Environment Committee on March 27th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

I'd like to call meeting number 18 of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to order.

We are pleased to have four witnesses with us today. We have from McMaster University, Patricia Chow-Fraser. Pat, welcome. From the University of Waterloo, we have Dr. William Taylor. Welcome. From Forum for Leadership on Water, we have Mr. James Bruce. From the St. Lawrence River Institute of Environmental Sciences, we have Mr. Jeff Ridal.

There have been some negotiations among the witnesses in terms of who will go first because of PowerPoint presentations, and so on.

We're going to begin with Mr. James Bruce from the Forum for Leadership on Water, for the first 10 minutes.

Mr. Bruce, welcome.

[Dr. James Bruce, Representative, Forum for Leadership on Water]

Thank you, sir.

I guess I won the prize of going first because I'm the oldest. I'll tell you what that led me to think about in the Great Lakes.

My short talk is called “The Rise and Fall, and Rise Again, of Pollution of the Great Lakes”.

When I worked at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters on the Burlington side of Hamilton harbour, we were very excited when the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972 was signed. The scope was broad and it was based in large part on our scientific efforts. The need for a major cleanup was obvious, and the two countries, Canada and the U.S.A., Ontario, and eight states made clear commitments to pollution control programs in the agreement and in the related Canada-Ontario agreement.

Two main problems had been identified. The first was over-enrichment by the nutrient phosphorus, causing major algal blooms, which subsequently resulted in dead areas at the bottom of Lake Erie, and nearshore problems in practically all the lakes, but probably not Lake Superior. The second problem was a pervasive plague of toxic chemicals contaminating fish, water, and sediment. These problems were tackled vigorously by building sewage treatment plants for all municipalities and industries, and regulating phosphorus in detergents and some toxics, such as PCBs and the pesticide DDT.

This effort had wonderful effects, and by the late 1980s the main body of the lakes was pronounced healthy again. But after that, in both countries the governments relaxed a bit, and reduced both staff and attention to comprehensive science and monitoring. They considered, and many other people did, too, that the job was completed and well done.

Unfortunately, along with the inattention and staff reduction came a serious backsliding over the past two decades in the condition of the lakes. Algal blooms on Lake Erie, especially blue-green algae producing toxic cyanobacteria, are now seen as worse than before the big cleanup that began in 1972.

How did this occur? Well, the International Joint Commission has determined in its report this year on Lake Erie that more diffuse sources of pollution rather than the point sources from before are mainly to blame; that is, more often there are large quantities of phosphorus in runoff from urban and suburban areas and farmlands.

Some of this increase is due to changes on the ground. These include bigger sprawling suburbs with fertilized lawns and many pets, and more intensive agriculture using bioavailable fertilizer for things like the corn-soybean rotations that are common now.

Such changes leave more phosphorus on the ground to be dissolved in the runoff and loss of the protective coastal wetlands allows more rapid discharge to the lakes.

The contribution of the changing climate has also been critical. On the U.S. side of the basin, heavy rain events that produce runoff have increased in frequency by 27% since the 1960s. In a study I did recently for the Grand River Conservation Authority in Ontario, which also discharges to Lake Erie, it was found that the annual number of surface runoff events has increased 18% from the 1970s due to more frequent heavy rains and winter snowmelt periods.

Intense precipitation events increase in a warming climate, and the theory shows it to be by 7% per degree Celsius of temperature increase in the atmosphere.

This committee has already heard—I've seen the testimony—from representatives of Toronto and Hamilton about the impacts these heavier rains are having on polluted runoff and floods from their territories.

One of the consequences of this combination of changing land use and changing climate is that much larger quantities of the nutrient phosphorus is carried in the runoff waters, and much more of that phosphorus is of the dissolved bioavailable type.This is a double whammy, both more large flow events and higher concentrations of dissolved reactive phosphorus in those flows.

