OCDSB trustee candidates come together to call for safer drinking water

Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) trustee candidates have co-signed a statement calling on Ontario to adopt a federal guideline that would make drinking water in schools a little bit safer for students and faculty.

This comes after parents and trustee candidates on the school board said they have concerns about the safety of drinking water in various OCDSB schools, particularly regarding the amount of lead in tap water.

Lead is omnipresent in our environment, according a Health Canada 2017 scientific review. In modern-day Canada, food and water are the primary sources of exposure to lead for most residents.

According to a March 2026 report by the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA), the substance has seeped its way into water fountains and sinks at schools.

That organization ranked individual schools and school boards across Canada based on the number of tests exceeding provincial and federal government limits for allowable lead levels in drinking water.

The OCDSB scored the worst of all school boards in the country.

Out of more than 1,300 tests, OCDSB had 104 water fountains and taps that exceeded limits set by the province.

Health Canada regulates lead in water, but the guidelines are optional. The federal government suggests limiting lead levels to five parts-per-billion (ppb), down from the 10 ppb deemed acceptable until 2019.

While most provinces and territories abide by Health Canada’s suggestion for a stricter limit on lead in drinking water, Ontario and Saskatchewan do not follow the federal government’s guidance.

The OCDSB exceeded the federal lead limit of five ppb on 156 occasions, according to a March 2026 report by CELA, which used publicly available provincial data for its analysis.

The statement was co-signed by 10 candidates from nine zones across the district, including trustee candidates John MacRae (Zone 1), Daniel Pershick (Zone 3), Emily Quaile (Zone 4), Natasha Lynn Mott (Zone 5), Chris Durrant (Zone 6), Hilary Clauson and Scott Dutrisac (Zone 9), Keelin Pringnitz (Zone 10), Brendan Ray (Zone 11), Cathy Varrette (Zone 12).

“In 2019, Health Canada lowered its guideline for lead in drinking water from 10 parts per billion (ppb) to 5 ppb, reflecting the evidence that there is no safe level of lead exposure,” the statement read.

The trustees argue that the solution currently adopted (flushing pipes to reduce lead levels in drinking water) is unreliable and is “at best a temporary stopgap because lead can return to dangerous levels in just minutes.”

“Recent layoffs to custodians have resulted in higher workloads, yet the remaining custodial workers are expected to flush the pipes every morning in perpetuity, if the OCDSB does not come up with a long-term plan” MacRae said. “We need a permanent solution for this critical health and safety issue, not layoffs.”

The joint statement also asks the OCDSB to publicly report the annual test results on a faucet-by-faucet basis and to increase test frequencies across the board.

The trustee candidates say permanent solutions include pipe replacement or installing filtration systems.

To do so, they call on the province of Ontario to fund the lead filtration systems by prioritizing schools that exceed the 10 ppb limit and have the youngest students.

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