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Despite decades of government effort and untold billions of taxpayer and corporate dollars, there is little sign that water quality in Ontario’s Great Lakes and lesser lakes is getting better.
Troubling reports from this past year include blue green algae blooms in places such as Georgian Bay and Muskoka, high phosphorous levels in Lake Simcoe and continuing problems with sludge in Hamilton Harbour.
There are persistent, harmful sewage spills and leaks from aging municipal waste treatment plants, pesticide and manure spills and runoff from farms, and massive pollution problems caused by large cities.
Industrial pollution and carcinogens continue to be dumped into the environment at a “staggering” rate, environmental groups maintain, and water levels have been on the decline for much of the decade.
Surface water – rivers and streams – meanwhile are under continual threat from some of the same sources and additionally from leaking dumps, gasoline and other storage tanks, storm runoff and growing urbanization in rural Ontario.
Gord Miller, Ontario’s environment commissioner, said it is not that conditions in the Great Lakes, in the inland rivers and water bodies are getting appreciably, catastrophically worse. Rather, our water ecosystem is suffering from slow, gradual, even “modest” decline.
Water is a resource Ontarians have always taken for granted. Roughly 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water passes through the Great Lakes and water is clean, cheap and abundant almost everywhere in this province.
Evidence shows that the Great Lakes have seen improvement from where they were headed in the 1970s.
Numerous scientific studies show steady drops in a broad range of pollutants and carcinogens, and municipalities have made concerted efforts to reduce their impact on the ecosystem.
Sewage treatment plants are steadily being modernized, improving the quality of treated water being released back into lakes and rivers. Sudbury, for example, now has the cleanest drinking water in Canada thanks to upgrades at the Ramsey Lake plant, including a new reservoir, new pumping station, ultraviolet disinfection system and underground water mains.
Kingston similarly has invested millions into its water and sewage treatment infrastructure.
Water quality in the Niagara River is arguably the most compelling environmental turnaround over the past several decades.
The infamous contamination of the river and harm to residents on Love Canal from buried toxic waste on the U.S. side of the border shocked North Americans into confronting the impact pollution was having on their communities and became a defining issue for the environmental movement.
Government did step in and the renewal of the Niagara River has been a thorough if somewhat unheralded success story. Some pollutants have dropped by more than 90 per cent in the river while toxic waste discharges have been substantially reduced and municipal sewage discharges, once a major source of contamination, are also significantly improved.
New threats continue to emerge, including invasive species with the zebra mussel being the most publicized.
Meanwhile, our growing population, climate change, increasing water usage and dramatically higher costs to treat and provide water in a post-Walkerton political environment raise fundamental concerns over how we view and use water.
Government awareness has grown but political will and action rarely matches rhetoric. Little, or certainly not enough, is being done to prepare for future need and future circumstance.
Ontario’s population is projected to grow from an estimated 12.5 million today to 16.4 million in 2031.
The province currently spends less than a penny – one-third of every cent it spends – on the environment and just a fraction of that on water.
Ontario lacks the research staff or enforcement to fully appreciate what is happening in the Great Lakes, Miller said. Nor is there yet pressing public concern over water quality.
“There’s no question we’ve become generally detached from the natural world as a whole and we’ve become detached from the Great Lakes,” he told Osprey News.
As far as drinking water is concerned, progress has been made both in terms of ensuring drinking water is safe and water sources are protected, Miller said.
But there are larger, broader concerns. Warmer winters increase evaporation, which scientists predict will lead to increasingly lower water levels. Warmer summers do the same thing.
There are long-term threats that will compound lower water levels, including industrialization and growth in the U.S.
“There is a strong lobby to feed the thirsty southwest,” Miller said. “There is tremendous pressure for the U.S. to put straws in the lake and take water out.”
Miller argues in his report that essential environmental standards in this province are not being met and that the province is not preparing for future environmental needs, including water.
Other countries, such as New Zealand, have already begun to tackle the same problems we face, out of necessity.
