combination of measures, a municipality should implement. The options range from costly investment in new infrastructures that often source water from neighbouring jurisdictions, to improved maintenance of existing infrastructure and water saving practices, to various economic incentives to reduce water use, such as metering and fees based on amount used.
This growth in water demand has been paralleled by growing concern about the quality of domestic water supply. In the 1990s, several cases of municipal water contamination received extensive media coverage and raised public awareness about the importance of water quality control. As a result of these cases, some provincial governments adopted specific legislation that set minimum standards and testing procedures for municipal water (Brennan, 2005). However, the understanding of the relationship between household perception and household practices regarding water quality is not well documented.
This analysis focuses on the effect of "rurality" in determining:
- per capita water use at the municipal level; and
- water quality perception of a household, as proxied by the water treatment choice of a household.
The baseline data presented in this bulletin indicate that, on average, water used for domestic purposes is higher in rural municipalities than in urban ones, but that rural households who drink tap water1 are less likely to treat the water than urban households. Both the amount used and the perception of quality perception might be affected by location characteristics. On the one hand, the sparse settlement patterns of rural areas offer more opportunities for recreational uses of water (pools, gardens, etc), which in turn could explain the higher amounts used. On the other hand, a relatively high reliance on private sources of water (in particular wells) or different socio-economic characteristics of rural households could be a key factor in explaining higher confidence in the quality of water used at home.
Two data sources are used in the analysis: the Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey (MWWS) database 2004 of Environment Canada (Environment Canada, 2007b) and the Households and the Environment Survey, 2006 of Statistics Canada (Statistics Canada, 2006) (Box 1).
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