When these polluted flows reach the warming waters of the Great Lakes, large algal blooms are produced. An example on Lake Erie is on the cover of the 2014 International Joint Commission report, where you see a boat trying to plow through a huge algal bloom. I didn't bring copies of this because I was told by IJC that they had sent copies to all members of the committee.

This re-eutrophication, which is what the process is called, is also beginning to be felt on the shores of Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, and perhaps Georgian Bay as well. The report of the IJC documents the preventive actions that must be taken to reduce phosphorus sources on farmland and in urban areas from ending up in the lakes, and I would commend to you the proposals they have.

In addition, a new era of toxic chemical pollution has also been documented. For highly toxic mercury, after reductions from 1970 to 2005, we now see concentrations on the rise again in some fish and fish-eating birds, such as loons. Coal-fired electricity generating plants in the U.S.A. continue to be a major airborne source of mercury to the Great Lakes, although Ontario has thankfully reduced its number of coal-burning power plants.

The good news is that serious health and ecosystem threats from DDT and from PCBs have decreased as a result of regulations, as shown by analyses of herring gull eggs at Burlington in a program that began in 1972.

But there are a host of new contaminants, not removed at conventional sewage treatment plants, finding their way to the lakes. These include pharmaceuticals, dumped or excreted. There are small but growing concentrations of anti-inflammatory drugs in Lake Erie's open water, far from shore. Antidepressants are observed in Lake Ontario and antibiotics down the St. Lawrence River. Endocrine-disrupting substances are found in Lake Huron.

The gender composition of a community near Sarnia, Ontario is changing, with only half as many boys as girls being born. We've seen similar kinds of changes in fish communities—more females and fewer males. Toxic flame retardants are on the increase.

But on a very positive note, recent research has shown that ozonization, or using ozone, in water and waste water treatment could remove many of these newer pollutants and help clean up our waters.

In summary, our generation, through our governments, holds in trust these vital waters for all to use and for future generations. But if we want the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system to be healthy, fishable, drinkable, and swimmable, we must renew our commitments. This means an increased commitment to monitoring and science, and a commitment to undertake control measures based on scientific findings. We owe this to ourselves, to our grandchildren, and to their children.

My colleagues will tell you some of the ways we can move forward.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bruce. And thank you for staying well within your 10-minute allotment. I want to encourage all our witnesses to follow your great example in that regard.

We'll move now to Dr. William Taylor, from the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Taylor, welcome.

[Dr. William Taylor, Professor Emeritus, Biology, University of Waterloo]

Thank you.

I'm going to start with a list of issues, not because I'm going to cover them all, but rather because I want to emphasize that most of the Great Lakes issues we're concerned about are related, both in terms of their ultimate causes and also in terms of possible management solutions. The problems are not independent.

As Dr. Bruce started out saying that the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972 set targets for the nutrient concentrations in the Great Lakes to remediate the effects of eutrophication. To achieve those targets, they worked out loadings with models whose thrust the figure 2 graph illustrates, to achieve those concentrations. Loadings were adopted, and management actions were put in place to achieve those loadings.

What happened was that at the same time the Great Lakes were suffering from eutrophication there was a great excess of small fish. Some of you who are my age and who grew up in the Toronto area might remember that they washed up on the shoreline in massive amounts in the spring and were cleared by bulldozers into dump trucks, there were so many of them. But with an aggressive stocking campaign of exotic fishes from the Pacific and with control of the sea lamprey, which devastated the population of the native lake trout, those small fish were brought under control, and instead we had a valuable recreational fishery in its place. That is a pretty good success story.

I threw in the next slide to make the point that when phosphorus goes into a lake, it does feed algae—it is first assimilated by algae and bacteria—but it also moves up the food web and nourishes a whole chain of organisms, from those algae through invertebrates and ultimately to the large fish that we find valuable and want to preserve.

A problem with too much algae can arise because there are too many nutrients, and that's commonly the case; but it also can arise if the flow of nutrients up the food web isn't happening properly and efficiently, so that it's accumulating where we don't want it, either in algae, in the water, or on the shoreline. There is a food web aspect to this problem that we need to keep in mind.