“While the world’s attention has often focused on oil as the resource in greatest demand, many scholars believe it is the demand for water that will be the defining issue of this century,” said Lydia Wevers, director of Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.
Wevers said New Zealand, Australia and much of Europe, out of necessity, have adopted a “conserver” culture toward water. The results include consumer technology, such as toilets and shower heads that use less water, to priority investment in infrastructure. Municipalities across the country, with the help of the national government, have been replacing outdated infrastructure including old, leaky pipes for the past decade.
That is not to say that provincial officials in Ontario have been idle. Significant new legislation and regulation, including the Clean Water Act, have been passed and the current Liberal government has made water quality a priority.
The province is spending $67.5 million on technical studies to help map out a plan to protect source water and tens of millions are spent annually on water infrastructure projects.
“Our government is taking decisive action to protect the sources of our shared water; because in doing so, we protect the health of our families, the quality of life in our communities and ultimately our future prosperity and environment,” Environment Minister Laurel Broten said in introducing the Clean Water Act.
“We have taken action to improve how water in Ontario is treated, how water systems operators are trained and how water systems are inspected,” Broten said.
However, Ontario has no targeted, long-term funding program to deal with the pressing need for investment to replace old water and sewage plants and leaky water pipes. No strategy to date has been articulated to deal with future need in this province.
And municipal officials insist the new standards and expectations, without appropriate funding, amount to downloading.
“No one has been able to provide any credible estimate of the cost of implementing the legislation,” Doug Reycraft, president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, said during hearings on the legislation.
“We do believe that the government has genuinely good intentions to protect sources of water and the municipal governments in this province share those interests,” Reycraft said.
Meanwhile, back on the lakes, water levels have dropped dramatically in lakes Huron and Michigan over the last century and both are about 27 centimetres lower than they were in the early 1900s.
Conflict over water use in those and other lakes is not only inevitable, it has already begun.
This has clearly been the case in cottage country, where lakes must serve the disparate interests of boaters, anglers, cottagers and rural residents.
Again, there is no articulated plan for the future or how to pay for work currently envisioned, said Terry Rees, executive director of the Ontario Cottagers Association.
“Our concern as an organization is that there just does not tend to be a longer-term vision for water,” Rees told Osprey News.
“No one’s really minding the store on the waterfront, I would say, in much of Ontario.” There is already “lots of infighting” over water levels and it’s likely to get worse in the future, Rees said. The province created a group a few years ago to figure out how to cope with lower water levels.
“They struggled and struggled with who gets cut off,” Rees said. “Is it the plastics factory that uses a lot of water, is it the car plant that’s also on the same watershed as the farmer, is it the golf course, is it the municipality? They could never really come to terms with the hierarchy of users.”
Because cottage country is in rural Ontario, higher water rates and higher taxation have become hot button issues.
Grants for water projects go mostly to larger communities and are handed out on an ad hoc basis.
“Not to harp on the downloading thing, but we’ve got a great deal of responsibility for water and other issues,” Rees said.
But small towns have limited resources and limited ability to tax. New regulations, including the Clean Water Act, make municipalities largely responsible for ensuring water safety, even to the point of having inspectors and enforcement officials.
“It’s difficult for the dog catcher to be the bylaw officer, to be the water inspector and so on,” Rees said. “There’s some challenges about just generally the design of programs, funding and delivery.” “There’s been, it’s my sense, an urban agenda and because we’re increasingly urban the province seems to think it’s easier to concentrate on the bigger centres,” he said.
“Municipalities are pushing back because they feel they can’t take it any more.”
At the same time, water conservation isn’t part of this province’s culture nor is it adequately promoted by the province, Rees says, particularly in cities that drive demand for water.
Dr. Harry Swain, chairman of the government’s Watertight task force on drinking water, agrees attitudes have to change, starting with the cost of water which needs to be higher.
“This stuff in fact is cheap and a trivial component of household budgets,” Swain told Osprey News. “The people who complain loudest seem to be the people like me who like the odd glass of scotch.”
“The cost of one bottle of scotch per month takes care of the problem,” he said.