Waterkeeper Mark reflects after Wolfe Island Music Fest
August 22nd, 2010

The Wolfe Island Music Festival was a great place to meet and talk with people from around the Lake Ontario last weekend. From the musicians to music lovers everyone wanted to talk about the water. And everyone wanted to know how the Lake is doing.

The state of the Lake is not an easy question to answer. There are so many variables and factors to consider. Depending on where you come from and what you like doing, the answer can vary from awful to great. For example, Toronto Harbour is a cesspool that you wouldn’t want to swim in, eat a fish from, or even let your dog drink out of. Toronto Harbour is getting worse not better. Each successive condo you see built on the skyline is hooked into the old combined sewer systems, which overflow directly into the harbour almost every day it rains.

Things are not so bad on Wolfe Island. The morning I arrived at the Festival grounds, I had just finished swimming for 20 minutes and had a fresh perch lunch. Maybe not as wisely, but truthfully, I also had been drinking coffee from unfiltered lake water. If you are lucky enough to come from Eastern Lake Ontario, you still eat the fish, swim in the lake and drink the water.

Toronto Harbour and Wolfe Island just happen to be two areas on the Lake I am around the most. The rest of the Lake is also full of both wonderful and dangerous places: beautiful beaches, sport and commercial fisheries, deserted islands, exotic birds and fish populations as well as dangerous zones of radioactive waste, coal tar, and militarized waters with signs warning against not fishing, swimming or drinking the water. In order to enjoy Lake Ontario you really need to know a lot about it. We need to have a lot more discussions about the state of the Lake.

State of the Lake discussions also raise questions about what to do about the problems. In those areas where we still have pristine waters, migratory species, fisheries and beaches it is obvious that strong protections are needed to preserve important links to Lake Ontario’s past glory. But as much of Lake Ontario is industrialized, polluted and destroyed it should never be condemned to the mistakes of past generations. Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has a vision of a Lake where everyone can safely drink the water, eat the fish, play in the waves and experience the wild beauty. Our purpose is to ensure clean drinking water, a healthy eco-system and unrestricted enjoyment of the Lake is a right for every generation. In that respect Lake Ontario Waterkeeper is as much about protecting Lake Ontario as it is about restoring it.

From 20 years experience in environmental law, I believe the greatest negative factor in assessing the state of Lake Ontario is the growing ignorance about the Lake itself. We are losing confidence in the health of the Lake and more alarmingly, our governments are closing down the experts and scientists who were most trusted in providing us with the Lake’s wellness chart. Environmental Assessments were once the forums where historically most people get their information about the Lake and the environment. Through environmental assessment processes, experts and officials were called upon to testify about scientific facts, reports, investigations. By attending these processes or the hearing about the proceedings through local media, we all got an understanding of the issues involved and the dangers that might come up. But recent changes to the Navigatory Water Protection Act, the Federal Fisheries Act, the federal and provincial Environmental Assessment Acts are reducing our communities’ ability to hear about the Lake. The public is now excluded from reviewing the decisions or participating in processes that judge the ability of the Lake to absorb more damage, more pollution. We are becoming ignorant of the good and the bad around the Lake.

Furthering the problem is a lack of public access to fishing spots, beaches and marinas. We have a population of people on Lake Ontario who rely on it for their very existence as drinking water, but know next to nothing about it. As a result, I was not surprised to find many people on Wolfe Island last weekend pessimistic about the Lake’s future. Most were convinced pollution will only grow. Nuclear power plants will always discharge radioactive tritium into drinking water, kill millions of fish through cooling water pipes and create toxic sites that risk breaching and fouling drinking water. Coal and petro-coke furnaces will always discharge excess wastes, dioxins, furons, mercury, waste coal and coke into our water. Cities will always discharge sewage and street waste from storm water and sewage pipes. Ships will always dump hazardous waste and transport dangerous goods on our Lake. All this pollution is an inescapable part of our lifes.

Unfortunately, without our environmental processes enshrined in the Fisheries Act, Navigable Waters Act and Environmental Assessment Acts the pessimism is warranted. Without legal reviews and public processes polluters will make it difficult to remove or tighten the rules with improved knowledge about the impacts and risks. Greater understanding through innovation and improved technology will be ignored. Pollution is no longer about a lack of alternatives but is a cost cutting measure justified by profits, jobs and taxes. To reverse this powerful disincentive, Ontario must restore the respect for our right to swim, drink and fish in Lake Ontario and tighten our pollution permits through public processes. Nuke plants do not need to discharge tritium into the Lake or kill fish. Better technologies are available to reduce and eliminate this waste and we can prove it. Coal plants and petroleum coke plants do not need to discharge metals and waste into the Lake as new technologies and alternative forms of energy eliminate this pollution and we can show them how. And cities do not need to discharge untreated sewage and untreated stormwater in the lake as technologies have been available for decades to remove the pollutants before entering our water and we can bring in the experts and engineers to do it.

Thinking about the state of the Lake leads to thinking about the future of the Lake. How long will I be able to swim, drink and fish on Wolfe Island? I know polluters will continue to pollute as long as there is money to be made by polluting. Also, I know it is cheaper to fund public relations campaigns that deny environmental impacts, applaud green practices, finger point and diminish the seriousness of the problem than actually stop polluting. The only counter balance to these threats is if the public has greater knowledge and awareness of the Lake to rebut the false charity of polluters. I expect it is always going to be hard to get an honest appraisal of the Lake. But gatherings like the Wolfe Island Music Festival always get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Thanks for being part of the Swim Drink Fish Music Club.
Mark Mattson
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper

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