Student Action

Michael Hlinka: Don't soak students for a drink of water

Michael Hlinka, September 8, 2009, CBC News--All over Canada, college and university students are returning to class. Many of them will find the material they're studying difficult, but what might be even more challenging, at least according to a study from the Polaris Institute, is finding a water fountain.

You heard me right. According to this Ottawa-based public interest and research advocacy group, water fountains are disappearing from Canadian campuses. This is particularly true in newer buildings.

Let me correct myself. Rather than disappearing, the fountains were never put there in the first place. They're being supplanted by vending machines, where students are required to buy, rather than receive free, water (or H2O, for those chemistry majors out there).

A little bit of history: When I attended university, which was during the late 1970s, no one drank bottled water. It wasn't until the 1980s that I first saw bottled water, or more accurately "spring water," appear in trendy restaurants. It was a time when people were becomingly increasingly health- (and even more particularly weight-)conscious. But soon there was also a strong "fashion statement" element associated with bottled water. When on top of that, you layer the self-evident fact that buying water rather than drinking the free stuff from the tap made a statement about income, you're well on your way to understanding the spring water phenomenon.

But the evolution of the bottled water industry didn't stop there.

Soon it included not just spring water but also filtered water, which is just ordinary tap water that has undergone extra treatment. And it's that category that dominates bottled water sales these days.

Eventually what was a product for the elites morphed into the mainstream. And in 2008, bottled water sales in Canada amounted to $1.6 billion, and my guess is that young people, aged 16 to 24, consume a disproportionate amount of that total.

Over the years, cash-strapped institutions of higher learning saw a business opportunity and leaped at it. According to the Polaris Institute, a beverage company typically signs a deal with a school, paying it to get exclusive rights to sell its products in vending machines, cafeterias and convenience stores. Next thing you know, bottled water has become an important (forgive the pun) revenue stream for colleges and universities.

I don't blame the beverage companies one little bit for entering into these supply arrangement. It's their responsibility to make as much money as they can for their shareholders.

However, public institutions have a different mandate. It seems to me that there's a clash here between economics and simple logic, a.k.a., common sense. There's enough financial pressure on students already without making it almost impossible for them to get water for free from a drinking fountain instead of purchasing it. And we don't need regulations here. We just need colleges and universities to do the right thing and start putting more drinking fountains in their public spaces.