Also keep in mind that when we measure phosphorus in the water, we're not measuring all of the phosphorus in the system. We're only measuring in a water sample the small organisms at the base of the food web, whereas just as much phosphorus can in fact be in the larger organisms that we're not including in our measurements. When we say total phosphorus, we really should be saying total phosphorus in the small organisms and not the total amount of phosphorus that's out there.

To return to the management actions that were undertaken, which Dr. Bruce already mentioned, targets for P loading were achieved. I've shown some data on my sixth slide for several of the lakes. The loadings fell as phosphates in detergents were banned and sewage treatment plants were improved. All the lakes met their target loadings, or in fact loadings became lower than the target amount set.

I've chosen Lake Ontario as an example on the next slide, because those preceding are pretty small to look at. The phosphate concentration through time fell, again below the targets that we thought would be necessary to achieve good water quality in the lakes.

What's interesting about this slide is that it shows the trend through time. The circles are all the actual data points of phosphorus in the lake year by year. The black line is the line predicted by the model that was used to set the loadings.

You can see that it over-predicts in recent years. In fact, the model has to be altered to make it fit the data now. That's the blue line. It reflects that the food web and the fate of phosphorus in the lakes has changed since the model was developed. The lakes have changed. It's very obvious when you look at the fish community that this has changed, but the important point is that the lakes are changing, and phosphorus no longer behaves as it did when we set out to manage it.

As we've heard, we have a resurgence of problems in the near shore. These are extreme pictures that I've chosen in the next three slides, but these problems are widespread around the Great Lakes.

The first picture shows the northern shore of Lake Erie in the eastern part, in Ontario, and a massive fouling event with shoreline algae. Clearly you don't want your cottage there. The next shows the infamous algal bloom of 2011 that started in the western basin of Lake Erie and gradually spread and covered a good part of the lake.

Despite achieving our targets for loading and concentration we see a resurgence of these problems. It is very distressing.

One of the hypotheses that is in the literature as to what has changed in the lake concerns invasive species, the zebra and quagga mussels that came from Europe.

In the following picture you can see the bottom of the lake in a shallow area of Lake Ontario. It is covered with these mussels, and this fouling algae, Cladophora, is growing on the mussels in a high-nutrient environment that is created by the excretion of the mussels.

This nearshore shunt hypothesis suggests that the phosphorus is coming into the lake and, instead of distributing over the lake, is being held in the nearshore zone where it is feeding this food web composed of organisms new to the lakes.

We're also pretty sure that non-point source pollution is part of the problem. You have been introduced to this already. The next slide is an illustration from a recent paper on this problem. This shows the southern shore of Lake Ontario between Hamilton and Niagara Falls, illustrating that along the shoreline in areas that are being developed there are small tributaries and other outlets producing high concentrations of algae right against the shore, while the offshore waters are still clean and clear. Nonetheless, right at the shoreline where these small storm sewers and small streams flow in, we see high levels of algae. It's a local problem, but certainly important to the people who live there.

The next slide shows the algal blooms in western Lake Erie for the different years, relating the intensity of the algal bloom, the cyanobacterial index or CI, to the spring loading of phosphorus. You can see there is good evidence in the intensity of the summer algal bloom and that it is directly related to the amount of phosphorus that comes in between March and June.

In particular, that massive 2011 bloom occurred when there was a thunderstorm in June which took a lot of phosphorus off the land at a time before the crops had really started to grow and assimilate that phosphorus, or were dense enough to hold back the soil. Those extreme rain events are becoming more frequent.

There are management options, as the next slide shows, to decrease phosphorus loading into the lakes. We could ban phosphorus from dishwashing detergent and lawn fertilizer and we could continue to improve sewage treatment plants. For non-point sources, we could regulate fertilizer application by farmers or we could push the implementation of best management practices or even more radically, retire farmland. There are management options, if we're confident that reducing phosphorus loading is the right thing.

