Environment Committee on Feb. 25th, 2014

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

I have another question for you, Mr. Walker.

You talked about green infrastructure and said that it would be important to improve our infrastructure to better adapt to climate change and the difficult times we will have to go through. Even the deputy ministers of the environment are saying that it is very important to fight climate change. Unfortunately, that is not currently being done.

How can we prepare to combat climate change hazards and respond to the issues in the Great Lakes Basin? What are your suggestions and recommendations when it comes to green infrastructure?

[Gordon W. Walker]

Climate change is huge for all of us, and none of us in this room could likely say that they haven't seen the impact of climate change, such as more moderate winters, although I can't say that about right now. We've had a pretty impressive winter, and just two weeks ago 90% of the surface of the Great Lakes was covered by ice. That is the first time that has happened since 1994, but if I'd been here in any year in between, I would have been bemoaning the fact that there was not enough ice cover and that the evaporation was so phenomenal that it was taking away huge amounts of water and causing great impact on the Great Lakes.

How to stop climate change is something that scientists have been arguing for a long time, and of course, there are hundreds of arguments out there on how to stop climate change. I'm not sure I can add much to that equation, but very obviously, if climate change can somehow or another be slowed or reversed, then that would have a huge impact on the Great Lakes and a great impact on all of us. Stretching from the point where Lake Superior is at one end all the way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it has huge impact on the water, both in terms of quantity and in terms of what flows from that.

When there is a lower quantity of water caused by climate change, that presents a problem. That makes trouble for shipping. That makes trouble for fishing. It makes trouble for the quality of the water, so anything that can stop, discourage, or reverse climate change is important. It may be a pretty tough order to accomplish. It's going to take the entire world being part of that.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much.

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

You have one minute.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

I will yield the floor to Mr. Bevington.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thanks.

My question might be a little bit more complicated than one minute, but I think I'll get some time later. I just want to start talking to you about cumulative impact assessment and how that's taking place.

Do you have modelling systems now that you're using to determine the impacts of all these stresses on the Great Lakes? Are you able, say with climate change, to predict what will occur with a two-degree warming in the system? Are you in a position to forecast different outcomes as a result of potential change in climate or different types of loading that may end up in the system due to increased population or use?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Mr. Bevington, you've used up your entire time with the question. We'll have to come back to Mr. Walker perhaps in a future round for the answer.

Mr. Toet, you have seven minutes.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a few questions and I may pass it back to Mr. Sopuck.

One of the things was anecdotal, and that was the great work that has occurred with the IJC. I can attest to that on a personal basis. I think it was 2001 that I actually had my swim with my family in Lake Superior, which meant I had finally had my opportunity to be in every one of the five Great Lakes. There was a time in the seventies when there were a few of those lakes I would have not wanted to have been in at all. I think we have made great progress, as you have told us, and anecdotally I can speak to that.

You talked about the wetlands increase. One of the great programs that I've seen out there in the last couple of years that has been quite effective is the recreational fishery restoration program that was working and engaging groups on the ground. A lot of our different fish groups and habitat stewardship groups do great work on the ground, and have been engaged in this process.

Is this something you see that would also be very beneficial to the work on the Great Lakes going forward, especially as we increase the capacity for the recreational fishery? Will that automatically have a very beneficial effect for the Great Lakes Basin area?

[Gordon W. Walker]

Whenever people are involved, a population getting involved with the Great Lakes.... In the areas of concern that we have, the hotspots around the Great Lakes, the remedial action plans are populated almost entirely by volunteers, by people who are participating in helping to solve the problem.

I'm thinking of the Hamilton Harbour, the Randle Reef, and Toronto, but all the harbours that have had issues. The Collingwood Harbour, the Wheatley Harbour, the Severn Sound—they have been removed as areas of concern because people were involved. So the testimony to people being involved actually coming up with the solutions is huge.

The dimensions of the problem are gigantic as well. When you think about the Great Lakes fishery, think just in terms of Lake Erie. The walleye industry alone is close to $1 billion a year. That's a huge industry and there are an awful lot of people who are involved with it. To the extent that groups from schools and other kinds of associations can be brought together to work in their organizations, to work with the IJC.... We have many organizations within the IJC that are populated by volunteer participation.

To the extent that more people can get involved in it, that's going to be extremely important to solving the issues coming in the future, especially with the concentrated populations that are growing up in this area. It just gets greater and greater. Since 1960 we've probably seen almost a doubling of the population in the basin. Well, that has a huge impact. It is very important that people be involved to the extent that they can be encouraged, by all means.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Mr. Sopuck.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

Mr. Lambe, I'm on the fisheries committee as well and you referenced our study on invasive species. I'm going to ask a question regarding the Asian carp species that are present in the Mississippi watershed.

Do you think that we will be able to keep them out of the Great Lakes?

[Gordon W. Walker]

I sure hope so.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

I hope so too, but can we actually do it?

[Robert Lambe]

We did an assessment, the Government of Canada actually led an assessment, and the report was released in 2011 that demonstrated that Asian carp could have a pretty devastating impact on the Great Lakes. Simply put, we have to keep them out.

Right now, there's a lot of debate going on here within the U.S. Of course, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a report called “The Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study” on January 6. They identified eight alternatives for stopping the spread of invasive species between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and vice versa.

The focus is obviously on stopping the Asian carp from coming up the Mississippi, as you noted. Most people who are engaged in that debate say that they believe, and there's some science to support it, that there has to be a physical divide, that the natural divide that existed before the artificial canal was put in...[Technical difficulty--Editor]. That comes with some significant problems. If you do that, you certainly aggravate some flooding situations that we have in Chicago. There's a commercial waterway that would be impacted by that.

