Owners of shared water wells in Manitoba are concerned over recent changes to provincial legislation and precedent-setting actions that feel, to many, like government overreach.
In recent years, at least two communities in the southeast have closed their public wells due to government demands for chlorination systems that local leaders say are unnecessary and unaffordable.
These include the Woodridge non-potable bulk-fill well, shut down in 2024. For decades, it is said, this well has supplied farmers with water for their livestock and crops. It’s also served as an emergency water source for firefighters in times of grass or forest fires.
The other is an artesian drinking water well in Piney, which closed temporarily last year. This well is said to produce some of the best drinking water in the world.
Konrad Narth is the Progressive Conservative MLA for La Vérendrye, the constituency containing Woodridge and Piney. He’s been going head-to-head with Mike Moyes, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, on this issue.
“[Piney] has literally the best natural spring water in the world pouring out of the ground there,” says Narth. “People from across Manitoba would go to Piney and fill up jugs to bring home.”
This is also the source, he adds, for a major water bottling company that sells to distributors of all the generic bottled water brands, including Superstore and Co-op stores.
But it’s not just communities like Woodridge and Piney that feel the pressure. The Crystal Springs Hutterite colony, located near Ste. Agathe, was forced to chlorinate their well water system in 2024 or face a major fine.
For 70 years, residents of the colony have been drinking from the same natural water well without issue. The water, according to Victor Kleinsasser, secretary of Crystal Springs, is some of the best-tasting around.
The colony is served by one main well which has around 25 service connections to various households and buildings. It also services the entire farming operation.
About five years ago, Kleinsasser said they were paid a visit by an officer from the Office of Drinking Water (ODW). This officer determined that if the well was to serve as drinking water, it needed to be tested on a biweekly basis.
Since that time, every two weeks, Kleinsasser or someone from the colony has delivered a water sample to a lab in Winnipeg. So far, their test samples have always shown that it’s completely safe for consumption.
Even so, the officer was back a few years later, this time insisting that a two-part chlorination system had to be installed.
“Even though the tests come back clean, they’re still insisting that water must be chlorinated,” Kleinsasser says. “For us, this is a huge problem because we use this water for the barns, the car wash, the greenhouse, for adding to the chemicals when we spray our fields. Even the taps for sprinkling our lawns are hooked up to the same lines. It’s wasteful to add chlorine in all that water when it doesn’t need it. The other thing is, our people don’t want it.”
The residents of Crystal Springs, he says, have deep concerns over the health ramifications of adding chlorine to their water, not to mention the taste.
According to both Narth and Kleinsasser, every Hutterite colony across Manitoba is facing the same pressure to chlorinate right now. This is true regardless of water sample results and expensive reverse osmosis filtration systems that many colonies already use.
For Narth, this kind of governmental strong-arming makes him worry that communities like Niverville and New Bothwell could be next. Here, hundreds of residents enjoy water derived from shared neighbourhood wells.
“There was [a time when] more common sense was used,” Narth says. “The Office of Drinking Water had relationships with these communities and said, ‘You should be testing the wells [at specific intervals].’ There were agreements like that. Now there’s just more enforcement even though they’ve conformed with all the expectations of monitoring.”
Cost of Chlorination
In order to avoid fines, Kleinsasser says his colony succumbed to governmental pressure and added chlorine to their water. As per this new directive, they also had to assign their resident plumber the task of checking chlorine levels on a daily basis and reporting this info back to the ODW. This has added to his already full workload.
But that’s only the initial stage of the ODW’s intervention. The next stage will require the colony to install two large baffle tanks inside the pumphouse. The current building is too small for the added components, meaning they may have to build a new structure or extend the building to make room.
“They say we have a public well, but we don’t have access to public funds,” says Kleinsasser. “When it comes to building the system and increasing the size of our pumphouse and adding the tanks… well, that’s all our cost.”
Residents of Crystal Springs are also incurring additional costs from the installation of carbon filters to try and eradicate the taste of chlorine.
For a community like Crystal Springs, which has always complied with the province’s demands, this all feels like a slap to the face.
“The water officer tells me he can walk into our pumphouse anytime he wants,” Kleinsasser says. “He has the authority to walk in on private property, at any time.”
Like Narth, Kleinsasser is beginning to worry that this attack on Hutterite colony wells is only the beginning.
“The officer of ODW has said there are literally thousands of these shared wells in the province. So this won’t just affect the Hutterites. It will affect everybody.”
PCs Fight Back
In March of this year, the NDP government made an amendment to the Drinking Water Safety Act. According to Narth, the move helped the government further legitimize the power they already wield.
The Act, as it stands, classifies well systems into three categories: private, semi-public, and public. Wells serving only one household are considered private. Wells with two to 14 service connections are deemed semi-public. Public wells are those with 15 or more service connections.
At this stage, fully private wells aren’t as strictly regulated. It’s primarily the semi-public and public ones that are being targeted. This means that whenever there are two or more connections to an individual well, water treatment requirements can be enforced.
Equally concerning to Narth and others is the Act’s requirement for an operating license on public and semi-public wells.
“A person must not operate a public water system or a semi-public water system unless the person holds a current operating licence for the water system issued by the director in accordance with the regulations,” the Drinking Water Safety Act states. “If, after reasonable investigation, the director is unable to identify any owner of a water system or determines that a water system does not have an owner, the director may order a person who owns or controls the land on which the water system is located to take control of, operate and manage the water system or any part of the water system for a specified period, at the person’s expense and in accordance with the terms and conditions of the order.”
For now, Narth and his fellow Progressive Conservatives have requested that the latest amendment be held back until the Legislature reconvenes in fall.
As for the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Mike Moyes says the delay is what actually threatens Manitobans.
“The only thing [Manitobans] have to be concerned about is the fact that [the amendment] has been delayed by the PCs until the fall,” Moyes says. “I think this is a really important piece of legislation that modernizes our drinking water legislation.”
The amendment, he says, more closely mirrors legislation being used across the country.
According to Moyes, the primary objective is to give flexibility to an ODW director to shift well systems into different classifications if it’s deemed that certain risks are involved.
Of higher risk are well systems that service vulnerable residents, like schools or personal care homes. At lower risk might be wells that service campgrounds where public water use is less frequent. These are important factors above and beyond how many connections a single well has.
“We’re actually really looking forward to working with communities, working with Hutterite colonies, so that we can make sure we have the proper oversight,” Moyes says. “In certain cases, they might be reduced [from public] to semi-public and then we can reduce the amount of onerous oversight on them.”
As for the chlorination enforcement of the Woodridge well, Moyes says they discovered that the non-potable water was being used by some individuals as drinking water.
To that point, Narth argues that if public taps are clearly marked as not safe for drinking, the responsibility should fall on the individual. He doesn’t believe this is a justifiable cause for chlorination enforcement.
As for questions about chlorination orders on the Piney well, Moyes says that they have never existed.
When the Drinking Water Safety Act amendment is reintroduced in the fall, it will go to a public committee process. This is the chance, Narth says, for residents to state their concerns or ask questions.
“I encourage people to sign up to committee, but they can also sign a written statement and have it read out during committee,” Narth says. “That’s probably the best direct opportunity to voice your concerns.”