The Decibel - Canada revamps standards around ‘forever chemicals’ in water

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

What’s in your drinking water? On Prince Edward Island, the provincial testing program shows potable water in some communities have higher levels of toxic “forever chemicals” than is recommended by Health Canada. To what extent this affects other provinces is unclear – PEI is currently the only province that systematically tests water supplies to make sure they hit federal targets for toxic chemicals.Patrick White is The Globe’s water reporter. He explains the safety concerns surrounding “forever chemicals” in our water, why the health agency revamped its guidelines and looks into why other provinces are slow to adapt.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hazelbrook PEI is about 10 kilometers or so from Charlottetown. It's quite rural, there are farms everywhere, and over the past few decades, a lot of residents there have objected to the presence of a particular landfill that was in the community. Patrick White reports on water issues for the Globe. It was a construction and demolition landfill, so nobody's really sure what was going in there, and that was part of their objections for years. They managed to get this landfill shut down in the last 10 years, but they always wondered what was going on under the ground. This is a very small community by the way. There are about nine households

directly around this landfill. And everybody there gets their water from wells. So they were always concerned that what was leaching out of the landfill might mix with their groundwater and they would end up drinking. Two years ago, the province started a testing initiative. They became really concerned about these, what we know as forever chemicals or PFAS,

and they started testing all over the island for the presence of these chemicals. PFAS are called forever chemicals because they never degrade. Once they're in the environment, they're around forever and they can have some serious health consequences. Late last year, they did some testing of all the water around the former Hazelbrook landfill and they turned up really high levels of these forever chemicals. One family I talked to a couple days ago had 600 nan nanograms per liter of PFAS in their water. To put that in perspective,

that's 20 times what Health Canada now recommends. Patrick is here today to explain why PFAS are a problem, what the government is doing, and how concerned we should be about our drinking water. I'm Maynika Ramaman-Welms, and this is the Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Patrick, thanks so much for being here. Thanks very much for having me. So we just heard about how the community of Hazelbrook in PEI discovered that their drinking

water has high levels of these toxic forever chemicals, also known as PFAS. So Patrick, what exactly are PFAS? So to spell it out, PFAS are per and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They're created in a lab. They were first created in a DuPont chemical company laboratory in the US in the 1930s and there weren't a lot of commercial uses immediately in the 30s. In the 1940s they start being used in the Manhattan Project, the project in the US to create the A-bomb. After the war, the number of uses just proliferates. Most PFAS have these really prized properties of being resistant to water, oil, grease, fuel,

and they don't really break down. They have this really incredibly strong chemical bond at their heart, which is the carbon fluorine bond, one of the strongest known in organic chemistry. So when it's heat or other pressures are applied to PFAS, they don't tend to break down. So we see them in Teflon.

We start to see them in stain resistant materials like couches and carpets and all sorts So we see them in Teflon. We start to see them in stain resistant materials, like couches and carpets. And all sorts of products start using these PFAS chemicals in the post-war period. OK, so it's kind of this class, I guess, of synthetic chemical compounds, essentially, that we use for a lot of different things.

Yeah, it's a whole class of chemicals that started off, of course, with one in a DuPont laboratory. There are various estimates on how many different PFAS there are now, and it is up to 15,000 different PFAS. Okay. So a whole range of different things that we're talking about. It is in so many products and there are so many different PFAS that scientists

and regulators and researchers really can't keep up with what's out there in the environment anymore. One of the really common uses as well, not necessarily a consumer product, but a product that is more ubiquitous than we think is firefighting foam. So every airport tests their firefighting crews constantly weekly, and they use these firefighting foams.

And for decades and decades, the companies that made these firefighting foams. And for decades and decades, the companies that made these firefighting foams said they weren't toxic. So these firefighting crews every week would spray these foams all over airports and then just wash them away with water. This is one of the things they really liked about the foams is they would wash away with water directly into the soil. And now a lot of the airports and especially Air Force bases around

Canada and the US and all over the world are heavily contaminated with PFAS. Wow. Okay, so now we know they are toxic, it sounds like. What exactly is the concern around them? The companies that made them, 3M and DuPont, a lot of reporting, especially in the US and Europe has now found that they were doing internal tests on animals and then on employees that found there were definitely toxic effects on living things. Researchers in recent decades outside the companies have managed to duplicate a lot of that.

They've found that there are likely effects on the liver, the kidneys, the thyroid, there are links to on the liver, the kidneys, the thyroid. There are links to developmental delays in children, links to reproductive issues. It's really a consolation of health effects that these PFAS are suspected to cause. Yeah, sounds like a lot of things to be concerned about there.

