CUPE Ontario and Ontario NDP Challenge Conservatives’ Claims on Bill 60 and Water Privatization With Damning Legal Opinion

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Ford Conservatives’ plan to privatize Ontario’s water was conclusively exposed today as leaders from CUPE Ontario and the Ontario NDP were joined by a lawyer from Goldblatt Partners LLP to release a legal opinion that reveals the true intent of Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025.

CUPE Ontario commissioned a legal review of Schedule 16 of Bill 60 as part of the union’s fight against the Ford government’s plans to privatize publicly owned regional and municipal water systems.

Simon Archer of Goldblatt LLP was engaged by CUPE Ontario to provide the opinion. His comment contradicts claims by the government the legislation. Among his conclusions:

• Bill 60 does not guarantee that water and wastewater corporations will be held by a municipality or other public entity; it simply gives the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing discretion to determine who can own them.
• The government has used the term “municipal service corporations” to describe the corporations created by this legislation, but the term does not occur anywhere in the legislation; in this regard, the word “public” in the name does not have any real legal effect.
• A similar corporate structure was used to corporatize municipal electricity infrastructure in Ontario in the early 2000s.

“The Ford Conservatives have buried sweeping changes to essential public services in the omnibus Bill 60 because they knew Ontarians would oppose those changes if they knew what was actually being proposed,” said CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn. “But workers have been raising concerns about privatization from the beginning. The people who operate and maintain our water systems understand exactly what’s at stake: decisions about water systems will be driven by profit instead of public safety.”

“The word ‘public’ in the name does not have any real legal effect. The legislation does not guarantee that water and wastewater corporations will be held by a municipality or other public entity,” said Simon Archer. “Government spokespeople keep using the term ‘municipal service corporations,’ which are required to be public, but that language appears nowhere in the legislation.”

Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles observed that “Bill 60 takes a public system built on accountability and turns it into a corporate model based on profiteering, and it takes decisions away from communities and locally elected officials. We know that we can’t rely on the Ford government to put people first, especially when there’s profit involved.”

Fred Hahn concluded: “We need to ban together to force the Ford Conservatives to reverse course here. No one should profit from our drinking water. Ontarians value public water, and together we can protect it. CUPE Ontario will continue the fight to keep our water safe, affordable, and public.”