Tiny Township is a, well, very small township northeast of Collingwood. And it just happens to be the location of the world’s cleanest water.

The water bubbling to the surface is so clean the only match for its purity is ice pulled from the bottom of Arctic ice cores from snows deposited thousands of years ago, well before any high-polluting industries existed.

So naturally, they’re planning to put a bunch of garbage on top of it, turning the whole area into a big landfill site.

This, despite the fact that there are plenty of alternative dump sites (this isn’t Toronto; there are plenty of open spaces around), and that:

Paradoxically, given how much people are willing to pay for clean water, the pristine water is a nuisance at the dump site.

In order to dig out a pit for the dump, the county will have to pump millions of litres out of the ground to prevent the landfill from becoming a pond. The pure water Dr. Shotyk uses for his laboratory experiments will be dumped into a nearby creek.

The amounts wasted in this way will be large, enough to slake the needs of up to 250,000 people a day for months.

The landfill is designed so that clean groundwater is supposed to seep into the dump and become contaminated with garbage residue.

So to repeat — Canada — Ontario — has the source of the cleanest, purest water on Earth.

And our big plan is to contaminate it.

Now, when water shortages are one of the many looming disasters the world (if not Canada itself, as much) is currently facing.

When I first read about this — it was a couple years ago — I tried to ignore it and hope it would go away. But this thing could start in a couple months if a group of local citizens don’t succeed in getting a one-year moratorium imposed on it.

So when the Council of Canadians called me (no, I don’t have call display) for donations, I was working up to let them down gently, until they mentioned that this issue is what they were working on. Then I had to donate to their efforts to stop it. Because I didn’t what else to do, other than feel embarassed, and enraged.