Bottled water and groundwater in Ontario: Can free market environmentalism resolve the emerging conflicts?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nestlé Waters’s recent purchase of a well and water-taking rights in the Township of Centre Wellington, Ontario, has garnered national and international attention, raising concerns about how groundwater resources should be managed. In this paper, we explore free market environmentalism as a way to resolve groundwater management and water-takings issues in Ontario. Controversy over groundwater resources and their use, as illustrated by the recent case in Ontario, has become more prevalent globally as concerns about groundwater quality and scarcity develop. Our results suggest that, in theory, the incorporation of private property rights and the common law principle of riparian rights into provincial groundwater allocation mechanisms has the potential to resolve the emerging conflicts in Ontario. However, our analysis reveals that the current level of politicization in Ontario’s water allocation and pricing systems, combined with the current lack of adequate monitoring and documentation of groundwater use, are significant barriers to implementing a resource allocation mechanism for groundwater based on the principles of private ownership and riparian rights. We address these limitations to gain a deeper understanding the implications of the current water-takings system in Ontario, and conclude that these limitations deserve greater social and political attention if these controversies are to be resolved. While free market environmentalism has solutions to offer to Ontario’s groundwater management issue, the current political and institutional approaches to groundwater allocation and pricing in Ontario do not allow for them to be fully applied.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".