It is a lot of things. It is a lot of things. There are people in the legal community who see PFAS as kind of the new asbestos because it's just launched this huge round of litigation in the U.S. It's not as clear cut as asbestos because whereas asbestos kind of leads to mesothelioma, there's so many different health effects that have been linked to PFAS that it's really hard to map out cause and effect. Okay, so now that we're all properly worried

about what these things are, where do we find these now, Patrick? Because it sounds like we have specific uses for them, but they've kind of found their way into different parts of our environment. You mentioned the firefighting foam. So yeah, where do we find them? For me, reporting this story,

this has been the most shocking part of this. There are PFAS in your blood. There's PFAS in my blood, almost assuredly. Health Canada has done some biomonitoring of the blood of Canadians, and they found it in virtually everybody they tested. Researchers have found it in the livers of polar bears. They found it in rainwater all over the world. There's virtually nowhere that PFAS have

not reached at this point. Now, in a lot of cases, especially in during my blood, hopefully they're in very, very low concentrations. They're in concentrations so low that researchers 10, 20 years ago would not have even been able to detect the levels that are this low. So there are chemists out there who say with concentrations this low, it's not

really causing a problem in many cases, just because you can detect them. Doesn't mean it's toxic, but this is where health Canada comes in. They are taking a precautionary approach with this. They say there's no safe level of PFAS in the environment and in our bodies. So this is why they brought in some new guidance last summer. Okay, well let's talk about that then, what the government and what Health Canada specifically is doing to kind of monitor these PFAS levels. What have we seen?

So, for many years, Health Canada has taken kind of a chemical by chemical approach to this. We've long known that certain PFAS are toxic. So the two best known PFAS are probably PFOA and PFOS. They are found in firefighting foams, nonstick pans. They're kind of the oldest and most prominent of PFAS. Their production and distribution has been heavily regulated in Canada for quite a number of

years. Health Canada has also tried to regulate other certain PFAS individual compounds. And again, as I mentioned earlier, there are up to 15,000 of these things now. Right. So many. Yeah. So it becomes a very slow game of whack-a-mole if you're going to try to regulate these things on a compound by compound basis if every year companies are creating dozens if not

hundreds of new chemicals and regulators can only manage to regulate maybe one new chemical every five or ten years. So in August Health Canada introduced a new objective value where they look at a class of 25 different PFAS. So they're not decided not to do them one by one. They've got a whole class of 25 different PFAS and they say the sum total concentration in drinking water of those 25 PFAS cannot be over 30 nanograms per liter. Can we put that into perspective? Like yeah be over 30 nanograms per liter. Can we put that into perspective? Like, yeah, what is 30 nanograms?

Yeah, I had a, I had a hard time with that one. I didn't really know how to compute in my own head, what a nanogram was. So 30 nanograms per liter I've figured is about 15 raindrops in an Olympic sized swimming pool. So really small concentrations. Health Canada says, again, there's no safe level. We're taking a precautionary approach on this.

So these are the new objective values that they're looking at here. What does that term mean though, Patrick? Yeah, it was interesting talking to people in different provinces. They all have a slightly different interpretation of what that means. It is essentially a recommendation. It is guidance, which is different than a guideline. A guideline means that this is what Health Canada says is the maximum safe allowable value. There's some provincial legislation, drinking water legislation that says, essentially, if the federal government calls it a guideline, we will now make it a regulation.

So it almost becomes law, because the provinces actually regulate their own drinking water. It's not Ottawa's job. It sounds like at this stage, it's not enforceable then. Guidance objective value is a little different. They've essentially come out with a document that says, this is a placeholder.

We are now coming up with guidelines and we think this is the objective value for now. We will probably put it in a guideline coming up, but for now, this is the objective value. It's not enforceable in any ways. It's kind of like when you're driving a twisty highway and you see the yellow road signs that kind of give a suggested speed limit, like you should slow down to 30. It's a bit like that. It's a suggestion, but if you don't go 30,

you're not going to get into any trouble. We'll be right back after this message. Patrick, we just talked about these objectives that Health Canada has set out when it comes to PFAS in water. Let's come back to PEI, which we started talking about these objectives that Health Canada has set out when it comes to PFAS in water. Let's come back to PEI, which we started talking about off the top here. What has PEI specifically done when it comes to these objectives? PEI has been really proactive on these objectives.

