The Current - Waterloo’s water shortage a warning bell for Canadian communities

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Most new development in Waterloo, Ontario has been put on hold because the region doesn't have enough water  infrastructure for future projects.  How this is a warning bell for other communities across Canada.

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and a digital business library full of on-demand resources. Benefit together with Chambers Plan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. If you drive 90 minutes west of Toronto, you will find one of the fastest growing communities in this entire country. Waterloo, Ontario is a region built on innovation, the birthplace of the Blackberry, home to many tech startups. But that growth has hit an obstacle, not enough water.

Not for the people who live there now, but for future homes and businesses. In January, the city of Waterloo put a freeze. on all new developments until it could solve that problem. In a few moments, we'll hear from a developer. But first, we're joined by Amy Shaw, director of water and wastewater operations for the region of Waterloo. Amy, good morning. Good morning, Matt.

Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. When did your region realize that it had a water supply issue? Last fall is when it all came kind of together. We had been seeing some operational indicators of some issues with our declining well field. in certain areas of the region. That combined with aging infrastructure,

we were having some of our main plants down for repairs. And when we started looking at the methodology that we were using to determine how much water is available for growth, that's when we recognized that there was a constraint in the Mannheim service area. You mentioned wells, and that's important because Waterloo and the Waterloo region gets a lot of its water from wells, right? That's correct, yeah. Waterloo region has probably one of the most complex water systems.

in all of Canada, and that includes like over 120 wells, groundwater wells. And we get about 80% of our water from groundwater wells. And then the other 20% comes from surface water from the Grand River. So it's a complex system. Are you running out of water? Absolutely not. So what's happening right now is there's a lot of water in the ground. We just need to be able to get our aging infrastructure repaired.

some of those key systems repaired, and we are working furiously to have some new projects to bring new capacity online. So we have many, many infrastructure projects lined up, about $100 million worth of infrastructure projects to get us back where we need to be. But you just said that you need to get new capacity online. One of the issues here is that with these new developments, they are going to require water. And so it's not that you're running out of water now,

but the concern, as I understand it, is that for those future developments, it's difficult to ensure that there will be water. Is that correct? It's just the timing. It's a matter of timing. So there is capacity in the aquifers and in the system. It's just we do have some projects that we need to be able to put in place to be able to get that capacity for development right now. So why did you tell developers that their plans would have to be put on hold? Well, right now, the sustainable capacity, the demands are exceeding, the same. sustainable capacity right now. So my job is professionally and ethically and legally is to protect the existing drinking water

system. So we are awaiting these infrastructure repairs to happen. And so right now it's a matter of bringing that capacity online before we're able to proceed with new development. But just to, again, put a fine point on this. The sustainability part is important, if you're talking about drinking water. Is your concern that if these developments, developments went ahead as they were planned, that there would be a crisis or pressure or whatever

word you want to use when it comes to the availability of drinking water in future? Well, it would add additional risk to the system. Yes, we are seeing that some of our wells are under strain right now and they're being pushed or what we call peaking more than what we would like to see happen. So until we're able to take the pressure off the current system, that is correct, like that could add additional risk to the systems. And what that means is if we push our wells too hard, that we could lose some of them. Is this a matter of too much development too quickly? I can't speak to the development side of things. I'm operations. So what I can tell you, though, is that we are fast tracking, you know, these infrastructure projects as fast as we possibly

can. Providing sustainable drinking water for the community as it grows is my top priority. In the meantime, the mayor and council in the region in February voted to relax this freeze on development proposals, right? There was significant pressure from the development industry, and they wanted to try to figure out what would be a fair way, if I can put it that way, and that's the language that they used to go forward. Do you think that was the right decision, given everything that you've just illustrated? So there was a caveat around that motion and what it said was once we're sustainable and we have an adequate operational resiliency. So even when capacity does come online with some of these solutions that we have, the short term, medium term and long term, is there still has to be that decision making on whether we are sustainable and in a place that we're comfortable releasing up to that 50% of capacity for development. Where is the water going to come from? Part of this is about infrastructure and you've hinted at that.

But where is the water going to come from if the region is going to be one of the fastest growing areas in this country? You're looking at upwards of a million people by 2050? Correct. Well, right now we're focused on the medium short or the short term, medium term solutions, as we mentioned, to kind of get back to normal here. We do have the water supply strategy update, which is ongoing. And that will determine the options that we need to consider to get us to the 2051 mark for what types of, solutions we should be looking at, whether that's, you know, a pipeline or whether that's another surface water source or where groundwater should be coming from. But to your point, you can't tap the wells endlessly and at a certain level without the concern

that those wells, that the aquifers won't replenish themselves appropriately, right? I think the key is operating them sustainably so that they do have the ability to recharge in a timely way. If you're pushing them too hard, they don't have that ability to recharge in a fashion that we would be comfortable with. So it's a matter of spreading out the pumping and not having it concentrated in certain areas.