A lot of the discussion now is about what you can do if you don't have a physical divide. That's where most of the energy is going right now. Looking at better locks systems and through more effective technology, more effective electrical barriers, can we exploit the development of that newer technology to keep them out?

I think we have to be optimistic at this point. Because the population front is about 60 to 70 miles from our barrier and they are not advancing that quickly, we can use a little bit of time here to come to an interim solution that's going to satisfy all the users. But the clock is definitely ticking. I'm glad there is as much attention on this as there is because we do need to find a solution very quickly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

You have 45 seconds.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

There's some anecdotal evidence that the zebra mussels in the Great Lakes have had an effect on water quality and some say it's a positive effect. Is this true or not?

Mr. Walker, can you comment on that?

[Gordon W. Walker]

Well, they've made it look prettier. Zebra mussels have cleaned up things an awful lot. I've often crossed the bridge over the Detroit River and the St. Clair River. If you crossed it in 1970, it was a pretty grey-looking body and today it's a very bright effervescent blue. So there has been a cosmetic improvement, and zebra mussels of course are becoming less of an issue as the quagga mussels take over.

We have all these issues, you know. There's been an awful lot of improvement made, but since 1986 or 1987 up to...for a considerable period of time, there was something like 34 new invasive species that were non-indigenous that came into our waterways.

It is fair to say though, that since 2006, not one has been identified as new. So there's been a substantial improvement with the ballast water that created the problem in the first place. The improvements are working very well. In fact, in Washington there's a ballast water meeting next week.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Okay, we have to move on now to Mr. Scarpaleggia.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to both witnesses for your testimony.

I'm just trying to understand the historical arc of this issue. It was very interesting that you mentioned that the first time governments really got concerned with water quality in the Great Lakes was 1964 and that led eventually, as I understand it, to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972. My understanding is that the agreement's focus was initially narrow. It was to look at the problem of phosphorus, is that correct?

Then I imagine over time other issues were dealt with jointly by the Canadian and American governments within the framework of that agreement. It sounds like where we are now is that we have phosphorus out of detergents and I presume we have our house in order when it comes to waste water effluence. We've had enough time to make those investments.

Now the problem appears to be—and please, after I finish, I'd really welcome a correction on my understanding of the issue.... What we seem to be talking about is agricultural runoff and the phosphorus from that source. Is that a correct understanding of the arc of the issue, if I can put it that way?

[Gordon W. Walker]

I think that's a pretty good summation. It wasn't one thing; there were many things.

The Cuyahoga River was on fire, if you can imagine that, in the late 1960s. There were lots of issues. That obviously was not phosphorous. At the same time, the fishing industry was dying, and the lake was deemed to be a dead lake. That was phosphorous. You're quite right that they solved many of the issues by removing the phosphorous as much as possible from the loadings that came from the waste water plants. The billions of dollars invested by the governments of the two countries, and the states, and the provinces, solved a lot of problems by cleaning that up, as did taking phosphorous out of the laundry products. Contrary to what was said by the manufacturers of Rinso and Tide and all those at the time, that we would all have grey shirts, well, some white shirts continued after that.

So it did work, but now it's a different kind of issue. It is mostly agricultural runoff. But there are problems. For instance, there's what the dog does on the front lawn of the home in Toledo, or in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It just washes down into the gutter, goes from there into a sewer, ultimately goes into the river, untreated, and then is in Lake Erie. Those are problems.

There's the concentrating that we now have of the feedlots, and perhaps even the ethanol production where corn requires a different form of fertilizer, a lot more fertilizer, and they run it right up to the edge of the river, with no buffering or anything of that sort. That's creating a great deal of problem.

Something has happened in the past 10 years on the rivers I've identified, rivers like the Maumee and the Sandusky. Something has happened. It was all right 10 or 12 years ago, but not now. What has happened? Something has come in.

Ethanol is probably a good thing to point at, and feedlots that are much more aggressive. As well, there's the continuing, of course, of putting fertilizer onto the frozen ground, where it doesn't sink in. It washes off into the creeks, into the drainage system, into the river, to the point where when you look at the end of the Maumee River, it has created that huge bloom of algae. The only way to stop it is to try to curb those efforts—not necessarily to stop putting the manure on the ground but to stop doing it when the ground is frozen. That's not an easy task. Farmers will give quite a story on that.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I think the issue, at least in Canada, is that the responsibility for agricultural land management falls under provincial jurisdiction. If you're going to create a larger buffer zone between the fields that are in operation and the water course, it's really up to the Province of Ontario, basically, I would imagine.

But you were saying that they are on board. They've negotiated agreements and they're working with states and so on and so forth.

[Gordon W. Walker]

They're supportive, but they are only....

Take the rivers that service, let's say, southwestern Ontario, such as the Thames River, 200 kilometres or so of that, and the Grand River right up almost to Orangeville and down to Dunnville, where it goes into the lake; those systems are just a fraction of what the other rivers are putting in.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

The U.S. rivers?

[Gordon W. Walker]

Yes. It's difficult to put a number on it, but they're just a tiny fraction—a big difference.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Right.

I have another question in terms of the impact of climate change. We understand that water levels are up and down, but generally the trend is down, which will affect shipping and so on. I understand that climate change leads to more extreme weather events, which leads to runoff of fertilizer, and that's a problem.

Are there other ways in which climate change will impact, or is impacting, water quality in the Great Lakes? Or is extreme weather and runoff and flooding and all of that really the crux of the issue?