The report prepared by the International Joint Commission and in which the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food participated is founded on work by the Science Advisory Board and the Water Quality Board. It states that if you look across the Great Lakes with respect to nutrients, Lake Erie, in particular its western basin, is in trouble.
A lot of the environmental conditions are dictated by the morphology, the shape of the lake. You can think of Lake Erie as actually three small lakes joined together: the western basin, which is very shallow, the central basin, and the eastern basin. In the western basin, the water mixes constantly. The two main tributaries to the basin are, as Mr. Wilcox suggested, the Maumee and Sandusky rivers coming from the United States, and the Detroit River coming through the international border.
The Maumee and Sandusky watersheds are developed extensively in agriculture, particularly row crops, corn, bean, wheat. They have identified that as the single largest contributor of phosphorus to that area. In aquatic systems, phosphorus is a very important nutrient. If you add phosphorus, things grow. It is considered to be the limiting nutrient and the most significant. That's why the discussion is focused on it.
If you recall back in the 1960s and 1970s, Lake Erie was referred to as the dead lake and through a lot of binational work, it was recovered. By the time I started practising in the 1980s, it was a lake in recovery and there were actually discussions that the phosphorus levels were getting too low. Since the 1990s, a number of things have changed. It seems to be related to the presence of invasive species, zebra mussels and quagga mussels, and changes in the food web. While we are still meeting those original objectives in the open water for phosphorus, now it looks like—and this is a theory, not a fact—what was an acceptable level of phosphorus 15 years ago is no longer acceptable.
The other thing the report points out is that traditionally phosphorus exists in two states in water: dissolved and particulate phosphorus. The particulate phosphorus is usually associated with soil particles and in agriculture situations, runoffs, and erosion. Through much of the last century, the focus was on controlling total phosphorus. What the International Joint Commission report is suggesting is that we need to turn our attention to dissolved phosphorus now as being the most biologically significant, in that if you add dissolved phosphorus, algae grows really well.
In Ontario, I think we could say that they have many of the issues correct although they've extrapolated the data from American practices and American studies, which don't necessarily track the same in Ontario. We use different agriculture practices. We have somewhat different soils and the definition of large in the United States is much different from the definition of large in Ontario, order of magnitude quite oftentimes.
The best practices, the things that you can do to balance the proper use of phosphorus and other nutrients in the lake, those translate well across the borders. Under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement which came into effect a year ago, there is an annex that deals specifically with nutrients and it asks for a number of steps to be taken. We are participating with Ohio and a number of the binational jurisdictions on that task force.
Simply speaking, they're setting new objectives for the lake that will address these ecological endpoints, like harmful algal blooms, dissolved oxygen depletion, and cladophora growth as a first step that's to be done by 2016.
We're looking at a review of best practices across the jurisdictions, what works best where, and we're coming up with domestic action plans. That's already part and parcel of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.