There's been talk about getting water from Lake Erie and having it pumps to waterloo. Is that a possibility? It's always a possibility. Like I mentioned, the water supply strategy update, which is ongoing, is going to shortlist a bunch of options on what we are going to need post

2031 or 2032, which a lot of these projects we're looking at right now get us to about 2032 for finishing those. So that will be coming out at the end of 2027 or the beginning of 2028, and it will drive the decisions that we need long term, which like I said, may include the option of a pipeline to Lake Erie. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment Conservation and Parks sent us a statement that reads in part our government has awarded almost $60 million since 2024 in infrastructure funding across the Waterloo region. We remain a committed partner, but infrastructure must keep pace with growth so residents

and developers can have confidence that reliable water systems and responsible housing development will continue without unnecessary delay. Developers want this to move forward. We are in the midst of a housing crisis as well, but you have real concerns around that infrastructure. How do you square all of that? It's a balance, and being in this role is sometimes difficult. Council is the owner of the drinking water system, and I am their representative.

And so it's my job to make recommendations and to make those difficult decisions to be able to protect the drinking water system. I think it's a balance, and I know we're working full out. My team has been working on this since it was evaluated and determined back in the fall. And we're putting all hands on deck to be able to get that capacity back, to be able to move development forward in stages. I have to let you go, but I think there are a lot of Canadians who just assume that we have, not an endless supply, but certainly a vast supply of water, drinking water in this country. What does a story like this tell us about that?

I think it is a cautionary tale for groundwater-based systems. And as infrastructure ages, we need to stay on top of that. And we need to make sure that we have an operational resiliency buffer to make sure that we were able to take those systems offline. And I just think for other communities that are groundwater-based, there's some lessons to be learned here, which maybe will prevent it from happening in the future somewhere else. Amy, good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Amy Shaw is Director of Water and Wastew Operations for the Waterloo Region. Chambers Plan is benefits with benefits. You and your team can get all the basics, like comprehensive health and dental coverage, disability insurance, and more. Chambers Plan also stacks your business with built-in supports to help it grow, like on-call HR, legal, and financial guidance, personalized leadership coaching,

and a digital business library full of on-demand resources. Benefit together with Chambers Plan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. I'm Lisa Yuso, a digital producer at Ideas, the podcast that likes to feed your curiosity. I ask my colleagues why they think you should. listen. Ideas can make you the smartest, most interesting guest at your next dinner party in less than 60 minutes. It's got the best of a storytelling podcast with the best of a great lecture. You can pretty

much never predict where an episode will take you, but you can count on every episode to shift your perspective, even just a little. Find and follow ideas wherever you get your podcasts. Joseph Pupelo is the co-chief executive officer of Polokor. It's a local developer in the Waterloo region. Joseph, good morning to you. How are you doing, sir? Well, what went through your mind when you heard that there would be a moratorium on building for developers in the Waterloo region?

Well, we're 137 days into this now. And if you think back over the past six years, it's been issue after issue that the development industry has faced, whether it be COVID, hyperinflation, geopolitical concerns now gas, where is now water. We've faced issue after issue trying to hit a housing, address a housing crisis. And so what does this mean for you if you can't build what you want to build?

Well, in many cases, you've had developers with projects year over year have been working towards this. And materially, what this does, it effectively stops builders, trade, small businesses, and the entire sector from making a living. because it takes years and years and years for these projects to get to the ready point where they're able to pull a permit. For tradespeople in particular, and I'm not discounting your own concerns, but for people who are working, building those homes and making sure that humbling and electrical and drywall and all of that is taking care of. What does this mean for them?

Well, this materially impacts their living, putting food on their table. I came from my grandfather who'd trade and working with concrete. And if you're not getting jobs in because of things that are happening out there, that you can't put food on your table. So it's a material impact that it's impacting families across the region. How was the decision to put the moratorium in place? How was that explained to you? I think it was initially explained.

