Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
First of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about something that I've been working on for over 30 years and has become a major part of my life. I hope to see it finished by the time I retire.
I should also mention that my other role is co-chair of the Bay of Quinte restoration council. So for all of the Bay of Quinte RAP programs, I co-chair that restoration work.
Quinte Conservation is one of Ontario's conservation authorities. I'm not going to talk a lot about it because Bonnie will fill you in on what Conservation Ontario, our umbrella group, does for us.
Over the years with conservation authorities, the programs we do all have an impact on improving the environment of the Great Lakes. In our case, the whole watershed of the Quinte watershed drains into the Bay of Quinte. The Bay of Quinte was identified as one of the hot spots in the Great Lakes because of the severe pollution over years of not knowing what people were doing when we were dumping pollution into the rivers draining directly into the bay. The contaminants that were carried down the rivers at the time came mainly from industrial pollution. To the north of Belleville about 50 kilometres, there was an old mining site, the Deloro Mine site, where the by-product was arsenic. Thousands of tonnes of arsenic made it down the river into the Bay of Quinte and also carried other pollutants.
On top of that there were phosphorus problems generated by agriculture and industry adding to the contamination problems in the bay. One of the biggest problems with the Bay of Quinte is that it's fairly shallow. It's not a deep body of water that has changes and has fresh water pumped into it all the time, so it is a problem that requires constant management.
Over the years our focus has been, through partnerships with Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and the health units, to educate the public, educate politicians locally, and also to put programs into place to help restore some of the issues that were prevalent in the Bay of Quinte.
The Bay of Quinte is extremely important to the area. You have to keep in mind that the whole watershed population is about 125,000 people, so we don't have an unlimited amount of financial resources to correct all the problems that exist in the bay. On the other side of things, the Bay of Quinte, from a tourism point of view, is worth millions of dollars a year because of the recreational opportunities that it provides. It's still one of the best fishing places in Canada and attracts a lot of tourists from the States and Europe to come to the Quinte area to fish for several weeks. They pump millions of dollars into the area's economy.
When we talk about delisting an area of concern, it brings up some questions. What happens after we delist? There were 80 points identified 30-some years ago by the public and by experts that had to be addressed. To date we have knocked off 50 of those concerns. They've all been corrected. We have 30 left that have to be completed. They're almost complete.
The problem we have is that the 30 that are left are all connected to phosphorus levels. If we can contain the phosphorus levels, we can control the rest of the problems and take the Bay of Quinte off the list of hot spots. What that means to tourism and promoting the area is that people still say, “The Bay of Quinte is one of those bad spots. We don't want to go there.” We want to promote it as being an area that everybody should come to because you can eat the fish, you can drink the water. The bay is clean.
One of the concerns that we have about delisting is that in our area—I'm talking about the Quinte area only—we deal with 18 municipalities. None of those 18 municipalities has the expertise on staff to manage an area like the Bay of Quinte to monitor and ensure that the Bay of Quinte always is in good shape and doesn't revert back to the way it used to be.
Quinte Conservation does have the expertise, but we don't have the financial capability for doing all the work that's required. We have the staff expertise but not the dollars required to pay for sampling, such as the sampling of algae and the sampling of the water quality and that type of thing.
I don't have the exact figures, but we estimate that we've spent probably about $10 million in cleaning up the Bay of Quinte. It has been money well spent. On top of that $10 million, private industry and the agricultural community have also pumped in several million dollars to match grants that were provided through the federal and provincial governments to protect wetlands, to restore shorelines, to put in alternate watering holes for cattle, and for manure storage and that type of thing, to prevent runoff into the creeks and to try to control the phosphorus problems.
We need to protect our investment. We can't just walk away from it after we take it off the list. We definitely hope that there will be continued funding to make sure that those hot spots don't go backwards. We have to continue to monitor. We have to know what the state of this is. We have to continue to understand where we're at from a scale that we now can compare to from the past.
One of the big concerns I have is the direction that the federal government, through DFO, and MNR and MOE are taking in terms of reductions in staff available to carry out programs on the ground. I'm also very concerned about the new self-help, do-it-yourself permitting. You can now go on a website and get a permit under the Fisheries Act. You can go to a website and get a permit. You will be able to get water-taking permits. MNR, public lands...anybody can abuse those systems. That's going to have a negative impact on what we have done for the last 30 years. I think we're going in the wrong direction in some of those areas.
The last thing that we have a major concern about is climate change. I know that a lot of people think we don't have global warming and that, after this winter, climate change doesn't exist. Well, we know it does. One of our jobs is to manage dams into the Bay of Quinte. We have 39 dams. We used to automatically put the logs in the dams at a certain date and pull them out at another certain date. With the microbursts now and the changes in temperature, last year we were a month behind. You can't go by dates anymore. You have to go by what's happening with the climate. It's affecting everything we do. It has affected the Bay of Quinte. We didn't expect zebra mussels to come in as an invasive species or the impact that's had.
We have to be very aware of all of these things. We can't just walk away. We have to keep monitoring and making sure that we have programs in place to educate the public and educate the local politicians, and to make the public proud of the resource they have and make everybody want to chip in and protect the future.
I could go on for hours, but I'm trying to keep it under 10 minutes.