Today a committee of the Calgary City Council voted to recommend that the city stop adding fluoride to Calgary’s drinking water, and I have no idea if that was a wise decision or not. To be honest until recently I had never given much thought to fluoride but we heard many people in the city talk about how adding fluoride to the drinking water was a very important and effective strategy to improve the oral health of people living in poverty. The science is confusing, at least it is confusing to me, and after I watched a number of presentations to council today I think I am even more confused. My level of confusion does not matter now, if the decision is made to remove fluoride from the drinking water it will save about $750 000 a year and somewhere between four and five million dollars in upgrade costs to the fluoridation facilities.

Surely this money would need to be spent in ways that will positively impact people living in poverty, since that was one of the main reasons it was introduced into the water in the first place. Should that money be spent to provide dental care to people living in poverty? Maybe it should, and if so the VCC team would be happy to help Council develop and implement such a program. If it were up to VCC though, we would prefer to see that money used to reduce poverty in the city. Let’s remember that we have 140 000 Calgarians living in poverty and we know without a doubt that the only way to really change that is through a comprehensive Poverty Reduction Strategy. The money that was saved by today’s decision would be well spent in starting down a road towards drastically reducing poverty in our city and that would surely be something that VCC, and many Calgarians, would be interested in working toward.