This is the seventh time the issue has been put to a vote since the 1950s; of the six previous votes, four rejected the practice and two favoured fluoridation.  In 1991, the city council added the chemical to the water, but twenty years later, in 2011, they voted to remove it.  They did so because of the extremely high cost combined with the government’s acknowledgement that children were being overexposed to fluoride on a massive scale, causing a lowering of the recommended fluoride level in water by 40% from 1.2ppm to 0.7ppm. 

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The dental lobby then spent years bullying the council, as well as misleading the public about a flawed study that claimed to show an increase in dental decay in Calgarians after fluoridation cessation.  Their pressure culminated in a 2019 council hearing on water fluoridation to hear public testimony and a review of the science by the O’Brien Institute for Public Health.  During that presentation, Dr. William Ghali, MD described the growing science on the cognitive effects of fluoride (see additional testimony). Since this hearing, additional high-quality studies have been published linking fluoride exposure during pregnancy and infancy to neurotoxicity (Riddell 2019, Till 2020, Grandjean 2020, Grandjean 2021, Cantoral 2021). This should have been the end, however, the city council was unwilling to let down the dental-lobby, so they chose to defer the decision to voters. 

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Safe Water Calgary is leading the campaign to keep fluoridation chemicals out of Calgary’s water.  We are a well-organized and all-volunteer group of local citizens including concerned parents and professionals, led by Dr. Bob Dickson, MD.  We have been utilizing both traditional and modern campaign strategies, including distributing yard signs, handing out leaflets at local events, sending out mail inserts, generating earned media, and creating advertisements for various social media sites, radio, and news outlets.  

 

Follow us on Facebook to see some of our ads and memes.  If you live in Calgary, please vote NO on the plebiscite, tell your friends and family to vote NO and please volunteer.  We need "all hands on deck" to help with a variety of tasks, so please don't hesitate if you have any extra time between now and October 18th.  Just email: safewatercalgary@gmail.com

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Please make a donation today, to help fund more advertising time, as well as the printing of more signs, leaflets, and door hangers. We need to educate hundreds-of-thousands of voters in such a short period of time.  
DONATE TODAY

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A Local Campaign With A Global Impact

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While the decision in Calgary will have a direct impact on residents within the city and surrounding communities, there is little doubt that it will also have a much broader impact, especially throughout Canada.

 

Canada’s medical and dental establishments, and especially Health Canada, have been blatantly pro-fluoridation. In spite of that, Canada has been one of the western world's biggest success stories. Many of its cities and communities have stopped fluoridation in the past few decades, and some provinces like British Columbia and Quebec are 98% fluoridation-free.

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Now, fluoridationists are working aggressively to reverse our momentum. They convinced the city council in Windsor, Ontario to re-instate fluoridation last year, and weeks ago they lobbied the Regina, Saskatchewan city council behind the scenes to vote for fluoridation with almost no public notice or input. This is about far more than Calgary. If they win here, they will roll out their efforts all over Canada, making it far more difficult for citizens everywhere to keep or make their water safe for all citizens.