There's a crisis and we're trying to evaluate the quantum of the crisis. And then quickly everyone, when a crisis naturally, emerges, everyone freezes and trying to understand how big of an issue is. Since that time, we've learned that this can largely be accounted for and taken care of through proper infrastructure upgrades, pumps and pipes effectively. We're not worried about the quality of water. We have enough water in our aquifers. It's about getting the water to the right places. But you have enough water in the aquifers now, but what Amy Shaw said is that there's concerns about sustainability. The the development pause was put in place in part because there is a worry from people like Amy

that down the line when these developments come online that there may not be a sustainable source for drinking water. Is that not a prudent decision to take? I understand where she's coming from in that regard and working closely with staff in order to address this and really talking at the timeline the developments come online. So when you get water allocation through the system right now, the project isn't actually drawing water from the system for years on end. So if you think of a large high-rise project, it takes time to get the undergrounds, the superstructure. You're talking at a process of two to three years. This is the same thing for a suburban greenfield development.

It takes years to grade a service and then eventually apply for building permits. Things can happen concurrently in phasing development and allocation prior to these units, even taking occupancy and therefore allowing a lot of things to go forward. And that can be managed contractually and legally. But if they don't know that the water is going to be there once people move into those homes, isn't it prudent to pump the brakes if people are concerned that perhaps at some point in time those wells wills will run dry? Well, looking at the series of projects that they have in place right now in order to bring water on,

a lot of the upgrades and a lot of the work have already been completed. So it's about managing executional risk along with the other risks. This is a risk that can be managed and this is a risk that we've managed historically in the Waterloo region being a ground-based water system. We've managed this risk historically over the past 30 years and we've been able to grow.

I think as you alluded to, we're on our pace to growing to a million people by 2050. So this is the risk that we've had to manage. And I want to be clear, the users and the development industry, in the system, we paid into the system to ensure that it's reliable to the tune of over $100 million. There's $100 million sitting there in order to address this concern and pumps and pipes.

So when the MECP, the province alludes to the massive infrastructure funding that they've given to the region, the region itself is invested huge. So we have to make sure that we have a reliable water system and make the necessary investments in infrastructure. One of the reasons why this is an interesting story across the country is because we as a country are building at scale and we're trying to address a housing crisis. We're trying to build the houses that perhaps weren't being built and passed. But there are infrastructure concerns. And one of them, as we've been saying, is the ability to ensure that people actually have the water that they're going to need down the line. When you hear people say

that we're building too much too fast, what do you say to them? So what I would say is we been planning towards a million people for the past 20, 25 years. So for us to have that much capital sitting there without the necessary infrastructure is needless to say frustrating. We have to make sure that we're deploying it at a speed that might seem a little bit uncomfortable, but we need to make the necessary infrastructure plans. I think if you look at where the direction of things are going provincially as well as federal, is a general recognition that we have to invest in our infrastructure and we have to go quickly.

So there's a lot of projects to be done at all levels of government, and we have to go quickly. And it may seem a little bit uncomfortable to go this quickly, but our country needs that in order to sustainably grow. And if it's not happening just finally in Waterloo region, if the pause continues, and as you've mentioned, your industry, but also the people who work in your industry, tradespeople and what have you, aren't working,

before you move your project somewhere else? Well, this is the issue. I mean, people that own the actual land and development are there, they can't go anywhere. Their land is not going there. But talent and capital are highly liquid and highly portable. They will go to other places where they can and will. And this is the fundamental issue.

We've spent the last 25 to 50 years building up all of this knowledge of building within our area in this region. and I've highlighted this to council. And again, this has largely been a staff decision, not a council decision to this juncture. This has large and long-ranging impacts to our overall community in losing that operational knowledge of our community and building within our region. Joseph, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Joseph Pupelo is co-chief executive officer of Polocorp. It's a local developer in Waterloo region. David Rudolph is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo. David, good morning to you. Good morning, Matt. Amy Shaw said this is a cautionary tale. What is this about? Is it about the water supply? Is it about infrastructure? Is it about both? Yeah, I think we could easily say it's about both. Just at Christmas time, the World Economic Forum put out a really significant document talking about the $6.5 trillion deficit in water infrastructure across the world. world and how critical it's going to be for economic development, basically health, maintenance of health across the globe. And, you know, we're not immune to it. So infrastructure degradation, clearly, particularly water, water tends to be infrastructure heavy. And we've for such a long time

have possibly ignored signs that infrastructure is failing. If you think about the supply, of water. As I said earlier to Amy, there are a lot of Canadians who believe that we just have an enormous supply of water, that we can tap into in rivers and lakes and what have you. You also have a housing crisis in which people are trying to build at, as we just heard from Joseph, a furious pace. What happens when the two collide? Well, you know, what's interesting is, of course, all of us as Canadians have just taken it almost culturally, that we have almost unlimited water. Probably think about it that way.

