Bottled water and groundwater in Ontario: Can free market environmentalism resolve the emerging conflicts?

Nestlé Waters’s recent purchase of a well and water-taking rights in the Township of Centre Wellington, Ontario, has garnered national and international attention, raising concerns about how groundwater resources should be managed. In this paper, we explore free market environmentalism as a way to resolve groundwater management and water-takings issues in Ontario. Controversy over groundwater resources and their use, as illustrated by the recent case in Ontario, has become more prevalent globally as concerns about groundwater quality and scarcity develop. Our results suggest that, in theory, the incorporation of private property rights and the common law principle of riparian rights into provincial groundwater allocation mechanisms has the potential to resolve the emerging conflicts in Ontario. However, our analysis reveals that the current level of politicization in Ontario’s water allocation and pricing systems, combined with the current lack of adequate monitoring and documentation of groundwater use, are significant barriers to implementing a resource allocation mechanism for groundwater based on the principles of private ownership and riparian rights. We address these limitations to gain a deeper understanding the implications of the current water-takings system in Ontario, and conclude that these limitations deserve greater social and political attention if these controversies are to be resolved. While free market environmentalism has solutions to offer to Ontario’s groundwater management issue, the current political and institutional approaches to groundwater allocation and pricing in Ontario do not allow for them to be fully applied.