On December 21, 2018, the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks posted its decision to extend the moratorium on issuing water taking permits to bottled water companies until January 1, 2020.
Pursuant to section 34 of the Ontario Water Resource Act, water bottling facilities must apply for permits to take water from groundwater sources if the facility plans to take more than 50,000 litres of water on any day.
The moratorium is found in Ontario Regulation 463/16.
While groundwater is a renewable resource, the moratorium was put in place in 2016 to give the province time to conduct a review of whether the science, data, and policy by which the province regulates water-taking are sufficient to protect Ontario’s ground-water sources from over-consumption.