The Bottled Water
You grab a bottle of water at the store. $2.50. The company that bottled it paid less than a penny for a thousand litres.
The System
Corporations pump millions of litres from Canadian groundwater for almost nothing. They bottle it and sell it back to you at a 3,000 to 5,000 times markup. The permit fees are so low they're essentially a rounding error on the balance sheet.
BlueTriton extracted (ON, 2023)
Ontario permit fee
Retail markup vs extraction fee
638 million litres. That's how much BlueTriton (formerly Nestle) took from Ontario wells in 2023. The permit fee? $503.71 per million litres. Before 2017, it was $3.71.
$0. That's what BC charged for groundwater extraction until 2016. Then they raised it to $2.25 per million litres. Ontario charges $503.71. Both figures are negligible compared to retail price.
The gap between what corporations pay for groundwater and what consumers pay at retail is staggering — not because the water itself costs that much to bottle, but because the extraction fee bears no relationship to the environmental value of the resource. Ontario charges $503.71 per million litres. The true cost of groundwater depletion — aquifer recharge rates, ecosystem dependency, drought risk — isn't priced at all.
Let's hear the other side
...and see if it holds water
Bottled water serves a real need. In communities with boil water advisories, during natural disasters, and in areas with...
The Promise
Water is a public resource. Provinces issue permits to protect it. The permits are supposed to ensure sustainable extraction. In practice, the fees are so low that companies have no financial reason to limit what they take.
$503.71 per million litres. Ontario raised the fee from $3.71 in 2017 after public outcry. It sounds like a lot until you do the math. That's $0.00050 per litre. A bottle at the store costs $2.50.
The Reality
The water crisis at Six Nations isn't caused by corporate extraction — it's caused by decades of underfunded infrastructure on reserves. But the juxtaposition is damning: the same province that charges $0.0005 per litre for corporate extraction hasn't funded clean water for 11,000 Indigenous people living on the same river system. The problem isn't that Nestle took the water. It's that the government values corporate permits over Indigenous lives.
11,000 residents. Six Nations of the Grand River lacked clean tap water while Nestle extracted from the same watershed. Only 10% of Six Nations was served by a water treatment plant.
What Works
Community pressure works. Wellington Water Watchers led a decade-long campaign against Nestle's extraction in Aberfoyle, Ontario. BlueTriton closed the facility in January 2025. It took ten years of showing up, but they won.
10 years. Wellington Water Watchers campaigned for a decade to stop Nestle/BlueTriton from extracting groundwater in Aberfoyle, Ontario. The facility closed in January 2025. Community organizing beat a multinational.
What You Can Do
Drink tap water. Support municipal water infrastructure. Ask your province why extraction fees are pennies while you pay dollars. Follow Wellington Water Watchers for a model of how communities can push back.
Ask your provincial government to raise water extraction fees to reflect the true value of groundwater. Support organizations like Wellington Water Watchers. Drink tap water — it's tested more rigorously than bottled water in most Canadian municipalities.