Sometimes, going rogue is the only way to get things done
For years, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Montreal, would go to public places to gather drinking water samples, and test them at his lab for harmful PFAS chemicals. He uncovered widespread contamination that otherwise might never have been revealed.
February 12th 2025
For years, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Montreal, would go to public places, like Tim Horton’s, with an empty water bottle in his jacket. Sauvé would make his way back to the bathroom sink and fill his bottle — not to drink, but to take to his lab and test for harmful chemicals in Quebec’s drinking water.
Other members of Sauvé’s team did the same; a cloak-and-dagger approach to environmental science he said was necessary to publicize the results. He believes that he would still be waiting for permission from the province to test for “forever chemicals” in the drinking water, if he had formally requested municipal permission, he told Canada’s National Observer.
“I'd still be buried in paperwork with the cities, with the forms and the agreements on the confidentiality and what I could or could not do with the data,” he said.
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Instead, he went rogue. Late in the summer of 2018, he began to collect samples from water fountains at parks or libraries, taps in public washrooms, and indeed, coffee and doughnut chains, to find out how much PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, citizens were ingesting from common water sources. Risks of exposure to these substances include reproductive problems, developmental effects in children, increased risk of several cancers, and weakening of the immune system, including reduced vaccine response.
Back at his lab, Sauvé independently found five Quebec municipalities exceeded Health Canada's new proposed objective for safe levels of PFAS in drinking water, including alarmingly high levels along the St. Lawrence Valley, the most populated, developed area in Canada.
Had he followed the normal rules, Sauvé believes he “could never have published the data naming the cities.” Operating independently ensured he would have no binding agreements with any of the cities and could publicly release his findings, no matter how politically controversial.
“I've got total academic freedom.”
Growing understanding
Health Canada brought in stricter recommendations of 30 nanograms per litre (ng/L) for 25 specific PFAS in drinking water. But despite Sauvé’s worrisome discoveries, no provinces have adopted them. Drinking water is generally a provincial jurisdiction in Canada, so provinces are not mandated to follow the Health Canada recommendations.
For years, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Montreal, would go to public places to gather drinking water samples, then test them at his lab for harmful chemicals. PFAS
By contrast, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken a stricter approach, with much lower enforceable levels of six types of PFAS in drinking water than Canada, down to 10 or even 4 ng/L. U.S. public water systems must monitor for these PFAS, whereas in Canada, PFAS are not regularly monitored in provincial drinking water.
Sauvé’s work has pushed the boundaries and gradually raised public awareness about the need for governments to regulate PFAS. While Sauvé has published studies on PFAS since 2009, when he started, water quality regulations were more lax, and human health concerns from the group of chemicals were not yet mainstream, he said.
Early concerns about PFAS pertained to the health of wildlife, Sauvé explained.
“At the time, there was very little, if any, concern relative to human health.” Science had already accepted that PFAS bioaccumulate, or pile up in the organs of living creatures, in the food chain.
Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Montreal, at work in his lab. Photo by Bastien DoudaineSince then, understanding about human harms of PFAS has been rapidly evolving. Canada first regulated the manufacture, use, sale, and import of certain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances at the federal level in 2012. Six years later, in 2018, the first drinking water guidelines were issued for a few of the 4,700 types of chemicals in the PFAS family.
These days, citizens and officials alike are more likely to be aware of the risks associated with PFAS, as nearly 99 per cent of Canadians already have the substances in their blood, even in remote regions like the Arctic. Many of these entered Canada’s waterways by leaching out of landfills, airports, and military bases.
PFAS contamination from a military base in Bagotville, Que. uncovered by Sauvé, led to a $15.5-million environmental remediation project. This contamination came from PFAS-containing firefighting foams used for training and operations from the 1970s until the 2010s. While mostly phased out, the foam is still used for “emergencies,” even as contamination remains in the area’s surface water, soil, and groundwater on the base and surrounding area.
This is a nation-wide problem for cities near military bases in Canada, many of which show evidence of this exact kind of contamination. A few hours away from Sauvé’s work in Quebec, fishing advisories have been issued in the city of North Bay, Ont. where PFAS contamination is high, and citizens are worried about possible long-term health effects from their drinking water. PFAS pollution has also been found in Trenton, Ont., Winnipeg, Man., Moose Jaw, Sask., Edmonton, Alta., Gagetown, N.B., and many more places. The Canadian Environmental Law Association has identified several dozen of these PFAS-contaminated sites, which they call an “underrepresentation” based on how government agencies collect data.
According to the federal government, military bases conduct regular drinking-water tests in accordance with Health Canada’s guidelines. This routine testing does sometimes catch PFAS in water. Yet. increasingly, groups like Brats In The Battlefield in Gagetown, concerned about the lack of transparency and research, are demanding an independent public inquiry into harmful chemicals used on base.
“Why is it a chemistry professor’s work that identifies a drinking water system contaminated by a military base?” Sauvé asked the Standing Committee on National Defence at the House of Commons in Ottawa, Ont., in December 2024.
Sauvé presented his work and findings at one of four defence committee meetings tasked with investigating federal contaminated sites. Despite plans for further meetings and studies into contamination, committee work stopped in its tracks after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament early this year.
Sauvé says the commitment to eliminating PFAS from drinking water and protecting citizens must come from the provincial level.
“Provincial rules for drinking water for PFAS have not been updated to reflect the new science,” Sauvé said, since currently, there are no PFAS standards for drinking water in Québec, and PFAS analysis of drinking water systems is not mandatory. “The provinces could very easily just adopt [Health] Canada's recommendation, and they could include some of the more restrictive approaches of the U.S. EPA.”
February 12th 2025
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