Calgary removed fluoride from its water supply. A decade later, it’s adding it back
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, has said he would advise the United States to remove fluoride from drinking water if confirmed. Experts say that adding fluoride to the water supply prevents cavities, while other studies suggest high levels of fluoride can lower a child’s IQ – but that was only at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
In 2011, Calgary City Council member Gian-Carlo Carra and a majority of his colleagues voted to remove fluoride from the Canadian city’s water supply. About a decade later, they reversed course after residents wanted to put it back. I caught up with Councilman Carra this week to get a sense of why residents wanted the chemical removed in the first place and what happened once it was gone. He told me the story started during his first run for office more than a decade ago.
GIAN-CARLO CARRA: As I was knocking on doors, I was amazed at how many people, totally unsolicited, expressed the fact that they wanted fluoride out of their water. I didn’t know a lot about it. It wasn’t an area of expertise for me, but it was definitely something that I heard. And when I got to City Hall, all of my colleagues reported having heard that pretty firmly at the doors. And when we walked into our budget cycle, which is – you know, you’re drinking from the fire hose, getting elected.
SUMMERS: Right.
CARRA: And two weeks later (laughter), you’re managing a $4 billion a year operating budget. We were informed by our water services department that our fluoride injection system was caput. We were looking at $20 million to re-up it and, you know, about a million dollars a year in operating costs. And so there was an instant conversation about, well, here’s a place where we can react to the public and save some money and prove that government’s listening. And we made a decision.
SUMMERS: And once the city removed fluoride, what started to happen then?
CARRA: Well, we’ve had 10 years. And what we know is that the rate of dental caries has increased significantly more than the rate of dental caries was increasing before. And I think another meta study came out also, in that 10-year period, that looked at all the other studies and made it pretty clear that, yeah – there probably are meaningful benefits. I will say, don’t in any way think that fluoridating the water is going to stop, you know, low-income kids who don’t have access to dental care and don’t have good dental hygiene habits inside the home’s teeth from rotting out of their faces, but you are going to affect a significant, rounding improvement on a general approach to dental health and public health.
And so a move was put onto the ballot, and a majority of the population, you know, in an age of anti-science and weaponized disinformation, said, no, we want this. And so we decided to put it in. It was one of the first things we did in the 2021 budget, right after getting elected, and it’s taken until the first quarter of 2025. So we don’t have it back in. It’s a very complicated thing.
SUMMERS: What have you learned from going through this experience? And what do you think other policymakers can take away from what you and your colleagues have seen there?
CARRA: I’ve experienced, over my 14 years on council, this, you know, global decline into a politics of anger, fear and division – you know, weaponized misinformation, huge amounts of propaganda taking place. I think the metanarrative is that I was – and a lot of my colleagues were – significantly offput by this sort of, like, anti-science conspiracy theory ascendancy. And so that was also a place where we were interested in, you know, both testing the will of the public, but also standing up for science because we live in wild times now, where you go onto the internet, and people are – with absolutely no training and no scientific capacity – are opining on things they absolutely don’t understand and significantly moving public opinion. So, you know, I’m incredibly gratified that, you know, the public voted for it, gave us, you know, a very clear mandate. And I’m glad that, you know, we’re trying our best to follow science in an age of weaponized disinformation.
SUMMERS: That was Calgary City Council member Gian-Carlo Carra. Thank you so much.
CARRA: Thank you.
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