Evidence of meeting #17 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was watershed.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:10 p.m.
Ted Murphy
—than the agricultural areas. But going back a couple of years, Conservation Ontario, working with the ministries...better legislation on the chemical uses, fertilizers on lawns, everything, now we're seeing an improvement.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Your 39 dams, I have a recreational property which feeds into the Trent-Severn Waterway, which is not precisely close to yours, and I've been rather surprised to learn how crude the management is of those dams. It's log in, log out. The data by which MNR in particular makes decisions, and maybe it's you who makes the decisions, is generated from volunteers—George going up to the local lake and saying, “Yes, it looks a little high, Fred”.
Are we much better than that?
5:15 p.m.
General Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Quinte Conservation Authority
We're perfect in our watershed.
5:15 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
5:15 p.m.
General Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Quinte Conservation Authority
We haven't got to that point. We have a staff, a well-trained staff, and we have computer modelling that we use to tell us when to pull logs. We work with all the cottage associations also. They're worried about water levels now, a lot of them for the wrong reasons. A lot of them it's because they hit their prop on the rock, not because of the shorelines or whatever.
But, no, we do have a system in place to manage all the dams.
The one problem we do have, however, is for the 39 dams that we own, there are another 39 dams we don't own. They're privately owned, and nobody has any legislation over how those private people manage their dams. We can step in when it comes to what they're doing with water levels, but if a dam is falling apart we can't do anything about it. The province's hands are sort of tied. If you buy a piece of property and find out it's got a dam that goes with the deed, and it's going to cost you $200,000 to do a study and fix it, you're probably not going to do anything.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Yes. You're going to let it fall apart.
In your relationship with the cottage owners' associations, do you get them to stop this flat runoff and build up the weeds and the stuff in front of their cottages? It used to be fashionable to clear-cut your property right down to the edge of the lake.
5:15 p.m.
General Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Quinte Conservation Authority
Number one on our agenda is education on buffer zones. The big thing we promote is that a buffer zone does not have to be a tree that's 10 feet high so that you can't see the water. A good buffer zone can be ground cover with good root systems. It could be a rock garden, even, if it has the proper root system. We're having very good luck with all the cottage associations. They patrol their own systems. They report violations. We work with I think 20 different associations and probably involve over 1,000 volunteers.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Harold Albrecht
Thank you, Mr. McKay. We gave you well over your 5:08.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today and contributing to our study on Great Lakes water quality.
We will now suspend for two minutes and reconvene in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]