One protester pushed a placard toward Harris that read, "We Demand Answers! No More Cutbacks!"

The number affected by contamination in the town's drinking water supply is close to 15 percent of Walkerton's 5,000 residents. Eleven patients remain hospitalized in the London Health Sciences Center, and five children are on dialysis.

Harris insisted that the origin of the problem was a 1993 government decision forcing municipalities to pay for their own water testing, when the labor-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) was in office. Some participants started chanting, "Stop blaming the NDP."

Since 1995 when Harris took office, a string of further cutbacks have followed. In 1996, the Harris-led Conservative government privatized all state-run water-quality testing, closing government laboratories that once conducted an average of 400,000 drinking water tests per year.

The budget for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment was slashed from Can$287 million six years ago to $165 million for this year (Can$1=US 67 cents). Some 900 out of 2,400 employees in the abatement, regional, and enforcement staff have been cut in the same period. The Harris government is close to fulfilling its stated pledge to cut "red tape" regulations by 50 percent.  
 
Factory farms take hold
Over the past decade, intensive agriculture or factory farming has taken hold in southern Ontario, where giant feedlots for fattening hogs, cattle, and poultry are becoming the norm. To encourage this, farmers have been assured of less environmental regulation. Two years ago, farms were exempted from local bylaws and lawsuits for problems caused by runoff of animal waste, chemicals, and pesticides. Walkerton itself has five cattle feedlots within a five-mile radius. Four of them are small, around 200 head of cattle each. One holds 2,500.

Some experts believe a large storm on May 12 may have overwhelmed some waste containment systems.

It appears, however, that many municipalities do not have the experienced staff or resources to cope with these new public health responsibilities that have fallen on their shoulders. For example, Gary Palmateer of GAP Microbial Services, a private testing lab, said his company found coliform bacteria in two of Walkerton's wells and its water distribution system on five occasions as early as January. Palmateer said he notified both municipal authorities and the Ontario Environment Ministry's Owen Sound office. Nothing was made public.

A new lab was hired in May and it reported fecal contamination in the town's water system May 18. The town's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) managers did nothing with the report for five days. The Environment Ministry was not notified. It was Dr. Murray McQuigge, medical officer for health, who announced the problem. Faced with a growing number of illnesses, he announced a boil-water warning May 21 and took his own samples for testing that confirmed the water contamination. On May 23 the whole story was made public.

PUC general manager Stan Koebel gave no explanation for the failure to alert public health officers and said offhandedly that utility employees had also told him the town's chlorinators were faulty, working inconsistently, and one of them was broken and was being replaced.

Many working people are convinced that such public health disasters and breakdowns are easily preventable. But they become inevitable and cumulative consequences of the policies of the wealthy Canadian rulers, as they drive through deeper cuts in social funding, gut environmental, occupational, and health regulations and their enforcement, and remove levels of responsibility from central government oversight.  
 
 
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