So Health Canada in 2023, they basically send a notice to all the provinces to say, we are probably going to set this guidance at this level, 30 nanograms per liter for 25 different PFAS. PEI didn't really wait around to see if that was going to become an objective value. And then a guideline, they started a testing program where they prioritized schools, old age homes, municipal water systems first. And they went out and gathered samples at dozens and dozens of different locations and then sampled them for the presence of PFAS. And then they did made a move that I haven't seen

many other jurisdictions do anywhere, especially in Canada. And that's they posted all the results online. So you can actually go on to the PEI website and find the testing results for PFAS all over the province. They then expanded the testing program and went to old airports and construction and demolition sites, like the one in Hazelbrook and posted

those results online now. So at this point, there are, I think, 98 different sites that are posted online. So even though these are just objectives, PEI seems to really have taken this on though, and actually gone through the actions of trying to find out what's in their water. Yeah.

And they've, they've said, we're not necessarily adopting this Health Canada number at this point into any kind of regulation because it's still just guidance, but they have said that we are following the 30 nanograms per liter number, and we're going to test all of these sites based on the 30 nanograms per liter threshold. And if any place is over 30 nanograms per liter,

we're going to come up with some solutions for people, so they're not drinking contaminated water. So they've taken this really proactive approach all over the province. So this is why a place like Hazelbrook, then, is aware that they've got a high amount of PFAS in their water. If the residents of Hazelbrook were transplanted to,

I think, pretty much any other province in Canada, they would be unaware, unless they did personal testing and paid for it themselves, which is hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per test. So you mentioned that other provinces seem to not necessarily be doing this. So what makes PEI different? Why is this province standing out here and actually taking the action that other provinces aren't?

Yeah, I heard a few different answers on that one. One is for drinking water guidance, they tend to follow what Ottawa says because they don't have really well laid out measurements for what kind of contaminants they should be looking for in the water in their own provincial legislation. So they're much more prone to following federal guidelines on this. There's also a certain pride that I found that I didn't know about before reporting this story. In the local drinking water, 100% of the drinking

water comes from groundwater. Groundwater tends to be naturally filtered. It requires a lot less treatment than surface water in most cases. So there's a certain pride in the drinking water there. I think at the last, a big Waterworks conference in the USA last year, Charlottetown actually came out first for all jurisdictions in North America

in terms of water taste and quality. So they actually won an award for their water. This is award-winning water. So there's just a certain pride in that water. And they want to make sure the quality is up to snuff. OK, so we've alluded to the fact that other provinces haven't taken this kind of action. So how does this compare to the rest of Canada, Patrick?

What sort of response have we seen across the country? Yeah, part of this is due to just how drinking water legislation works. It is basically regulated by the provinces and it's up to the municipalities and the water utilities to put water legislation into effect and to test their water and make sure it doesn't have certain contaminants. So in many cases, like Ontario, for instance, has actually had a pretty stringent 70 nanogram per litre limit on PFAS since I think 2017. So in Ontario, at least they can say, we've been doing a lot on this already. So we don't necessarily want to swerve off the path we've taken and go with this federal guidance. But they have told me in Ontario that it's more spot testing that they're doing.

I think they have a few dozen reservoirs that they test occasionally for PFAS. They said there's a big impediment in terms of costs when it comes to wider spread testing. So even Ontario, which has some of the best drinking water legislation in the country, they aren't doing it quite as widespread as PEI. I asked all the provinces if they're following this guidance, Alberta and Nova Scotia didn't get back to me on what they're doing. Manitoba said, we are testing, but that's proprietary, so we can't tell you anything more, which is very different than the transparent approach that PEI is taking.

So it's a little different all across the country. Nobody I can find is doing something quite like PEI is doing. You mentioned, at least when it comes to Ontario, that there's a cost impediment here to actually doing this kind of widespread testing. How much would it cost to actually do this testing and fix the issues? Well, yeah, those are two very different things. The testing, there are different levels of specificity you can do with the testing.

If you just want to test for a few dozen different PFAS, I've been told in the upper hundreds of dollars. So if you were going to say in Ontario, where you're going to test, you know, thousands and thousands of sources of drinking water, that starts to add up. Uh, if you want to run for over a hundred different PFAS, the tests can get quite a bit higher and go into the thousands per test.

The fixing of the problem is quite a different issue. One community in Quebec, there's a chemist out of the Université de Montreal who found that there are high levels of PFAS in the community of La Bay, which is part of the city of Saguenay. I think it's about 8,000 people. The contamination was coming from a Canadian forces base. So the federal government came in and said, well, we will pay the cost to remediate this. The short-term solution was $15 million. This is just for a community of 8,000 people.