What about the fishery? The graphs on the next slide show what's going on in Lake Huron. Lake Huron has very low levels of nutrients in the offshore, lower levels than we intended to create. The top graph shows the forage fishes, and they are almost gone. The salmon are getting few and skinny. The number of species of fish that are caught in the survey trials has dropped remarkably as well. We are losing biodiversity, because even though there is a fouling issue at the near shore, there is not much in the way of nutrients in the offshore waters.

We're left with what to do. If the changes in the distribution of phosphorus are due to mussels, we don't really have a management strategy that could deal with the mussels, so it's not clear what we might do there. We could legislate or somehow reduce phosphorus loadings even further, but we are interfering with farmers making a living and with what consumers want to purchase and do with their homes. There is room to question whether these are really no regrets actions that aren't without consequence.

I would submit that in fact what we really need to do is start managing the Great Lakes as ecosystems and manage them more holistically, including managing the fishery as well as the water quality at the same time, and the land use. It really takes a much more complex approach to the problem than just more or less phosphorus than what we are currently allowing in.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Dr. Taylor.

We'll go now to Pat Chow-Fraser of McMaster University.

[Dr. Patricia Chow-Fraser, Professor, Director of Life Sciences Program, McMaster University, Department of Biology, As an Individual]

I want to first thank the committee for inviting me to come and share my concerns about environmental threats to the integrity of the Great Lakes. I am a professor of biology at McMaster University and I also serve as the director of the life sciences program.

It just occurred to me that we're going down in age here. Everybody knows Jeff is the youngest. I'm not yet emeritus.

Since starting at McMaster University in 1991, I have established the research program on the ecology, conservation, and restoration of Great Lakes coastal wetlands. I have trained 37 graduate students and 100 undergrads to date.

My students and I use a landscape approach—this is more a holistic approach, rather than reductionist—to understand how human activities affect the health of coastal wetlands, and have developed ecological indicators to assess the negative effects of agriculture, recreation, and urbanization. We also study the impact of invasive species and water level fluctuations on wetland health.

Over the past 20 years, we've sampled approximately 300 coastal wetlands throughout the five Great Lakes. Since 2003, however, our lab has focused almost exclusively on the many coastal wetlands of eastern and northern Georgian Bay, wetlands that had not been sampled or assessed before we started there 10 years ago.

It's important that you understand what I mean by a coastal wetland. These are wetlands that occur within two kilometres of the shoreline and are connected to the Great Lakes or a connecting channel by surface water at the 100-year high water mark. They are some of the most productive freshwater ecosystems, supporting extremely high biodiversity, and they include more than 80 species of Great Lakes fishes that spend at least part of their life cycle in them.

There are many free ecosystem services provided by these coastal wetlands. They include filtering water for domestic use, preventing floods, and recharging groundwater. Unfortunately, 75% to 90% of the wetlands that were here 250 years ago have already been lost. They've been infilled or dredged for farmland and for building cities. Many of the remaining wetlands are suffering from increased nutrient and sediment load and are being degraded by the presence of invasive species, such as the common carp, Eurasian milfoil, and the common reed. By regulating water levels of the Great Lakes, we've also interfered with the natural fluctuations that coastal wetlands need to keep themselves healthy.

The first 10 years of my career at McMaster were spent on the restoration of Cootes Paradise marsh. This is in Hamilton; it's part of the Hamilton harbour area of concern. Like other AOCs, Cootes Paradise marsh became degraded over a very long period from decades of untreated sewage being discharged into it. It finally succumbed to the ravages of regulated high water levels and unchecked growth of common carp in the 1970s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, millions were spent in restoration to exclude carp from the marsh and to educate the public about the importance of watershed stewardship, but these efforts have returned only a very small portion of the ecosystem functions. The marsh is still in a degraded state after 20 years of study and management, and sadly, it will continue to require human intervention for the foreseeable future.

