Few of us are leaders. But when the occasion presents, some people, simply by doing their jobs with care and diligence, demonstrate a quiet leadership. The Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Health Unit and its Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Murray McQuigge, showed such leadership in the afternoon of Sunday May 21 when they issued a boil-water advisory to the 5000 residents of Walkerton, Ont. Acting without much evidence that the municipality's water system was contaminated (and, in fact, with assurances from the local public utilities commission that it wasn't), McQuigge sounded the alarm.

His report of the epidemic of E. coli O157:H7 infection that resulted in over 2300 cases of illness and 7 deaths makes for grimly fascinating reading.² It reveals, for example, the quiet leadership of Dr. Kristen Hallett, an Owen Sound pediatrician who reported the first 2 cases of bloody diarrhea to the health unit. Correctly interpreted, as it turns out, by the health unit staff, her report led to a search for other cases. By the end of the day, the health unit had uncovered another 14 cases of diarrhea severe enough to receive medical attention and had begun to look for causes.

Environmental contamination of ground water and inadequate drinking water quality are not new problems. In Walkerton, for example, it was known to the town and successive provincial governments since at least 1980 that some of the town's wells were contaminated with surface water and had unacceptable bacterial levels.² If this problem exists in Walkerton, it undoubtedly exists in many other small municipalities — and not just in Ontario. In addition, about 20% of private wells in Canada do not meet minimal standards for bacterial contamination.

The unstoppable trend toward the globalization of just about everything, coupled with a tendency for Western governments to decentralize powers to regional levels, works fine for some aspects of our lives. But most of us are not very "global." We all live in specific places, in local environments, and we must attend to those environments. We must not abandon our municipalities to global competition and the increasingly multinational and rootless private sector.

Federal and provincial governments are being swept along by these trends without fully recognizing the implications for public safety and health and for their own roles and responsibilities. It is just not good enough to devolve governance to the private sector without adequate regulation, monitoring and accountability.