Monday 8 March 1999

Lakes cleanup a wash: report
Federal, provincial governments don't meet their own 5-year targets

Rick Hughes
The Spectator

The federal and Ontario governments' Great Lakes cleanup efforts are falling far short of the targets they set for themselves just five years ago.

The Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy today is releasing a report called Troubled Waters that demonstrates the flagging commitment to Great Lakes restoration.

The Toronto-based group reviewed progress in each of the 47 specific commitments made by the two governments in the Canada-Ontario Agreement on the Great Lakes Basin signed in 1994 and covering the period until March 2000.

"It's clear that most of the goals and objectives of the agreement are not going to be met," said Mark Winfield, an author of the report.

The report points to the federal government's 1995 review of programs that resulted in major cutbacks to federal spending and the 1995 Ontario election of the Progressive Conservatives as the pivotal events that shaped the fate of the agreement.

WATERSHED

"It's clear that 1995 was the watershed," Winfield said.

"You saw key agencies walk away. And provincially, after 1995, we really saw a collapse of commitment to the agreement."

The agreement is essentially the action plan for fulfilling Canada's obligations under the Canada-United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

A combination of budget and staff cuts, lack of policy actions and simple disinterest in meeting the commitments are the reasons cited for the many failures.

The report says most of the accomplishments since 1994 are in fact the result of initiatives begun prior to the agreement.

But Ministry of Environment spokeswoman Karen Vaux says the province has accomplished far more than the environmental institute acknowledges.

"The government is still committed to working toward those targets." "There's a lot of good news. There has been progress. We do recognize that more work has to be done."

Vaux said that in the 17 Ontario toxic hot spots known as "areas of concern," 60 per cent of the province's commitments have been met, and beneficial uses in those areas have steadily increased.

Many of the shortcomings noted in the report have a direct bearing on the efforts to clean up Hamilton Harbour.

In particular are the withdrawal of provincial and federal funding programs that would support improvements to the Woodward sewage treatment plant and fund construction of more sewer overflow tanks.

"That's a big one," said Lynda Lukasik, chair of the Bay Area Restoration Council, which tracks the progress of Hamilton's Remedial Action Plan. "We're now in a situation where we have to rely on local political will to see these projects through; and in Hamilton Harbour they are key, right there at the top of the list."

Vaux, however, pointed to the existence of the $200-million Provincial Water Protection Fund for municipal sewer and water infrastructure.

The environmental institute report says most of that fund appears to be intended to facilitate the transfer of provincial facilities to the municipalities.

Lukasik said the report points to problems already being faced by the Hamilton Remedial Action Plan and it shows that the local action plan issues are issues across the Great Lakes. "I think a lot of the commitments that were made at those higher levels had positive implications for us. Because they haven't been followed through on, we're left with problems here."

Despite this, Hamilton's action plan appears to have been spared the worst of the cuts.

While the province laid off the action plan co-ordinators it financed and backed off from any co-ordinating role for the action plans, Hamilton's action plan co-ordinator survived because the position is federally funded.

The province also cut its support to action plan community groups such as the Bay Area Restoration Council, which monitors harbour restoration progress.

For the restoration council, that cut was $25,000 or half its funding. But Environment Canada stepped in and topped up the council's funding for a year while the group adjusted and got fundraising in place.

Environment Canada has also been instrumental in the slow but steady progress toward the cleanup of toxic sediments in the Randle Reef portion of Hamilton Harbour. Through the Great Lakes 2000 cleanup fund, it will also contribute to that project, as will the province.

Winfield credits Environment Canada for trying to step in and fill the holes left by agencies such as the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the provincial ministries of environment and natural resources.

The agreement focused on three broad objectives: restoring degraded areas (such as Hamilton Harbour); prevention and control of pollution, including a 90 per cent reduction in the use, generation and release of seven specific persistent toxic substances; and the protection and conservation of human and ecosystem health.

Nine areas of concern were to be restored by 2000, but only four are close.

The critical gain -- the reduction of persistent toxic chemicals -- was due to new discharge regulations on the pulp and paper industry that predated the agreement.

Winfield says a key issue now is what happens when the agreement expires: Will there be a new one and what will it say?

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