As Permitting Rules Loosen, Ontario’s Water Faces New Risk

Eight rivers begin in Ontario’s Headwaters region. Three of them feed the Great Lakes. Millions of Ontarians drink water that flows from this land. They swim in it, fish in it and build lives around it. And right now, all of it is being put at risk. The threat isn’t climate change or drought, though those are coming. It’s below-the-water-table aggregate extraction: blasting for stone hundreds of feet beneath the surface, where groundwater—Ontario’s drinking water—lives. When you breach that aquifer, contamination doesn’t stay in one place.