What I learned from this experience is that it's far easier and less expensive to spend money up front protecting these coastal wetlands from damage than it is to neglect them and then try to restore only a fraction of their original functions.

Of the 17,000 kilometres of shoreline around the five Laurentian Great Lakes, Lake Huron accounts for 36%. Much of the coastline of Georgian Bay is dotted with islands. In fact, there's an estimate of 30,000 islands. I have never counted them. They are called the Georgian Bay archipelago, which is the largest freshwater archipelago in the world.

With such a long coastline, it's not surprising that Georgian Bay also contains disproportionately large amounts of coastal wetlands. Our research documented that cumulatively, Georgian Bay has more coastal wetland area than any other Great Lake, more than 17,000 hectares, compared with only 12,000 hectares in each of Lake Erie or Lake Ontario.

What is even more unique in the context of the Great Lakes is that most of these coastal marshes, the portion of the wetland that occurs below the shoreline, is still in excellent condition. Using a suite of ecosystem indicators that we have developed, we have found that more than 50% of the marshes in lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario are currently designated as degraded, while more than 70% of the marshes in Georgian Bay and Lake Superior are designated excellent and unimpacted. The highest proportion of very good and excellent quality wetlands and the least number of degraded wetlands exist in Georgian Bay.

Our work in Georgian Bay has shown that these marshes provide very high-quality reproductive and foraging habitat for fish and wildlife, including species at risk, such as the Blanding's turtle. These coastal wetlands are typically low nutrient, because the catchments are on the Precambrian Shield and they have minimal human disturbance. Their hydrology and the water chemistry are also heavily influenced by their connection to Georgian Bay through the surface water. All of the wetlands that are hydrologically connected with Georgian Bay exhibit fluctuations in water levels, seiches, that vary by 50 centimetres over a day, or by more than a metre between years.

These hydrologic connections play a critical role in maintaining aquatic biodiversity. They prevent monocultures of emergent and floating vegetation from forming. They facilitate frequent exchange of chemical constituents between wetlands and Georgian Bay and allow daily and seasonal migration of fish, such as northern pike and muskellunge, in and out of wetlands.

Although the coastal wetlands of Georgian Bay are still among the least human disturbed, the sustained drop in water level of close to a metre over the last 15 years, the expansion of road networks and increases in cottage and residential development, and the invasion by non-native species such as the zebra and quagga mussels, the round goby, and the common reed are threatening the integrity of these sensitive ecosystems.

I would like to spend a little time now to describe each of these threats.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Let me just interrupt for two seconds, Madam Chow-Fraser. I notice that you have about eight pages and you have 10 minutes. We're getting close to that time, so I would like you to prioritize whatever you want.

I don't want to rush you, but just inform you.

[Dr. Patricia Chow-Fraser]

All right. I'm going to talk about the water levels.

The water levels in Lake Michigan have fluctuated in approximately 30-year cycles over the past century. They range between 175 and 177 metres, but with a long-term mean of about 176 metres, above sea level.

One of the many consequences of global climate change is there are lower than normal water levels in the Great Lakes, and we are seeing this now. For lakes Huron and Michigan, which are essentially two lobes of the same lake, water levels have been at or below the long-term average since 1999. The mean water level between 1999 to 2013 is 176 metres, which is an average reduction of 53 centimetres below the long-term mean. No other of the Great Lakes is associated with as large or as long a reduction.

There are many consequences of this, but the sustained low water levels have had immediate and devastating effects on the quantity and the quality of the fish habitat in coastal wetlands. Some of these negative effects have included up to 24% loss in breeding and nursery habitat, because they are no longer accessible to migratory fish. There is deterioration in the habitat structure related to disappearance of some of the submergent vegetation in the deeper water and a reduction in the species richness of fish and plant communities. If water levels were to drop to 174 metres, which is predicted by the global circulation models, access to another 50% of the wetlands now extant will be lost.

