Blue Friday with the Water Watchers

From the Canadian Blue Community Water Watchers:

💧 BLUE FRIDAY SAVINGS YOU WON’T BELIEVE 💧

1.72 Billion litres of water saved.

135,159 Decision-maker impressions.

383,114 Actions taken to protect water.

As we approach the most consumer-driven day of the year, we are celebrating BLUE Friday by leaning into the power of water savings over water-consumption and profiteering. What better way to celebrate water than sharing impact highlights from our 2025 water protection work?!

Those jaw-dropping numbers are just some of what the Water Watchers community accomplished together in 2025. Water Watchers empowers people & communities to work in solidarity towards social justice through the unifying lens of water. We believe people power and grassroots organizing are at the heart of the solutions we need to ensure water is protected now and into the future.

And, oh folks, did we ever live into that vision in 2025!

Explore Our Collective Impact in 2025

The water needed you and you showed up!

Across our on-going campaigns and our real-time, responsive actions confronting harmful environmental policies and decisions, we were able to MAKE WAVES for water protection in 2025. From fighting fossil fuel expansion to supporting groundwater conservation and beyond, our community proved without a doubt that WATER IS LIFE.

End Bottled Water

With Nestlé fleeing North America in 2021 and Blue Triton exiting shortly after in 2024, the End Bottled Water campaign looked a little different this year. We found ourselves responding to blatant attacks across North America on water protection & water rights under the guise of streamlining environmental policies.

Together, we garnered a total of 52,432 decision-maker impressions and engaged more than 30,000 people across the Great Lakes region in the fight for water justice.

Stop Salt Pollution

Salt is a forever contaminant that remains in the water forever, but we don’t need salt to keep winters safe and navigable, so we’ve been working to win significant provincial policy change that will stop salt at the source and protect our shared waters, including drinking water sources and ecosystems that aquatic species depend on for life.

This year, we reached decision-makers over 6,000 times with our joint advocacy, including engagement from almost 19,000 people across the Province.

Indigenous Solidarity

Indigenous peoples have lived in close, reciprocal relationship with their local lands and waters for millennia. They are the communities who know what it means to be in right relationship with the ecosystems we depend on for life and solidarity helps ensure our waters will support life for generations to come.

We helped raise $11,603, mobilized almost 20,000 people, and helped make 30,000 decision-maker impressions through Indigenous solidarity initiatives in 2025.

End Line 5

The Line 5 pipeline, which runs through the heart of the Great Lakes, was built to last 50 years. Today, Line 5 is almost 74 years old, and it has spilled millions of litres of fossil fuels into the Great Lakes basin. Indigenous Nations across the Great Lakes Watershed want to see an End to Line 5 and so do we.

This year, we’ve engaged over 140,000 people around the Great Lakes and made almost 70,000 decision-makers impressions to fight Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline expansion plans.

Building the Future We Want:

Why We Want to Launch the first non-profit Mobile Drinking Water Unit Program

Even through the positivity of all the amazing work that happened in 2025, we also got some really challenging news. Blue Triton, who announced they were leaving water bottling in Ontario last year, sold the former Nestlé water-bottling site for over $60 million to Ice River Springs, a Canadian water bottling company with deep pockets and interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

We have big work coming to resist this continued water profiteering, including being ready to mobilize Ontarians when Ice River has to renew water-taking permits in 2026. Between now and then, we need to build power towards our ultimate goal of ending permits for water bottling in this province.

With this goal in mind, we also started asking ourselves a different question this year….

“What would it look like to not just resist water profiteering, but to also proactively build toward a future without bottled water?”

The collective dreaming we’ve done around this question has resulted in the emergence of an exciting new chapter for Water Watchers. One where we don’t just say, “Water for life, not profit”, but bring the reality to life.

We are thrilled to announce our intention to launch a new program in Spring 2026: the Mobile Drinking Water Unit Program!

To support a world with drinking water access and without bottled water, we want to bring other solutions for water access forward, starting with establishing a new program: Water Watchers’ Mobile Drinking Water Unit.

A Mobile Drinking Water Unit is a trailer that can hold 4,700 litres of water and can travel anywhere a car can go. It doesn’t require power, so it can provide water access in remote places or during acute water crises, as well as at events – whether recreational or part of our advocacy for the environment!

Targeting areas around the Great Lakes, we imagine the Mobile Drinking Water Unit will support water access:

for Indigenous peoples without drinking water access
at demonstrations like sit-ins, climate rallies, and justice marches
at large gatherings, like festivals, concerts, and athletic events
for acute water access crises, such as water shut-offs or contamination events
for people experiencing homelessness
…and so much more!

While we continue advocating for 100% public drinking water access for all, the mobile drinking water unit will be a great example solution for drinking water access that’s flexible and eco-friendly, showing we don’t need bottled water – just a mobile water trailer and community coming together. We hope you’ll help us make this vision a lived reality and get out the message that water is for life, not profit!

HELP MAKE PLASTIC-FREE WATER ACCESS A REALITY!

Our fundraising from now until the end of January will all focus around helping this dream become a reality: a world in which the principles of mutual aid are the source of our resilience and adaptability.

When our governments fail us and investment in public drinking water access falters, we don’t let them off the hook. We continue the pressure, but we also engage at the community level to support one another – bringing beautiful, clean drinking water where needed. This is what launching a Mobile Drinking Water Program means to us: showing the transformative power of community-led solutions while building our collective power to hold decision-makers to account on water justice issues.

Mobile Drinking Water Unit Promo

Donate Here Now!

It is absolutely incredible what such a lean organization like ours can do through the power of community. These impacts are not just reflective of our staff’s work. They are rooted in the actions of all the individual supporters who call themselves Water Watchers.

These impacts are yours. Thank you to each and every one of you who made these impacts possible in 2025.

Water has always and will always connect us all. We can’t wait to continue to deepen those connections with you, our incredible supporters, through our shared water advocacy work as we wrap up this monumental year and prepare to greet 2026 with our sleeves rolled up, working hand-in-hand to resist threats to water and build a more just future together.

With Gratitude,
Water Watchers

PS – Want to support, but need a tax receipt? You can make a tax-deductible donation to ‘Water For Life’ through our charitable partnership with Small Change Fund here!