OTTAWA - Canadian municipalities will have to bring their leaky sewage treatment plants up to snuff under new regulations to be unveiled by the Harper government later this year.

The new rules will set performance benchmarks, timelines and monitoring and reporting requirements for the country's 4,000 wastewater facilities, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Thursday in Saint John, N.B.

The regulations will cover all wastewater systems operated by municipalities, the provincial and federal governments, and those on federal or aboriginal lands.

"All jurisdictions will now have to maintain, update, or develop new regulatory tools to implement the Canada-wide strategy," Prentice said, according to a copy of the speech provided by his office.

"We have the strategy. We intend to enforce it with the powers of the Fisheries Act to protect the health of Canadians and the environment."

Facilities that can't afford the upgrades or repairs can apply to Ottawa's infrastructure fund or borrow from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Prentice said.

The government will publish draft regulations in December, which will be revised and finalized next year.

A soggy summer in some parts of the country has pushed sanitary and storm sewers to the limit.

Heavy rainfall in Ottawa has clogged city drains and spilled nearly 500 million litres of sewage into the Ottawa River. Beaches have been closed because of high levels of bacteria.

Oyster and quahog fishing was banned along a six-kilometre stretch of Prince Edward Island's East River in June after a sewage leak was discovered at a treatment facility in a nearby trailer park.

Politicians in Victoria, B.C., recently approved a plan to build four treatment plants to handle the millions of litres of raw sewage the city and surrounding suburbs now dump every day into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

And a recent report by the environmental group Ecojustice analyzed figures from Ontario's Ministry of the Environment and found billions of litres of untreated sewage have been dumped into the province's waterways.