2006 Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey

Pricing Summary Database - Summary Tables

Methodology

The Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey (MWWS) has been conducted every 2-3 years since the early 1980s. In 2001 and earlier it was called the Municipal Water Use and Pricing Survey and Databases (MUD/MUP). Starting with the 2004 survey, the MWWS took the place of the MUD/MUP.

The MWWS is a Canada-wide (excluding federal lands) survey of all local jurisdictions (i.e. municipalities) with populations over 1000 and a sample (630 in 2006) of municipalities with fewer than 1000 residents.

Flow chart demonstrating how the seven sections of the 2006 Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey (MWWS) are connected.

The survey consists of up to seven relatively short surveys targeted to specific authorities. The first survey is general in nature and is aimed at jurisdictional (i.e., municipal) office clerks. It has two main purposes; 1) to determine which jurisdictions have systems or facilities, and 2) to provide the number and names of systems and facilities along with contacts thereof, with the goal of facilitating efficient collection of detailed information in the other sections of the survey.

Response Rates

Response rates to the pricing portion of the 2006 survey varied considerably, depending on the question. The survey responses were supplemented with call-backs to municipalities and Internet searches for readily available information. Information from all these sources was compiled in the 2006 MWWS pricing summary database. For the first time, responses from the communities with fewer than 1000 residents were included in this database and in the summary tables. However, the data is comparable to statistics from before their inclusion as any effect on the aggregate statistics is negligible due to population weighting.

The pricing portion of the 2006 survey collected information from 456 municipalities, accounting for 21.4 million Canadian residents (Table 18). Using the previous survey database to impute for non-response from the 2004 and 2001 survey data, the total population covered was raised to 24.1 million residents in 732 Canadian municipalities, accounting for just fewer than 80% of the surveyed population of 30.7 million residents. This is a smaller population than was accounted for in the water use portion of the survey (see Municipal Water Use, 2006 Statistics).

Municipal Aggregation

Pricing data is collected at the water and wastewater system level. As in 2004, due to the complexity of the online MWWS database combined with varying rates of response in the pricing section, the pricing data was aggregated to the municipal level for analysis. The data used to create the 2006 Summary Tables reflects the costs and rate types of only the water and sewer systems serving the most people in each municipality. This means that some of the lesser used rate structures have been omitted from the municipal-level data. However, in the vast majority of municipalities this had minimal or no effect and, due to population weighting, it had very minimal overall effect on the representative quality of the statistics presented here. For complete individual municipal responses, see the Search/Report page of the MWWS website.

Summary Data

  • The cost of water and sewer service combined is represented in Tables 4 to 10 and 15. Tables 11 and 12 report sewer service costs separately.
  • All tables except Table 17 include data from the 2006 survey and imputed data from the 2004 and 2001 surveys. Table 17 also contains imputed data from the 1999 survey.
  • All prices and volumes are per month and per cubic metre (m3), unless otherwise indicated.
  • Most water statistics presented in the summary tables are weighted by the population served water to make them more representative of the Canadian population. Similarly, in Table 12 the mean price for sewer service is weighted by the population served by sanitary sewers.
  • As in 2004, the multi-family data was excluded from the summary database, due to low response.
  • In 2006 for the first time there is a separate variable for the “base charge” paid by some customers in conjunction with their volumetric rates. The base charge also represents the cost of any “minimum volume” included in a water bill. This base charge is different than the stand-alone “flat rates” charged in areas without volumetric rates. In the excel database the “flat rate” (MIN_METR) column represents both the flat rates and base charges – it gives the cost of the base charge when the rate type is volumetric (CUC, IBR, DBR), and of the flat rate charge when the rate type is Flat.
  • The expanded water conservation measures survey question was again included in the summary database, as was done in 2004.
  • Data on water and wastewater revenue and expenditures was excluded from the 2006 summary database due to low response.

2006 Pricing Tables: PDF; 274 KB