Thank you very much for the very last-minute invitation to join this committee.
Hello.
I'm the executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition.
Lake Simcoe is in an art map behind me. It's in southern Ontario, an hour north of Toronto. It's the poster child for the impacts of development on a lake. It's the most intensively studied lake in Canada, as far as I know, with the exception, probably, of the experimental lakes.
I'm here to talk about the fact that there are so many interrelated, multi-jurisdictional issues that data alone, although important, cannot solve the problems. We have watershed legislation at Lake Simcoe that should be protecting the lake. However, most of the targets we are trying to achieve continue to get further and further out of our grasp. What I want to impress on the committee here is the very serious need for the federal government to act on the policies you already have. I'm speaking about, in particular, impacts to Lake Simcoe from the Bradford Bypass highway.
That's my overview. I'm going to step back a bit and acknowledge that Lake Simcoe is in the territory of Williams Treaties first nations. There are two first nations that currently reside on the lake. The Georgina Island first nation is one of our 30 member groups. I'm not speaking on their behalf, but we learn from each other and have developed relationships. We have a lot to learn from our first nations and I hope they're coming to this committee, too.
There are a number of things in my brief that I applaud the federal government for taking action on. I think it's very important to recognize that land use affects water more than anything else. I appreciate, in particular, tying affordable housing money to municipal density bylaws. That's because, at Lake Simcoe—where we have 500,000 people living in the watershed, including in the cities of Barrie, Orillia, Newmarket and Bradford—sprawl is the biggest growing impact we have. Of course, it overlaps with another federal priority I appreciate: reducing the impacts of climate change and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We have to do that to save Lake Simcoe, save our climate and protect our water from the impacts of salt pollution, which is a huge issue we've just taken up in a serious way in the last couple of months.
I'm talking about land use planning and how these activities interact with water quality. For the Bradford Bypass highway, for example, we know we didn't get an impact assessment. We tried twice. We know the impact assessment tool is a bit of a hot topic, so leaving that aside, we're still very concerned that our waters are not protected. The Bradford Bypass proponents have identified, in their fisheries information, that they found the American eel. That is a federal jurisdiction: endangered species. This was identified by first nations, another area of federal jurisdiction.
We have reviewed all this information and find it lacking. I'm going to be sending a letter to the DFO. Currently, the DFO says they are going to wait and see if they are asked to review this information. I submit that this is the wrong approach when we have a very big project. It is frankly not appropriate for the 21st century. It's a 16-kilometre highway over 13 water bodies, one of which is currently choked with salt already. It's not appropriate to let a project like that go ahead.
Clearly, everyone in the Government of Ontario has removed the brakes. The guardrails are being dismantled, so we need the federal government to act on the powers it already has to protect the fish. The quality of the water, of course, has a major impact on the fish.