4517 Traveling to Canada? Don't Drink the Water

Use one of these to get yourself into the testing lab.  And bone up on your 14th Century French.

Wait a minute. What?!  Wasn’t that what they told you before boarding Pan Am flight 22 to Mexico?  And now… Canada?  Yes, Canada.  Reports just out say lead levels in the water of some cities in Quebec and out west in Saskatchewan have levels that make Flint, Michigan relatively pure as Perrier.

Well, you may say, Canada has stricter purity standards than most US locales.  Not true. Oh, but at least in Canada, they have strong government agencies that find out about stuff like this and get it fixed. Same answer.

These high levels of lead were discovered by two groups of public enemies, the press and the universities.  We all know both are tools of the Great Communist Conspiracy to overthrow the American and Canadian forms of freedom-loving, individual-based independent lifestyles. 

Yes, journalists. Professors. Scholar athletes, hard-drinking undergrads.  All those Big Brains poring over thousands of pages of statistics.  All those cheery undergrads going house to house, asking strangers to give them a glass of water, then pouring it into sterile glass bottles and toting it off to a secret lab in Montreal where the passwords are all in Early French and the knocks on doors are Morse Code for SOS.

Water safety experts in Canada say they’re surprised.  Well, boys and girls, just what do you do with your job time? We know what you don’t do: check water safety.

Let’s be Springwater clear. The problem as reported is bad. But it’s not so bad that drinking and bathing will give you enough lead protection to immunize you against atomic radiation.

And while the studies were mostly made in Montreal in the east and Regina (pronounced re-JYNA’) in the west, they weren’t limited to those cities.  Along the banks of Lake Ontario… some of the water had so much metal, if it were iron, you could cause a surfer’s wave by using a magnet.

This story raises some important questions, some of them serious. Here are a few:

-Why is beer in both Mexico and Canada purer than tap water?

-Does brewing with alcohol kill the bad stuff in the water?

-What is the rate of lead poisoning among Canadians?

-Is lead in the water worse than having water you can set on fire as they do in the Pennsylvania fracking belt?

-Why are some water suppliers doing no tests, as the AP reports?

A great many people from the United States were perusing homes in Canada in anticipation that the madness that’s gripped this country may force us to move. Maybe we should consider Costa Rica. There are no problems getting through our Great Wall, as long as we’re traveling south. 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments?  Please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019