PFAS drinking water rules in Nova Scotia, 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 Nova Scotia 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.
Provincial standard
Nova Scotia publishes numeric Tier I Environmental Quality Standards for individual PFAS in potable groundwater, applied through the contaminated sites program. Values above are converted from the published µg/L table. Drinking water systems work to the Health Canada Objective. Shearwater and Greenwood CFB investigations drive much of the provincial PFAS response.
Compound
Limit (ng/L)
Note
PFOA (potable groundwater)
200
Tier I EQS, all land uses
PFOS (potable groundwater)
600
Tier I EQS, all land uses
PFHxS (potable groundwater)
600
Tier I EQS, all land uses
PFNA (potable groundwater)
20
Tier I EQS, all land uses
PFBS (potable groundwater)
15,000
Tier I EQS, all land uses
PFBA (potable groundwater)
30,000
Tier I EQS, all land uses
Sum of 25 PFAS (drinking water)
30
Health Canada Objective
NS ECC — Table 4A Tier I EQS for Groundwater (October 2022)
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 Nova Scotia: National Defence (5), MOT (1).
Site
Municipality
Custodian
Classification
Status
Media affected
12 Wing Shearwater PFAS Site-Wide
Halifax
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil, Surface water
14 Wing Greenwood Site-Wide PFAS
Kings, Subd. A
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil, Surface water
Barrington
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Sediment, Soil, Surface soil, Surface water
DCD School (907) - Fire Fighting Training Area
Halifax
National Defence
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Sediment, Soil, Surface water
Halifax Airport Former Fire Training Area
Halifax
MOT
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
HMC Dockyard Halifax PFAS Sitewide
Halifax
National Defence
Suspected
Not Available
Open the full map and filter Nova Scotia 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 Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change 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 Nova Scotia.
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 Nova Scotia. No US figure is reused or scaled to stand in for Canadian data.
Which sites are listed. Inventory records whose province field is NS and that carry the PFAS contaminant code. That gives 6 sites in Nova Scotia.
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 Nova Scotia standard shown above comes from Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change, Table 4A — Tier I Environmental Quality Standards for Groundwater, Potable Groundwater Condition (October 2022), 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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