And with the long time periods as our country has developed and grown, local areas stress the water source locally. And the case in Waterloo is an example of that. So concentrated growth, increasing demand, all of that has led to a stress on our water supply system and a time for us to consider how to manage it appropriately going forward. And there certainly is a series of different options we can select to do that. This is not the first time people have come across this in an urban center.

Many places of the world have been struggling with this and have come up with innovative solutions to resolve it. So I think we have a very positive future going forward, but it requires us to finally consider that the, The water supply and water resource has an ultimate limit, and we have to manage it. Can you just describe, and again, for people who live on wells, that's one thing, for people who don't have clean water, and there are many communities across this country who don't have clean water, they think of water very differently. But when you talk about the stress on the system, what could happen?

Amy says that there is enough water now, but perhaps in future that system may not be sustainable. What could happen if the region and broadly, if across the country, we don't figure this out? Well, really good questions. So first of all, one would probably like to know what our maximum capacity is so that we can make careful decisions on how much development we actually want. How much water can we take out of the ground? So there's an absolute limit to how much can be taken out of the ground because of how much actually recharges. This is a renewable resource. So the water that comes into the system annually through precipitation,

that's excess precipitation that infiltrates, that, of course, is a climatic process, and that's a natural process that changes on an annual basis. With climate change now, we're losing a little bit of our certainty on how that water balance is going to occur. In the long term, then, opportunities for us are to control pumping by spreading wells out, as Amy had mentioned, but also looking for alternative ways to get more water into the ground. And in fact, the region of Waterloo has been a pioneer in that in Canada by using something called managed aquifer recharge. So throughout the world and clearly here in Waterloo, we've taken water from the Grand River, pre-treated it and injected it back into the ground, into these enormous groundwater reservoirs so that we could enhance the capacity as time goes on.

That's something that is going to be one of the topics that we're really going to look at seriously here. And that's solved problems in so many different locations. You've also been doing research in Switzerland and in Finland, right? What could we learn from those countries in terms of how they're dealing with water and water infrastructure? So both of those countries have been struggling with the same problems that we have here in terms of what is the ultimate capacity. They hit that sort of hard conclusion really decades ago. So two cities that I went to visit just recently just returned on the weekend. One is Torco in the south part of Finland.

The other is the city of Zurich and Switzerland. Both of them, similar sizes to us, use groundwater to supply the system. And what they've done is look for ways to take water from other areas like a river or a lake, treat it, inject it into the ground, and enhance their supply systems. And what they've done over the last 20, 30 years there is we can really learn from that. Our system's in place, but I think we can do a much better job. They include things like infiltration basins, taking old gravel pits that are abandoned and allowing water to fill into them and infiltrate, and then pumping them out later when you need it.

So Manage Aquifer Recharge looks like an option for us that will help us to push that sustainable limit further. route into the future. So maybe we don't need that pipeline. Do you think thirsty regions will be looking at the Great Lakes and thinking we could put a pipe in there? For sure. But when you think about where we are, Kitchener Waterloo, Cambridge, Wealth, in a sense, we're kind of landlocked.

We have the Grand River growing through it, but we're a long way from the Great Lakes. So for us to consider building a pipeline to one of these sources, let's take Lake Erie as an example, the overall cost of it is is just extraordinary. And if we can manage our own local resource, in Kitchen Waterloo, we've used the groundwater source for over 120 years, and it's been so carefully managed that we're still using it, which is remarkable. It's such a resilient resource.

So taking the time now to study it, understand what the limits are, look for alternatives to get this supply, continued for our future use economically is amazing. It's just one of the reasons we're so prosperous in this area with access to this cheap water. I have to let you go, but just go back to the issue of it being a cautionary tale. Waterloo put a pause on its developments. Other communities across the country will be paying close attention to this. How should communities think about approving new homes to make sure that they can actually bring them things that we all need like water?

So that I think gets to the core of the question. And what we need to do, again, as Canadians, different communities, is to look carefully at how we're providing the water now, the source itself, the distribution, the aging infrastructure, and be able to make smart decisions based on what we think the ultimate capacity will be. So merging development with water management is the key point here. This is really interesting and important. And as I say, communities across the country will be paying close attention to this.

David, thank you very much. Thanks, man. David Rudolph is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. at the University of Waterloo. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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