Long-term there have been estimates of up to 100 million to actually remediate all of the PFAS in the ground and get clean drinking water to people permanently. So you could spread that number across dozens of hundreds of possible sites across the country and it really adds up. Yeah okay these numbers are getting quite big when we start to actually look at this. I'm just wondering too like what are the potential fixes for this? Is this like additional filtration or what do we do to to get the PFAS out of there? Yeah there are filtration systems that can work. They are expensive to install and they are expensive to maintain.

I believe one of them involves activated charcoal, which has to be swapped out every few months when it becomes kind of saturated with PFAS. And then the question is that's essentially toxic waste. So where are you going to transplant that PFAS contaminated toxic waste? So where are you going to transplant that PFAS contaminated toxic waste?

It creates another problem. The obvious solution, some people, chemists tell me is to put more regulations on the production and distribution of PFAS. That is kind of one good news out of all this. We have had real limits on the production of those two PFAS. I mentioned earlier, the two most common ones, PFOA and PFOS and biomonitoring of Canadian blood from 2009 to I believe 2019 has found that

the levels of PFOS and PFOA have declined, I believe by half since those regulations were put in. So if you nip this at the source where these chemicals are being created, it does have a foreseeable effect on personal health. Okay, so there is some positive news there if we actually look at it from that perspective. I just wanna quickly ask, cause we talked about such astronomical numbers with fixing the problem here

when it comes to the amount of money that's needed, who would be paying for that? Is this the government's paying the bill? It would be us. It would be us. Is it taxpayers if you're paying tax, say in La Bay, the $15 million for the short-term solution that comes out of federal coffers,

in many communities where they're simply adding a new filtration system to the existing water treatment plant that comes out of your water rate. We've been of course talking about PFAS and drinking water specifically, right? But it sounds like this is not the only way we're exposed to these forever chemicals. I wonder how significant is drinking water compared to other sources of exposure? Like what kind of impact is regulating drinking water actually going to have overall?

It's hard to say. The Université de Montréal chemist I mentioned, Sebastian Sauvé, who's done testing of at least 400 sites in Quebec for PFAS in the drinking water, says we need to start looking at food as a source of PFAS because PFAS do tend to bio accumulate and bio magnify. They work up through the food chain and the higher an organism is on the food chain, the higher concentration they tend to have of PFAS. So he told me that we can put billions and billions of dollars to bring PFAS from say

25 nanograms per liter down to 20 nanograms per liter. And we probably won't see any effect on human health, but we are quite likely getting much higher levels from certain foods, especially he's tested a number of foods, including fish that have been kind of all over the place on PFAS levels. So he's proposed, at least in an interview with me, that we really need to ramp up how we look at food and PFAS levels. So just lastly, before I let you go here, Patrick, how concerned should we be about these forever chemicals, these PFAS?

I mean, that's why I started looking into this, because I just read a few things about PFAS and thought, well, I cover drinking water issues or water issues for the globe these days, so maybe I should look into this because I just read a few things about PFAS and thought, well, I cover drinking water issues or water issues for the globe these days. So maybe I should look into this. There are chemists out there who say we don't need to be too worried about this, that the really bad PFAS are now quite heavily regulated. They call them long chain PFAS. The more prevalent PFAS now are called short chain PFAS and they don't tend to attach to human tissues. They go right through us. But looking at some of the stories

we've seen of communities affected by contamination and causing a slew of health effects, I think concern is, is warranted. I think organizations like health Canada are really looking into this quite steadily and they do have the precautionary approach that they're enacting here. But one thing we've seen in both the U S and a little bit in Canada, it's just starting to creep up is people actually going to their municipal councils and saying, we want the water tested. We don't like not knowing.

And in a few cases I've seen the municipality has and saying, we want the water tested. We don't like not knowing. And in a few cases I've seen, the municipality has gone ahead and tested the water for PFAS. A lot of municipalities are doing this anyway. They're just not publishing the results. So in these cases, they've tested for PFAS, and they've come back. And in all the cases I've seen, they've actually shown

that the water's OK and comes well under the 30 nanogram per liter level. So if you're concerned and there's concern as warranted, that might be a way to go. Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. That was Patrick White, The Globe's water reporter. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramamin-Wilms. This episode was produced by our intern, Kelsey Howlett.

Aja Souter is our associate producer. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.