Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. As mentioned, my name is Conrad deBarros. I work with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority as a project manager, coordinating the Toronto and region area of concern remedial action plan.
I appreciate the opportunity to attend this hearing and provide my perspective on efforts to protect and improve water quality and ecosystem health within the Great Lakes basin.
Since you've heard from a great number of witnesses already who have identified the efforts and needs for areas within the Great Lakes, such as Lake Erie, the Thames River, the Grand River, the southeast shore of Lake Huron, southern Georgian Bay, and so on, I'm going to focus my presentation on Lake Ontario, and more specifically on the western basin or western end of Lake Ontario. Why Lake Ontario? The Lake Ontario basin is home to 56% of Ontarians. Urbanization is causing stress and loss of natural cover and habitat, which affects the hydraulic cycle and water quality. The Don River, which enters into Toronto's inner harbour, has been identified as among the most polluted rivers in Canada. Lake Ontario is also a downstream recipient of pollution from the other Great Lakes and the Niagara River.
I'm going to address the three areas of focus of your study. I will start with identifying locations within the Great Lakes basin that are of environmental concern and prioritization of the areas to be addressed.
I'd like to give you a quick overview of the Toronto and region area of concern. The first slide provides an outline of this area of concern and gives you some statistics on its makeup. For example, it contains six different watersheds and 45 kilometres of Lake Ontario shoreline. It's a highly urbanized area of concern and it is still urbanizing.
For the past 27 years the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has been a very active partner with Environment Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, and the City of Toronto in the coordination and implementation of a remedial action plan.
Over those 27 years, great progress has been made to address some of the past environmental conditions that led to the identification of Toronto and the region as an area of concern. About 35 hectares of wetland and fish habitat along the waterfront have been restored; however, this is an ongoing process, and there is still more to be done. Water quality along the waterfront has been improved, but there are still issues with urban non-point pollution from untreated stormwater and combined sewers overflowing into the Don River and Toronto's inner harbour during wet-weather-flow conditions.
Implementation of the Don River and central waterfront component of the City of Toronto's wet-weather-flow master plan is critical to protecting and improving water quality and is the major initiative required for delisting this area of concern.
One of the challenges the Toronto and region area of concern and also Hamilton Harbour area of concern have is the challenge of urban growth and development.
The slide on display tries to indicate that we are really struggling to hold the line on maintaining water quality in the tributaries. Water quality is poor, and we're holding the line on that. The graph on the slide indicates the trends. It is a slide showing chloride levels in the streams within the Toronto and region area of concern from 1965 to 2004. Chloride is an excellent tracer of urban growth. The more roads you have, the more the salt that is getting into the streams through winter salting, with resulting higher levels of chloride.
Non-point, especially urban non-point, sources of pollution are extremely difficult to manage, as mentioned before by Chris. That is one of the biggest challenges we have with the development of the urban centre in Toronto.
Beyond Hamilton Harbour and Toronto and region areas of concern, population growth is a threat to water quality in the western end of Lake Ontario. That is an area from the Niagara River to the city of Oshawa. This area is known as the Golden Horseshoe.
I'll move on to your second area of concern, which is reviewing the efforts that are planned and/or currently under way to remediate identifiable areas of environmental concern.
The greater Golden Horseshoe area is one of the fastest-growing regions in North America. By 2031 the population in this area is expected to increase by almost 4 million people above the 2001 census to 11.5 million people, accounting for over 80% of Ontario's growth.
This slide that I've put up actually relates back to Toronto, but it gives you an idea of the struggle we have and the rate of increase in the population. That relates to urban development. It is extremely hard to protect the natural cover when urban development is coming in and stripping that away.
The magnitude of this predicted growth in western Lake Ontario will severely stress the natural land cover as the landscape is paved over and hardened to accommodate the increase in population. Stream and river hydrology as well as water quality and ecosystem health both in the tributaries and Lake Ontario will suffer if this growth is left unchecked.