ward3brighton.ca

Of the few visitors I get to this website, many are looking for information about bottled water bans in general, or specifically the ban put in place by the city of Charlottetown. I know this because my statistics application identifies the search engine string a visitor used that led them here, among other interesting data about visitors. For example, I noticed that someone using a computer on the Radio-Canada network had visited last night and this morning after having searched for “city hall charlottetown bottled water“.

I assumed a reporter was doing some research for a story. By mid-morning I received a call from Sophia Harris who was putting together a story for Compass (our local CBC evening news show), which was also to be part of a larger story being produced for The National (our national CBC nightly news show). I agreed to meet Sophia at City Hall around noon where I had a priorly scheduled meeting. We shot some staged footage of me and HR Director Andrew Thompson filling our paper cups with Charlottetown’s finest municipal H2O, and I answered some questions to the best of my ability.

This was the second time this summer a reporter had tracked me down via this website to discuss our bottled water ban. Several weeks ago, I received a call from Kim Arnott, a freelance writer for the Municipal Information Network, who wrote a story about the current trend away from bottled water.

Given the almost daily visitors here who are curious about the issue, I expect we’ll hear more and more stories in the media and very likely many municipalities following Charlottetown’s lead. For me this ban makes perfect sense from four different perspectives:

1. Purchasing bottled water reflects badly on us, as the purveyor of clean water services in Charlottetown. We should enthusiastically endorse our own product because it is excellent;
2. Bottled water is expensive;
3. Bottled water is not an environmentally benign product. The particular brand that the city used to purchase was shipped from western Canada, which leaves a huge carbon footprint, not to mention the waste in landfills;
4. We should discourage the effects of market forces on something every human needs. It shouldn’t become the new oil.