PFAS drinking water rules in British Columbia, the agency and citation behind them, how they compare to the Health Canada Objective of 30 nanograms per litre for the sum of 25 PFAS compounds, and the federal sites in British Columbia where the Government of Canada has recorded PFAS as a contaminant of concern.
This is the Canada view of the North American PFAS dataset. The complete dataset, including all 3,452 US systems and 97 Canadian sites, lives on the main PFAS contamination map.
Guidance value only
BC adopts the Health Canada 2018 PFOA and PFOS drinking water values and applies an additive sum-of-ratios test where both are present. No approved BC freshwater aquatic life guideline for PFOA or PFOS appears in the current approved guideline summary, and Schedule 3.2 of the Contaminated Sites Regulation contains no PFAS line items. Earlier versions of this tracker listed a 6.8 ng/L PFOS aquatic life guideline and CSR PFAS standards. Neither could be located in the source documents and both were removed.
Compound
Limit (ng/L)
Note
PFOA (source drinking water)
200
BC adopts the Health Canada 2018 value
PFOS (source drinking water)
600
BC adopts the Health Canada 2018 value
PFOS + PFOA
Not numeric
Sum of ratios to each guideline should not exceed 1
BC ENV — Source Drinking Water Quality Guidelines (WQG-01)
Health Canada Objective for PFAS in Drinking Water (2024)
Last reviewed 2026-08-13. Verify against the agency source before making a compliance or remediation decision.
From the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory, ordered by federal priority classification. The inventory records which contaminants are present at each federal site, not the measured concentrations, so these entries show where PFAS has been identified rather than how much was found.
Custodian departments in British Columbia: MOT (7), National Defence (3).
Site
Municipality
Custodian
Classification
Status
Media affected
Comox
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil
Prince George
MOT
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Sandspit Airport Former Fire Training Area (PFAS)
North Coast E
MOT
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Victoria Airport PFAS Stockpile
North Saanich
MOT
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Williams Lake Airport Former Fire Training Areas
Williams Lake
MOT
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil
Penticton Airport Former Fire Training Area (PFAS)
Penticton
MOT
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Penticton Airport Future EMB and North Apron Expansion
Penticton
MOT
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil
Port Hardy
MOT
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Colwood
National Defence
Suspected
Not Available
DND Rocky Point – PFAS Sitewide
Metchosin
National Defence
Suspected
Not Available
Open the full map and filter British Columbia pins
The map is built from the US EPA Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a United States programme. Canada has no equivalent national monitoring dataset for PFAS in drinking water. Sampling is run by provincial regulators and individual utilities, and results are published in their own reporting. The regulatory detail above is compiled from the BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy source listed in the citations.
Every count above is read straight from a published government file. Nothing is modelled, averaged, or estimated. The rules below are the exact rules used to produce the figures for British Columbia.
Open the inventory source page
EPA UCMR 5 does not apply. UCMR 5 is a United States drinking water programme, so it produces no results for British Columbia. No US figure is reused or scaled to stand in for Canadian data.
Which sites are listed. Inventory records whose province field is BC and that carry the PFAS contaminant code. That gives 10 sites in British Columbia.
Site records, not samples. The inventory reports site status, classification, custodian, and affected media. It does not publish drinking water concentrations, so there is no Canadian equivalent of the US nanogram per litre figures.
Reporting lag. Custodian departments update their records on their own schedule, so a site may have progressed since it was last reported.
Limits and rules. The British Columbia standard shown above comes from BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, Source Drinking Water Quality Guidelines (WQG-01), sections 1.39 and 1.40, reviewed 2026-08-13.
If any figure on this page does not match its source file, tell Nelson and it will be corrected or removed.
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