Ontario bill doesn’t rule out privatization of water, legal opinion finds
By: By Brett McKay, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter and Carly Penrose, Investigative Journalism Foundation
This article was originally published by Brett McKay, a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, and Carly Penrose with the Investigative Journalism Foundation on May 01, 2026, at 10:58.
Ontario’s government has promised that proposed corporations to manage water and wastewater will be entirely publicly owned. But an opinion from a University of British Columbia law professor called the legislation an example of “stealth privatization” of the municipal services.
The Water and Wastewater Corporations Act, introduced in November through omnibus Bill 60, authorizes the municipal affairs minister to require particular lower-tier municipalities to provide water services through newly created public corporations.
In early March, in response to criticism that the legislation would hand over Ontario’s drinking water system to for-profit businesses, the government proposed amendments to the act through a new bill, Bill 98, to clarify rules around who can own shares of the corporation and quell fears of privatization.
Joel Bakan, a UBC law professor, was asked to assess the bill by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Bakan said that from a legal perspective, Bill 98 “is going to have the same impacts on communities in terms of water services as a fully privatized scheme.”
The Ontario government argues that because legislation limits the potential owners of shares for the new companies to public entities, that means nothing has been privatized.
“But that’s a fairly slippery notion,” he said, and there are two reasons Bill 98 doesn’t avoid privatizing water services.
As written, shares of water and wastewater corporations can only be issued to “a municipality, the Province of Ontario, the Government of Canada or an agent of any of them.”
While governments and municipalities are public entities, “it’s not impossible, and quite typical, that they can designate as an agent a private company, a for-profit company or a company that they own,” meaning ownership of the water companies could easily fall into private hands, Bakan said.
In his analysis of Bill 98, Bakan wrote that entities like the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Build Ontario Fund already operate as agents of the federal and provincial governments to attract and facilitate private investments in infrastructure projects. Public-private partnerships among these entities, governments and the private sector could enable private ownership and control of water and wastewater services, he explained.
The act also requires that the water companies be incorporated as for-profit corporations under the Ontario Business Corporations Act. Bakan said this change in legal structure shifts the priorities of the company, and control over it, toward an obligation to shareholder earnings and away from communities.
“It operates along the same lines and with the same imperative as a for-profit company. You’ve completely financialized water services and you’ve made the financial return to the owners, even if they are a public entity, a priority over the public interests that communities, employees and individuals have in regard to water services,” he said.
Premier Doug Ford’s government is piloting the new water and wastewater delivery model in the Peel Region, which it says will give municipalities more tools to respond to growth and cut costs for homebuyers.
By 2029, jurisdiction over water utilities will be transferred from the Peel Region to its constituent cities; Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon. Those three cities would jointly own the province’s first water and wastewater corporation, “subject to future regulations setting out the share allocation,” according to legislation.
The Ford government has repeatedly denied that the new legislation contains plans to privatize services or undercut the decisions made by local councils and communities.
The mayors of Pelham, Thorold, Fort Erie, Wainfleet, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Port Colborne, Grimsby, St. Catherines and West Lincoln co-authored a letter to Ford in late March expressing support for plans to create water and wastewater corporations to manage services in their communities. Two of the nine mayors have also denied any intention to privatize those utilities.
The Office of Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. In other reports, a government spokesperson called claims that the province plans to privatize water resources “factually incorrect” and “misleading.”
Andrew Biro, a professor at Acadia University politics department, said privatization means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but scenarios where a private company has total control of who gets water or what it charges are “vanishingly rare.”
More often, what people are referring to when they talk about privatization are public-private partnerships.
“That can describe a whole range of things in which private actors or for-profit corporations get involved in building water infrastructure, overseeing, maintaining it, actually delivering the water, maybe, having some control over the actual water itself,” Biro said.
While these partnerships mean there is some degree of public control over utilities maintained, “the same kind of conflicts or tensions can arise.”
Biro said there is some truth to the idea that private sector organizations, especially for-profit businesses, can deliver goods more efficiently because they are incentivized to minimize costs.
“If cost is your only concern, then that’s fine, but if you have other kinds of concerns — as I think we should with respect to water — then maybe you don’t want to have the absolute lowest cost if it means sacrificing safety, for example,” he said.
People want water that is safe, convenient and affordable, Biro said. If it’s delivered as a public service, government subsidies can ensure that those three things happen.
“And if it’s delivered as a commercial good, then it’s not necessarily guaranteed that all three of those things can happen. So it might mean increased costs to deliver the same level of safety or cleanliness and convenience, or it might mean, if we want to keep costs lower, … declines in quality, declines in potentially cutting corners in terms of safety,” he said.
Matt Manassis, an Guelph, Ont.,-based water worker and vice-president of CUPE Local 241, said the way Bills 60 and 98 leave many questions about the future of Ontario’s water system.
The ways the bills are written are “deliberately ambiguous,” he said. “Even if the plan is not to immediately privatize, they are packaging up a water utility in such a way that it could just as easily be sold, or opened up to investment from private investors, private owners, at the stroke of a pen.”
That worries him, because a public system is more accountable, he said. “If you have an issue with your water, you phone up your city councillor … there’s a very direct line.”
Public water workers are also “socially accountable” to their neighbours. “We know the people who live near us. They know that we’re working on their water treatment system. They trust us,” he said.
More investments are needed in water infrastructure, he said, but he urged the public not to believe that privatization “is the only way to invest in a public good.”
With the creation of the public corporations, the more than 8,000 drinking water operators tasked with maintaining municipal drinking water systems across the province have so far been left in the dark about what it could mean for their jobs, Manassis said.
“Water is so fundamental and so important to everybody, we all need it, we all use it. It should be a public utility that’s operated by the people who use it,” he said.
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