Although he reinvented himself as a kingpin in the nursing home business, former Ontario premier Mike Harris used to be best known for the water contamination fiasco that killed seven people and sickened thousands more in Walkerton, ON.

That tragedy led to a dramatic decline in support for his government and was considered a key reason Harris resigned as premier in 2002.

Not surprisingly, the premiers who’ve followed Harris have steered clear of anything that smacks of weakening government surveillance of Ontario’s water systems.

Until now, that is.

Shaking off the Walkerton bogeyman, current Ontario Premier Doug Ford is embarking on a plan that will effectively privatize aspects of the province’s water systems, with potential risks to our drinking water.

Ford is well aware of the political danger of being associated with any weakening of public management of water. This explains why he’s going out of his way to deny the label “privatization” applies to the changes in new legislation, which the government insists will keep our water “publicly owned.”

But, as law professor Joel Bakan and economist Jim Stanford noted in a piece in the Star yesterday, the new legislation creates a regime for water and wastewater services in Ontario that is effectively privatized — despite the Ford government’s attempt to deny what it’s doing amounts to privatization.

The Ford government’s keenness to put in place this new water regime — while disguising the fact that it involves privatization — raises the question: whose interests is the government serving in doing this?

Clearly, there’s no public pressure for our water systems to be redesigned to include profit-making. That’s because there would be no benefit for the public.

However, there is one group that would benefit significantly — private investors.

Indeed, private investors — particularly large global institutional investment firms that represent (among others) pension funds, insurance companies and very wealthy families — have trillions of dollars in capital and are keen to invest it in low-risk projects where they can earn returns as high as seven to nine per cent a year. And public infrastructure, including Ontario’s water system, fits that bill.

Under Ford’s legislation, water and sewage systems can be removed from the control of local governments — the plan is to start with Peel Region — and transferred to specially-created, profit-making corporations.

“Key decisions — including finances, contracts and water rates — would be made by corporate boards,” observes Meera Karunananthan, a geography professor at Carleton University.

She also says that the public would continue to be responsible for the debt from constructing the water infrastructure, while the profits would go to investors. “Simply put, the public bears the burden while shareholders capture the reward.”

The public is also potentially endangered. A 2002 public inquiry found that among the factors contributing to the Walkerton tragedy was the Harris government’s failed provincial oversight after it privatized water testing.

Harris was an unusually gung-ho privatizer, and his legacy of privatization — with all the associated risks — lives on in areas beyond water management.

He also encouraged privatization in Ontario’s long-term-care homes and then went on to benefit handsomely from the privatized nursing home industry he helped create. Shortly after retiring as premier, he became a significant shareholder and chairman of Chartwell Retirement Residences, a major private chain operating publicly-funded nursing homes.

Chartwell was among the for-profit nursing homes that were found to have higher death rates during the COVID pandemic than not-for-profit homes, according to a 2020 investigation by a team of Toronto Star reporters as well as a CBC probe. Harris retired as Chartwell chairman two years later, in 2022.

While public services and infrastructure offer lucrative opportunities for moneyed investors, there’s a reason not to hand over aspects of these vital provincial responsibilities to private interests which are, above all, focused on making profits.

Ontarians died needlessly in nursing homes and in Walkerton. Doug Ford should take note.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.