The Clean Water Act

The Ontario government passed the Clean Water Act in 2006 to implement some of the recommendations of the Walkerton Inquiry.

The Act ensures communities protect their municipal drinking water supplies through prevention -- by developing collaborative, watershed-based source protection plans based on science.

The Act created source protection areas and source protection regions. A source protection region can have one or more source protection areas. The Act also created a local multi-stakeholder source protection committee for each region. These committees identify significant existing and future threats to their municipal drinking water sources and develop plans to address those threats.

The Ontario government paid the entire cost of developing the first source protection plans.