Beckwith, Ontario is just one town where TCE in the water has people really worried. Rob and Cathy Pretty moved to Beckwith three years ago. They've been drinking only bottled water for more than a year now.

"I couldn't believe that," Rob Petty says. "We moved into a brand new house in a brand new subdivision and twenty months later somebody drops me off a letter telling me that my water is unusable. I'm still in shock today when I think about it."

Cathy Pretty is concerned about the water they were using before they were notified about Beckwith's water problems. She was a few months' pregnant when they moved in. She drank a lot of water, bathed her daughter, and mixed water with formula when her son was born.

"So I was thinking was I polluting my child? Was I going to make him sick somewhere down the line?"

Trichloroethylene is a metal degreaser still widely used inindustry. In the 1960s and 1970s, TCE was commonly dumped in landfills and occasionally spilled in industrial accidents. It's been seeping into groundwater ever since. That's how TCE got into the drinking water of thousands of Canadians who rely on wells.

If you saw the movie A Civil Action, you've heard of Woburn, Massachusetts, where TCE was blamed for the high cancer rate.

Toxicologist Poh Gek Forkert is an expert on the effects of trichloroethylene on the human body. He says TCE is "a carcinogen in the liver, in the kidney, in the lung. As well, it causes upon exposure prostate cancer, cervical cancer."

When TCE was found in a municipal well in Barrie, Ontario, the mayor, Jim Perri, ordered it shut down.

In Shannon, Quebec, high TCE levels prompted officials to hand out water filters. But there's still no permanent solution.

"We should become more vigilant in monitoring its presence, especially in drinking water," Forkert told Marketplace.

But Health Canada appears to be less concerned about TCE. "We've had some information provided to us to show that there is some TCE contamination in some drinking water supplies but the levels are quite low," Health Canada's Steve Clarkson told Marketplace. "They are considerably below the drinking water quality guideline that Health Canada set in conjunction with its provincial partners."

Health Canada's guideline allows for no more than 50 parts per billion of TCE in drinking water. It's a guideline — not a law. It's also the highest allowable limit of any country that has set allowable limits.

Thousands of Canadians rely on tainted water: study

Marketplace obtained a Health Canada study conducted in 1995. It reveals that 14,000 Canadians had been drinking water with TCE at levels above the guideline. The study looked at about 25 per cent of Canadians who were using wells. The study has never been publicly released. You can read about it here.

While many of the contaminated sites in the study have now been cleaned up or wells closed, the study gives a glimpse into how much TCE was in ground water in Canada before 1995.

Among the study's findings:

• 28 sites had TCE levels above 50 ppb — including
• Amherst, Nova Scotia
• Fredericton, New Brunswick
• Ville Mercier, Quebec
• Rockwood, Manitoba

In each of the above cases, the TCE-contaminated wells were abandoned or cleaned up.

The study did not look at Beckwith or Shannon, where TCE was found since 1995.