In the January/February 2010 issue of Water Canada, Elizabeth Brubaker writes: Canada's municipal utilities are in trouble, and it seems increasingly unlikely that the provinces will bail them out. Federal aid seems equally unlikely, given the finance minister's warnings that there will be no major new spending initiatives in the 2010 budget. But our utilities need not despair. Although public money may be scarce, private investment and pricing reforms can provide sustainable solutions to the problems they face.  read more »

Environment Probe turned 20 this year. To our surprise and delight, we also learned this year that our foundation maintains Canada's most popular environmental web site. The reason, we suspect, is that the public doesn't like top-down environmentalism, and we have the field of community-based, market-oriented environmentalism pretty well to ourselves.  read more »

In this presentation to mayors and chief administrative officers of Alberta municipalities, Elizabeth Brubaker describes the challenges facing Alberta's water providers: Many water systems perform poorly, many face growing water shortages, and all are operating in an ever more difficult regulatory environment. Brubaker advises municipalities to price their water right, invest in their systems, get experts to operate them, and hold the operators accountable for their performance.  read more »

In this presentation to a conference on Infrastructure Renewal held in Toronto in October 2009, Elizabeth Brubaker discusses Ontario's water and wastewater problems, including poorly performing utilities, unmet capital needs, and underpriced services.  read more »

Environment Probe's comments on Stewardship, Leadership, Accountability: Safeguarding and Sustaining Ontario's Water Resources for Future Generations, a Proposal Paper presented by Ontario Minister of the Environment John Gerretsen and Ontario Minister of Natural Resources Donna Cansfield.  read more »

In this presentation to Property Rights and the Environment, a student colloquium held in Vancouver in July 2009, Elizabeth Brubaker explains that property rights provide incentives to conserve scarce resources, such as water and fish.  read more »

This important book builds on earlier work by the same author, Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (1995), which made a strong case that customary common law in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada has been an effective means of pollution control, where and when it has been allowed to work. As that earlier book showed, however, legislative law, often drawn up on the premise that it would promote economic progress or the public good, has often weakened these customary common law remedies to air and water pollution.

This new book applies the same analytical lens to the narrower issue of air and water pollution originating on farms.  read more »

"What does Environment Probe gain by this display of disunity?" demanded one farmer. His anger, voiced in a letter to the Ontario Farmer newspaper, was directed at our public rebuke of the new Ontario ALUS Alliance, a coalition pushing for a provincially funded program that would pay farmers to provide environmentally friendly "alternative land use services." His organization, a local of the National Farmers Union of Ontario, fears that a debate over the program's merits could jeopardize its public funding.  read more »

The new Ontario ALUS Alliance proposes incentives rather than regulations to encourage farmers to protect the environment. The Alliance's market friendly rhetoric obscures its reliance on tools that are antithetical to markets: taxpayer subsidies and violations of rural residents' property rights.  read more »

Water's value increases as it becomes scarcer. Elizabeth Brubaker, executive director of Environment Probe, says an accurate water pricing system is the best way to promote water conservation.  read more »