Cancelling Ontario’s waste-water program is an affront to science and common sense | TVO Today

Waste water is fantastic. It is a gift from the science gods. It is something we should be using more of, not less. This is the easiest smart public-policy decision a government could make. Deciding to have less of this data is, conversely, one of the dumbest decisions a government could make.

So, of course, the Ontario government is deciding to have less.

It’s important to provide the necessary context here: waste water is, for our purposes today, sewage. Human waste. As waste water is flushed down toilets into municipal water-treatment systems, small samples can be taken and then tested for the presence of contaminants that provide public-health scientists with broad indicators about the habits and afflictions of the local population. I first began reading about waste water years ago because scientists were using it to figure out what the illicit drug habits were of cities across Canada. The coverage at the time was a bit playful, almost treating the science being generated as a joke. Given that waste water is poop and that the research let reporters write about which cities in Canada liked to get high and party the most, that was perhaps inevitable.

But during the pandemic, waste water became a vital early warning tool. COVID-19 is detectable in waste water. Sampling at municipal water-treatment facilities gave local public-health officials a reliable indicator of the prevalence of the virus in the local population. It became a useful leading indicator of when a city or region was about to experience a surge in cases. I don’t think we ever really figured out what to do with that information, precisely, as by the time we were meaningfully able to track the virus in sewage, we had already largely settled into our system of controls to manage case surges. This is another example of a problem I wrote about a lot during the pandemic — namely, that having early warning is useful only if those warnings are able to trigger effective responses in a timely manner. We never really seemed to get there with waste water.

But it was still valuable data, especially, to be blunt, in Canadian jurisdictions, where we fought COVID-19 despite major data-collection and -sharing deficits. Waste water didn’t have that problem. It could be collected and tested quickly, and the information could be shared quickly. Best of all, and it’s important to stress this point, waste water is anonymized. No particular person’s sewage is sampled; the combined sewage of the entire local population is sampled. It’s not a perfect tool, as it lacks precision, but it’s fantastically useful, cheap, and poses no direct personal-privacy risks. It’s a godsend. And Lord only knows what future uses we may find for it and what discoveries scientists could one day make by looking back at the data collected over years and even decades. Cheaply and without privacy risks!

And Ontario is scrapping its program. The province will now rely on a similar federal program, as the federal program will collect data at locations in Ontario. The problem, of course, is that it will collect samples from more locations overall, but fewer in Ontario.

The explanation, in theory, is cost savings. And you know what? That’s laudable, again, in theory. Governments should indeed avoid duplicating services and look for savings. That’s fine! But there are two immediate programs here.

The first is that the cost savings are trivial. The annual cost of the provincial program was between $11 million and $15 million. That’s like two decent NHL wingers. More to the point, that’s about 73 cents to a full dollar per capita. A buck an Ontarian, at the most, is the annual cost of this program. For a premier who loved briefly providing beers for a buck, you’d think that would have some appeal. Apparently not. The cost savings here are just too damn paltry to be worth dumbing down our data.

And! If we’re going to avoid duplication of services — and a guy like Doug Ford knows full well there is only one taxpayer, after all — this is the kind of program that should be run at the provincial level. Health care and public health are primarily provincial responsibilities. This should be run by Ontario, for Ontarians.

If we lived in a less bizarre timeline and in a less dysfunctional federation, it would take only about 47 seconds for us to realize, collectively, that it would be best for the feds to establish a national collection standard (in terms of the data sought and how it’s formatted) and then have the provinces run their own programs. The feds could then simply be a receiver of that information, which could be collected in commonly accessible formats (and translated from English to French and vice versa, plus any relevant Indigenous languages) and then shared with literally everyone. Just post it online! A gift to science and researchers the world over. This could be a triumph of effective federalism and open data.

But since we live in this timeline and in this dysfunctional a federation, we’re getting a federal program offering inferior province-level data that the provinces (well, my province, anyway) will use to save the annual equivalent of less money than I have sitting in the bottom of my car’s cupholders, which I intend to leave there forever because it’s not worth the effort of retrieving. It’s that tiny a sum. You could not buy a can of pop from a vending machine for what this program would cost me next year in taxation.

Cancelling Ontario’s program is a bad idea. It’s stupid. It’s a blow against common sense and science. It leaves us less prepared for the next public-health crisis. It is the kind of decision that has absolutely no real defence and that never would have been made if adults were running things at Queen’s Park.

So here we are.