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The names of various acts and legislation pour from Albert Witteveen’s lips like water spewing from a faucet.
The farm environmental plan. Nutrient management legislation. Source water protection plans. And now, the Clean Water Act.
Witteveen has had no choice but to become well-versed in them all. He’s part of a group that took the fall after the Walkerton tainted-water tragedy.
He’s a farmer.
In the years since E. coli was found in the small southwestern Ontario town’s drinking water, Witteveen and his farming colleagues have been drowning in bureaucratic red tape to ensure Walkerton never happens again.
“We felt we were being picked on as a group because we’re an easy target,” said the former chicken farmer turned orchard owner in the Grimsby area.
There’s irony floating beneath the surface of it all for Witteveen. Take the Ministry of Environment reports detailing the amount of untreated sewage that municipalities, including Niagara, dump into lakes, rivers and streams during heavy rainstorms because water treatment plants can’t keep up with the volume of fluid coming into them. Not all of that is coming from farms, he noted.
“We felt there needed to be some government responsibility, being municipalities, the province, to take a lead position and start cleaning up some of their poor practices – that whatever we did wasn’t going to matter until they decided to be part of the solution,” Witteveen said.
It’s a point that’s not lost on Tony D’Amario, director of water management programs for the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.
“If the urban communities want pristine water, they’re going to have to pay the agricultural community to make it pristine and they’re going to have to pay us for the land we take out of production.”
David Biesenthal farmer
“It’s what’s happening on the land that’s causing the problems in the water – everything from urban runoff, greases, oils and fertilizers from people’s lawns,” D’Amario said. “We’ve got farms that have poor water quality. We have septic systems that are leaking. We have sewer overflows because of too much water.”
“It’s our attitudes as a society that cause concern…. Don’t use fertilizer on your lawn. Don’t wash your car in the driveway. It’s those things you see every day. Sometimes people in the city don’t realize when it goes down their driveway and down the drain, that it ends up in creeks and lakes.”
With the province’s Clean Water Act, set to take effect this summer, it appears responsibility for ensuring clean water will be spread around a little more evenly.
To prepare for the act, the conservation authority has spent the past two years drafting water characterization reports and examining the routes water travels over land and underground.
Once the rules take effect, a committee of community members, including farmers, will be struck to implement a plan that ensures source water is kept clean and safe before reaching the treatment plants. It’s a process D’Amario expects will take another two to three years.
“The better the water coming into the plant, the less likely there is a problem at the tap…. The cleaner the water that goes into the plant, the better the opportunity to ensure there isn’t a problem at the tap,” D’Amario said.
However, who is going to be responsible for that when the act becomes gospel is about as clear as mud.
“It’s hard to say, but there’s no question there will be a role for municipalities, the Region and probably the conservation authority,” D’Amario said.
Things are no more certain down on the farm.
“We’re kind of at the point of which regulation supersedes the other one?” said Witteveen, who is president of the Niagara North Federation of Agriculture. “What plan are we working with here? Which legislation is the sole source of how we should be operating?” Just as confusing is how costs to implement the plan will be divvied up.
For farmers, it could mean taking land out of production to create buffers around water sources. Some financial help would be appreciated, Witteveen said.
“We understood the principle behind (the Clean Water Act), but we just felt that if this was an initiative of the government and all of society was going to benefit from initiatives taken on the farm, that we not bear the full responsibility and costs associated with moving forward and doing a better job,” Witteveen said.
Bob Steele, Niagara Region’s project manager for water and wastewater services, is no more certain who will pick up the tab for establishing protection plans and regulation enforcement.
“You would expect the province to act responsibly and fund some of this,” he said.
In the meantime, farmers like Witteveen are just trying to keep their heads above water. “Most of us are in favour of it,” he said. “A clean environment gives us quality of life. We understand those principles. We just feel sometimes we’re the first people who have to conform and others follow after.”
tmayer@stcatharinesstandard.ca