Even if wetlands don't dry up, we are also concerned about the thermal quality of these wetlands. We have monitored the water temperatures in some of these embayments and have found that the temperature of the water that is used by pike is approaching 27.5°C, which is the point at which the fish stop feeding. We know when they don't feed, they're not growing and they start to die.

There is very little information on how water temperature in these nearshore habitats is changing. There is not a single monitoring system in the whole of eastern and northern Georgian Bay that is now being monitored by government. This highlights the need for more targeted research to understand the threat of warming temperatures and low water levels on the health of nearshore embayments.

I'm going to skip now to talk very briefly about our seeing the same sort of problems that Dr. Taylor was talking about with regard to the nearshore algal blooms in Georgian Bay. This is a big problem, because these are the kinds of things we expected to see in the lower lakes but never expected to see in Georgian Bay.

We're now seeing algal blooms in some of these embayments, and anoxia developing below eight metres from the middle of June until the end of September. All of these are happening because, we think, of association with the low water levels. But there's also increased development, and there are aging septic structures that are also contributing nutrients. None of these is being regulated in such a way that we can actually know what exactly is happening.

A lot of this is really a plea for you to make an effort to establish some monitoring specific to the Georgian Bay context, because it's very clear that you cannot just extrapolate information from Lake Erie, a system that is very shallow and which has a lot of people living in it, to something that is on the Precambrian Shield and that has a very low nutrient concentration.

I want to finish off by telling you that almost all of the work I have done in the last 10 years has not been funded by government agencies. It has been funded by small charitable organizations and private foundations. I think there is a bigger role that governments should be playing in making sure that some of these things are actually monitored and carried through over the next 20 years.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Ms. Chow-Fraser.

We'll move now to Dr. Ridal for a 10-minute presentation, please.

[Dr. Jeff Ridal, Executive Director, St. Lawrence River Institute of Environmental Sciences]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am very pleased to be here today.

Dr. Chow-Fraser mentioned the Great Lakes areas of concern program, which has been around for some time. It's really a flagship program in the Great Lakes basin. There were 43 AOCs originally identified by the International Joint Commission in 1985 as being under intense environmental pressures, 12 of which are in Canada, plus five that are binational AOCs. Currently, there are three delisted and two in areas of recovery in Canada, so there has been progress.

What I'm going to speak about today are two of the areas of concern, the ones about which I have the most specific first-hand knowledge.

The St. Lawrence and Bay of Quinte areas of concern, like most AOCs, have a long history of industrial, urban, and rural discharges, as well as human interventions, resulting in numerous impacts, as shown in the slide, and resulting ultimately in the loss of beneficial uses, which are also known as beneficial use impairments. To remediate and restore those areas, remedial action plans were evolved and put in place using an ecosystem approach, with the aim of improving conditions so that they were equivalent to or better than the non-AOCs across the basin. In order for us to realize that we had reached that stage, delisting targets were set, which were the measures in place to establish whether or not the specific beneficial use had been restored.

Since that time, this program has been rolled out in three phases. The first phase was to identify together with community consultation the key environmental issues for that area of concern. The second phase was to identify the remedial actions that were required. Since that time, these have been under way. The last step in this process is to provide a status assessment with a delisting recommendation.

The geographic areas of the two AOCs I referred to, the Bay of Quinte AOC and the St. Lawrence AOC, are shown in this slide. The Bay of Quinte is a very important inlet to eastern Lake Ontario in the Belleville area. For one thing, it is one of the most important fish habitat areas for the entire lake. As well, among many other things, it hosts a very important recreational fishery. It's all within Canada.

On the other hand, the St. Lawrence AOC was one of the binational AOCs, meaning that it's shared between the U.S. and Canada. It's in the Cornwall area in the St. Lawrence River not too far from here. It involves Canada, the U.S., Ontario, New York, Quebec, and the Mohawks of Akwesasne. I should point out that the Bay of Quinte also involves the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte.

Once the remedial action plans were developed, each of these areas of concern developed restoration councils, which involved a number of federal and provincial agencies, but also involved members of the community from the first nations, industry, municipalities, conservation authorities, non-profits, and other members of the public.

