Montreal has voted to stop fluoridating water at two water treatment plants that serve six demerged West Island communities, citing reasons such as the looming upgrades planned for the Pointe-Claire Drinking Water Treatment Plant.
The city’s Agglomeration Council voted on November 21 to stop fluoridation at the Pointe-Claire and Dorval plants. The change will affect more than 143,000 people in Pointe-Claire, Beaconsfield, Kirkland, Baie-D’Urfé, Dollard-des-Ormeaux and Dorval.
Maja Vodanovic, Lachine borough mayor and Montreal’s executive committee member responsible for water, told the council that upcoming water treatment plant refurbishments have complicated an already problematic issue with fluoride. In addition to the $100,000 per year price tag to maintain fluoridation, there have also been fluoride supply chain issues in recent years that contributed to closures at both water treatment plants. She added that maintaining the equipment to add fluoride has become unnecessarily costly and potentially wasteful, as it delivers fluoridated water that ends up washing cars and people, fighting fires, or flushing toilets.
Then, it all ends up in the rivers, said Vodanovic. From there, the city contends that there are unknown environmental and aquatic life concerns relating to wastewater treatment that does not remove fluoride from the water.
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“We do not believe that our water filtration system, that our system, should be used for other things than to provide the best quality water,” she told council. “That is already a very noble and a very complicated goal.”
Vodanovic told the council that the last thing she wanted was to engage in a health debate about fluoride. But that was the reason why some affected West Island residents attended the meeting to speak out. Former Quebec Member of Parliament, Clifford Lincoln, who lives in one of the impacted municipalities, addressed the council to suggest that the decision should have been one where the affected municipalities had a say.
“Why not leave this issue until at least 2028 when the Pointe Claire agreement expires, so that you give the five cities concerned, also citizens of Montreal, a chance to find out about it to decide for themselves,” Lincoln asked the council. “That is a democratic way. It’s not a way of imposing because the rest of Montreal doesn’t want fluoridation.”
In response, Vodanovic noted that because of the way the agglomeration agreement with the West Island communities is structured, it doesn’t give the impacted municipalities a lot of say in the process itself.
Health Canada maintains its support for drinking water fluoridation as a safe, universal and accessible method of preventing tooth decay. However, Vodanovic stated that access to fluoride is widely available in other forms for residents.
“I have to say that the city of Montreal took this decision to be coherent,” she noted. “We do not put fluoride in our water and we don’t intend to put fluoride in our water. We produce the water. We are competent in the matter and we want to produce the best quality water for all of Montreal.”
Fluoridation doesn’t occur elsewhere in Quebec apart from Saint-Georges in Quebec’s Beauce region.
The council explained that fluoridation will continue at the plants until supplies are exhausted.
*For a more in-depth look inside Montreal’s decision to end fluoridation at the two water treatment plants, stay tuned for the next print edition of Environmental Science & Engineering Magazine.
