Montreal will no longer add fluoride to its water system after municipal officials heeded the call of a petition launched by an island resident and on recommendation from the city’s water department.
The petition was also supported by Robert F. Kennedy, who was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next US health secretary.
The decision was made by a council representing Montreal and its suburban municipalities on Thursday, ending a practice of water treatment since the 1950s.
However, some suburban mayors say they weren’t consulted during the process and some residents are calling the decision undemocratic.
“The City of Montreal took this decision to be coherent,” said councillor Maja Vodanovic ahead of Thursday’s vote. “We’re doing it in the best interest of all.”
The Montreal water department said it first received a “citizen petition” about the issue launched by resident Ray Coelho in 2020.
Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle disagrees with Coelho, calling him a “far-right extremist,” adding that he doesn’t put “a lot of credibility on petitions.”
Despite Bourelle’s view of Coelho, only two of Montreal’s six water treatment plants use fluoride, which serves 5% of the island’s population across six suburbs in the city’s West Island.
“I’ve spoken to RFK on a few occasions, he congratulated me on ending fluoridation in Montreal,” wrote Coelho in a social media post earlier this month.
Kennedy alleges that fluoride is an “industrial waste” that can be linked to several health problems and that he plans to remove the mineral from the U.S. water supply entirely under the Trump administration.
According to the city water department, it costs around $100,000 annually to fluoridate the water at the two treatment plants and it has resulted in several shutdowns over health concerns for workers handling the chemicals.
Additionally, only one other municipality in Quebec adds fluoride to its water.
However, Montreal is not alone in its decisions as the town of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia also recently announced plans to remove hydrofluorosilicic acid from the water supply following a council vote.
The council cited that there are no studies that indicate conclusive data on the use of fluoride in delivering safe, potable drinking water.
The Government of Canada states that some “scientific findings have corroborated the preventive effects of fluoride on tooth decay,” which “helps reduce the cavity-causing effect of foods and bacteria.”
This was most notably championed by U.S. dentists F. McKay and G. V. Black who in 1909 initiated a 15-year follow-up study in one Colorado town and “observed very low caries rates among residents who had access to drinking water with a naturally high level of fluoride.”
Community water fluoridation is the process of “monitoring and adjusting the fluoride level in drinking water to the optimal level for caries prevention.”
The government reported that approximately 14.4 million Canadians (38.8%) were drinking from CWF water systems in 2022, meaning the majority of the population was consuming water without this process.
“We don’t think that something like fluoride should be put in 100% of the water,” said Vodanovic, who noted that Montrealers only drink 1% of the portable water produced by the city.
