Regina’s city council voted 7 to 3 to reject a proposal to postpone the addition of fluoride to the city’s water supply in 2026.
The decision to add fluoride to Regina’s water was approved in 2021. However, implementation was delayed until upgrades were completed on the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant. That project is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year with the introduction of fluoride set for January 2026.
City Coun. Clark Bezo introduced a motion on March 5 to postpone adding fluoride to the water supply until there is “conclusive evidence” that fluoride has “no significant neurotoxic effects or other bodily harms.”
Council discussed and voted on the issue in a 10-hour meeting on May 2, during which they listened to opinions both supporting and opposing the addition of fluoride to the water supply. Bezo previously
told The Epoch Times that fluoridation was an issue he heard on the campaign trail leading up to Regina’s municipal election on Nov. 13, 2024.
Shobna Radons, Bezo, and Dan Rashovich were the three councillors to vote in favour of postponing the move.
Other Saskatchewan cities have fluoride in their drinking water, including Saskatoon and Prince Albert.
A panel of experts assembled by Health Canada in 2023 said an increasing amount of evidence points to a potential link between fluoride in drinking water and lower IQ scores in children, particularly at fluoride concentrations that could be found in Canadian drinking water. The panel determined there was insufficient evidence to recommend a specific threshold and health-based value for the “neurocognitive effects” of fluoride in drinking water.
Montreal-area mayors and councillors
voted in 2024 to end water fluoridation at two West Island drinking water plants, pointing to low human consumption of the drinking water, with about one percent of residents consuming the water, according to the city’s water department. It also said fluoride had a corrosive effect on city infrastructure.
As Montreal voted to remove fluoride, Calgary recently voted to add it back to its water system.
Calgary first added fluoride to its water supply in 1991, then removed it in 2011. A local plebiscite in 2021 resulted in 62 percent support for fluoridation, and city council voted to reintroduce it.
Fluoride is set to be introduced in the later part of the second quarter of 2025, the city
said,
adding that it will notify the public four weeks beforehand once it has confirmed a date.In the United States, a federal judge
ruled last year that fluoride levels set by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) pose an “unreasonable risk” of lowering children’s IQ levels.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen said his decision did not “conclude with certainty” that fluoride is “injurious to public health,” but found an “unreasonable risk of such injury” sufficient to require the EPA to “engage with a regulatory response,” without specifying what that response should be.
