Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition has released report which ‘brings together local data and maps to surface some of the tensions many community development plans leave out’.
Margaret Prophet Mar 22, 2026 9:00 AM
With today being World Water Day, it is worth remembering how central water is to our daily lives.
If you live in Simcoe County, there is a good chance your tap water comes from the ground. According to Simcoe County’s water and wastewater servicing analysis, more than 80 per cent of municipalities in the area, including Barrie and Orillia, rely on groundwater for drinking water to some degree. Fifty per cent of the municipalities in the region rely on groundwater exclusively.
This water filters slowly through soil in forests, farmlands and wetlands before collecting in the underground aquifers where we pump from. In our region, this process can take up to months for shallow aquifers or up to several decades to centuries for deeper, more confined aquifers.
Most of us turn on the tap and never think much about it. And that’s exactly the problem.
In honour of World Water Day, the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition released Holding Water, a report that brings together local data and maps to surface some of the tensions many community development plans leave out: the interconnected water infrastructure beneath and around us, the pressure we are putting on it through our decisions, and the gap between what we know and what we’re accounting for.
What the maps show is a remarkable system, but one that needs better attention and understanding. Simcoe County sits on some of the most water-rich landscapes in Ontario full of moraines, wetlands, coastal shorelines, recharge areas, and aquifers that have sustained communities here for generations. For example, the Oro Moraine supplies drinking water for 25,000 people. The Minesing Wetlands are internationally significant and just as important internationally as the Florida Everglades. In the Lake Simcoe region alone, these types of systems deliver an estimated $922 million in ecosystem services annually, including flood protection, water filtration, and groundwater recharge. In exchange, these systems don’t ask for a capital budget, a raise in taxes, or a maintenance crew — just protection to allow them to serve their function.
What the maps also show is these watershed systems are under mounting pressure, but our planning system wasn’t built to see it whole.
Development is expanding across recharge areas — the lands that refill our aquifers. Wetlands that buffer our rivers and filter our water have had their protections downgraded, opening more chances for them to be lost. The conservation authorities that once helped govern these systems have had their mandates narrowed and could potentially be merged. And there is currently no comprehensive, publicly accessible, up-to-date accounting of how much water is being withdrawn from Simcoe County’s aquifers, how fast recharge is happening under a changing climate, or where our system’s actual limits are.
Water signals damage slowly, which is what makes it so easy to defer, and so costly when we finally can’t.
The Region of Waterloo is a cautionary example. Similar to Simcoe County, the region depends heavily on groundwater. Now, due to water shortages, it is pausing development while it figures out where future water supply will come from. That reckoning, which will be years in the making and economically significant, is what it looks like when you consider water too late in the process.
Our Holding Water report isn’t a call to panic or stop all development; it’s a pragmatic call for collaboration and community stewardship of our water systems. We have an opportunity to respond to the data, not react to it when a crisis comes. We can view our decisions through a water security lens so we don’t inadvertently lock in consequences for future generations they can’t undo.
Every community in Simcoe County has a stake in what this report outlines. What it shows us so clearly is we’ve inherited a commons rich with water that is worth protecting — and that is well within our reach.