In fact, the St. Lawrence River Institute, where I work, is really a child of this process. It's a little unique, so I want to take a few seconds to describe it. It resulted from the public involvement process within the first stages of the St. Lawrence AOC and reflects the partnership of the local municipalities, the Mohawks of Akwesasne, and leading citizens. It was incorporated as an NGO in 1994. We built our own facility there on the campus of a local college, with the land provided for free, but really with local funding. There was no provincial or federal support to build this facility, so there's very much a sense of pride locally. We currently have a core staff of 14, with scientists, technicians, and educators.

What do we do? We provide contributions for local science. This is what it was initially designed for: to provide expertise for the local scientists in an area of concern like Cornwall, which of course has a blue-collar background. Research and university partnerships have been key, as well as education and public engagement. The experience gained from working so closely with the AOC process in Cornwall has been passed on to other AOCs, particularly the Bay of Quinte's.

I'll highlight the types of projects that have been put under way through this area of concern and remedial action plan process. Obviously, we have abatement of industrial and municipal discharges, including sewage treatment plant upgrades, retrofits to stormwater facilities, and tracking down.... Once you turn off the big taps, you have to turn off many smaller ones, so there's the fugitive source track-down in terms of industrial contaminants and brownfield sites, as examples. We have habitat restoration and long-term plans such as municipal pollution plans.

All of this leads to improving water quality, and it has led to water quality improvement. In the graphic shown here, you can see the improvement in bacteria levels from where they were in the 1980s, when they numbered over thousands of colonies per 100 millilitres, to down below 100 after these actions have been taking place. The water quality criteria are shown in red.

Each of these areas, Bay of Quinte and the St. Lawrence River, have large agricultural areas, so it's very important to have rural projects such as erosion control, septic system upgrades and inspections, fencing projects, farm manure containment, and many of these other best management practices that are required to deal with these non-point source issues.

Also important in both of these AOCs has been public engagement, engaging the public in the process. For example, the landowners who were involved in these BMP implementations are volunteers. We have public consultation and other mechanisms, and even children's water festivals that happen both at the St. Lawrence AOC, with over 2,000 students being educated each year on these issues, and at the Bay of Quinte. For the last 21 years, our river institute has hosted an annual symposium to talk about Great Lakes water quality and St. Lawrence water quality.

These programs are very, very important, and their progress is an important indicator of Great Lakes recovery and of government commitment. They often involve big-ticket items that require partnerships at all levels. The progress has been slow, as I think most people would consider it, but there's a number of very good reasons for that, one of which is that science is not always clear-cut. We always think of science being black and white, but it's not always.

There have been game-changers that we've talked about already in terms of the zebra mussels and other invasive species, human interventions, development pressures, clearing for crops, and the obscuring effect of climate change. We've had to go back to the drawing board a number of times and reassess the initial delisting targets to see whether they still make sense.

Also, really, you have slow environmental recovery. I have a couple of examples of how that's occurring. I think there's some really interesting information here.

Mercury has been a key issue, with mercury contamination of sediments and in fish in the St. Lawrence area of concern. You can see in the graphic that there has been a gradual improvement over time in sediment mercury, but it has taken over 30 years to see that improvement. As you can see, the red levels, those are the highest levels, have declined down into the blues and the yellows. You still have high levels at Cornwall, so we have a sediment management strategy there to deal with that.

The next slide shows another example. It's the slow decline of contaminants in fish. Here you can see mercury concentrations before the AOC was involved. Afterwards, as you can see, there's a slow decline, but as for the levels now, many of these fish are still above the consumption guideline, which is shown in red here. It's the same sort of story in the Bay of Quinte, where you have PCBs that have declined quite dramatically. They're now tapering off at or near the consumption guideline limit. Continued monitoring, track-down and abatement of fugitive sources are required on this issue.

