Petition by RFK Jr. fan prompts Montreal council to end water fluoridation

MONTREAL — Municipal officials have opted to end water fluoridation on the Island of Montreal in a move spurred by a petition from a resident who claims he has the support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A council representing Montreal and the suburban municipalities on the island decided Thursday evening to stop putting fluoride in the water of six West Island suburbs that have been treating their water since the 1950s.

The city’s water department had recommended earlier this year that fluoridation be stopped, in part due to cost, though public health officials support the practice as an effective way to reduce tooth decay.

But mayors of the affected suburbs say they only learned of the city’s plan in September, years after the department began studying the issue. They say residents weren’t consulted and the process was undemocratic.

Ahead of the vote Thursday, Montreal city councillor Maja Vodanovic said the city wants the drinking water supply to be uniform across the island. “The City of Montreal took this decision to be coherent,” she said. “We’re doing it in the best interest of all.”

In a report dated March 2024, the water department says it began reconsidering the use of fluoride in the water supply after receiving a “citizen petition” in 2020. That petition was launched by resident Ray Coelho, who says his campaign was supported by Kennedy.

In a phone interview after the council’s decision, Coelho said he has spoken to Kennedy a few times, and that Kennedy congratulated him in a text message after the city’s plan became public last month. “He gave me moral support, which is good,” he said.

Coelho, a student at Concordia University in Montreal, said he was pleased with the outcome of Thursday’s council meeting. “I’m very happy,” he said. “It’s great, I can put my energy and time towards other things.”

Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who has been tapped by United States president-elect Donald Trump to be his health secretary, claims that fluoride is an “industrial waste” linked to a range of health problems, and has said the Trump administration will remove the mineral from the U.S. public water supply.

Coelho has an active social media presence, and he posts often about the Israel-Hamas war, calling Israel a “genocidal terrorist state.” He ran in the 2019 federal election for the now-defunct Canadian Nationalist Party, a far-right party that was deregistered by Elections Canada in 2022. He says he is no longer associated with the party and called his candidacy a “mistake.”

“I really question what type of due diligence Montreal does when they receive petitions,” said Heidi Ektvedt, mayor of Baie d’Urfé, one of the six affected suburbs. She said Coelho appears to be “inspired by conspiracy theories,” and said many of the residents in her suburb are “furious” about the city’s plan. “What’s going on in the United States should not creep into decision-making in our country,” she said.

Georges Bourelle, mayor of Beaconsfield, called Coelho a “far-right extremist,” and said he doesn’t put “a lot of credibility on petitions.” None of the affected communities, including Beaconsfield, has ever requested that fluoride be removed from its water, he said.

Only two of Montreal’s six water treatment plants use fluoride. Those two plants serve five per cent of the island’s population in six suburbs in Montreal’s West Island. There is only one other municipality in Quebec that puts fluoride in its water.

In its report, the water department says it costs about $100,000 a year to fluoridate the water at the two treatment plants. The city also refers to problems with the supply of fluoridation products in recent years that have led to shutdowns at the two plants and health concerns for workers handling the chemicals.

At the council meeting, Vodanovic said people drink only one per cent of the potable water produced by the city, while the rest is used for other purposes. “We don’t think that something like fluoride should be put in 100 per cent of the water,” she said.

The report acknowledges that major health organizations, including the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Health Canada, support putting fluoride in drinking water. Montreal’s regional public health directorate told the department in November 2023 it favours fluoridation. But the report says that health considerations are “beyond the scope of expertise of the water department.”

Bourelle and Ektvedt said they were only told about the city’s plan to stop putting fluoride in their communities’ water during a September meeting — four years after the water department received Coelho’s petition. Ektvedt said she was “speechless” when she learned of the recommendation.

“It is an undemocratic decision made by the City of Montreal,” Bourelle said. “It shows a complete lack of respect of the population affected.”

He said the affected suburbs have only a small percentage of the voting power on the council, calling the process “a flagrant example of abuse of power by the majority at the agglomeration council.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 21, 2024.

Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press