7.1 Non-municipal drinking water systems

Most of the detailed information on drinking water systems is for municipal services. There are hundreds of non-municipal systems serving small, usually somewhat isolated, users: campgrounds and resorts, roadside gas stations and restaurants, rural churches and schools, and so forth. These systems are overseen by Ontario Public Health, not the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, which oversees all municipal residential systems and non-municipal systems that serve residential developments and certain designated facilities (such as daycares).

Figure 6 indicates these other types of systems (the information accessible for this project is shown shaded in green).

Figure 6: Types of water systems in Ontario
Figure 6: Types of water systems in Ontario

Ontario Public Health provided Neptis with an Excel spreadsheet, which lists the small-scale systems and makes it possible to locate them on a map, but provides no information on capacity or flows. Also, the systems are organized by health districts, which do not correspond exactly to the geography of the Greater Golden Horseshoe.