You've heard a lot about eutrophication or undesirable algae. Nutrient inputs are a very big problem for the Bay of Quinte and the nearshore of the St. Lawrence River. Our graphic shows the inputs at high levels from the Raisin River tributary. Actually, the main body of the St. Lawrence pushes those inputs into the nearshore area, so you still have high levels downstream. Ongoing implementation of these best management practices on agricultural and urban lands, and long-term phosphorus control programs...for example, the Lake Simcoe strategy may be a possible model in the Bay of Quinte.

To give you a little bit on progress, the delisting progress is occurring, slowly. In fact, the St. Lawrence River at Cornwall AOC status has been submitted. I should have mentioned earlier that at Cornwall, because it was a binational AOC, we actually had two separate plans, on the Canadian side with the Cornwall AOC, and then on the American side, because the processes and the problems were very different. You actually have two concurrent remedial action plans under way

The Bay of Quinte AOC is a little bit behind where the St. Lawrence is, but five of eleven impairments are under consideration for redesignation. It needs more science, more action, but the target is to complete those by 2017. Delisting would be another few years down the line, if possible.

The last thing I'd like to point to is another issue to recognize, namely, once you face delisting, what happens after that? There are continued pressures on the environment. There's a need for long-term monitoring and assessment in response to emerging issues. There is certainly a concern, and we hear it in Cornwall, that delisting will mean loss of funding and loss of public interest in this issue. There's a continued need for engagement and to develop a long-term sustainable framework for our collective efforts in these AOCs.

We have undertaken a number of measures, including facilitated workshops and community meetings, to assess priorities and the scope, goals, partners, and funding mechanisms for the future. From this, these ideas and these models can then be applied to other areas of concern.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ridal. You've reached the end of your time.

We'll now move to our first round of questions. Each member has seven minutes. I'd like to encourage members to be specific about which witness they want to answer a question unless they want to open it to all four.

We'll start with Mr. Woodworth.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much to all of the witnesses today. The combined expertise we have in the room is extremely impressive. Your contributions have been very thorough and reflect a good understanding of the issues.

Being from the riding of Kitchener and therefore a little close geographically to Professor Taylor, I'd like to ask him some questions at the outset.

First of all, are you continuing your research, Professor Taylor? I know you're kind of semi-retired, but are you continuing your research?

[Dr. William Taylor]

Yes, I still have some projects going. I'm finding it hard to pull away too quickly.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Very good.

What is the source of funding for the research you're doing now and the research you've been doing over the years?

[Dr. William Taylor]

My funding now, and it's been pretty much the same way in the past, is from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council for the more basic research part. I also get funding from the Ontario government through the Canada-Ontario agreement.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

My understanding of the Canada-Ontario agreement is that the Government of Canada provides money to the Province of Ontario, which then uses it to fund projects such as yours. Is that your understanding?

[Dr. William Taylor]

Yes.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Very good.

Have you had an opportunity to follow the either imminent or just-finished Canada-Ontario agreement on the Great Lakes?

[Dr. William Taylor]

I've been included in some of the discussions, but I don't know the document in detail.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

My understanding is that it indeed will contain a focus on nutrient loading and the nearshore problems we've heard about. Is that your understanding also?

[Dr. William Taylor]

Yes, in that all the funding I've received from them has been in that area.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Do you have any connection or involvement with the International Joint Commission, which in the end is kind of driving the progress on the Great Lakes?

[Dr. William Taylor]

Yes. I was on their science advisory board for approximately six or seven years. I chaired it until recently. Jeff Ridal has taken over that job for me.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Do you have any observation on what Canada's current role is on that commission and how strongly we are represented?

[Dr. William Taylor]

The commission is very carefully binational. Everything is co-chaired by a Canadian and an American. All committees have equal numbers of Canadians and Americans.

We have two new Canadian commissioners. We still have a vacancy; we should have three commissioners. The two new appointments appear to be very energetic and dedicated individuals. Those would be Gordon Walker, who I think you've heard from already, and Benoît Bouchard.