Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House today to discuss Motion No. 502. The motion asks the federal government to invest money in improving the Trent-Severn Waterway in the Great Lakes region.
I have been interested in our freshwater resources for years. In preparing for this morning's debate, I learned more about a region and a waterway that were somewhat familiar to me.
I learned a lot from reading the speech by my colleague, the hon. member for Simcoe North. It is interesting because there are connections between that waterway and the Lachine Canal near my riding alongside the St. Lawrence.
Like the Trent-Severn Waterway, the Lachine Canal is a Canadian historic site managed by Parks Canada. There are connections between the two regions. I am interested in this issue not only because it involves our freshwater resources, but also because of the connection between these two historic waterways: the Lachine Canal and the Trent-Severn Waterway.
Water levels, whether they are high or low, are always a problem for those who live beside or use a particular waterway. I know this because my riding, as I just mentioned, is on a waterway, the St. Lawrence River. There are many marinas, sailing, and boat clubs along the St. Lawrence. We can see from one year to the next the impacts caused by low water levels or high water levels.
Low water levels are a problem for a number of reasons. When water is shallow, there is greater sedimentation, which then requires dredging. That is the subject of this motion. It is also very hard for recreational boat owners to get out of the marina when the water levels are low. Sometimes they are unable to leave that space because of the physical limitations that come with lower water levels. We know that commercial shipping is also affected by low water levels because there is not usually much space between the bottom of a ship and the riverbed. Sometimes we are talking about two or three feet, even for the big Great Lakes vessels.
I understand that my hon. colleague's attention to this issue is very important. I learned that the Trent-Severn Waterway, which is quite long and includes some free-flowing parts and canals, is in great use. It has 160 dams and 44 locks, and there are 50,000 residences along the waterway. This is a very important issue, and I support the request for a very modest sum of money, from what I have read, to drag a portion of the waterway which is at Port Severn. I believe there will also be some blasting required, which I would imagine makes the project a bit more expensive.
What we are talking about is a particular part of the waterway in a particular region, the Great Lakes region. However, I would be remiss if I did not talk about the issue of fluctuating and especially diminishing water levels in the Great Lakes in general.
What is causing those fluctuations and specifically the falling water levels? There are three causes that we know of, and we learned this from the IJC's Upper Great Lakes Study.
One cause is from the dredging of the St. Clair River, which is apparently allowing more water to leave the upper Great Lakes. Another cause is from the shifting of the earth's crust. The ice age compressed that part of the continent and over time the lake beds rise a little and tilt, causing some water to flow out of the region. Also, there is the problem of climate change, which leaves less ice cover in the winter and there is thus more evaporation.
This is a broader issue, and the government is going to have to look at the issue in broader terms.
I hope the government listens to the hon. member for Simcoe North and does the work for which he asks. However, we need to look at the issue of the falling Great Lakes water levels more broadly and the government will have make some investments.
The hon. member who spoke before me talked about infrastructure investments, and, yes, I would have to agree, but there are other kinds of investments that the government will need to make, which I would like to address a little later.
We have a problem with climate change and there is some uncertainty as how climate change will impact the Great Lakes. We know climate change will cause less precipitation in some areas and more in other areas.
The problem around the Great Lakes is that we do not know where the greater precipitation will occur, at what latitude. This is an issue when we talk about the Great Lakes because the basin is so small relative to the surface water. It is not a huge basin where if it rains farther north the water would still make its way into the lakes. No, it is a very small basin and if the precipitation is above or below the lakes, that water will not necessarily make it to the lakes.
We cannot say with certainty how climate change will impact the water level, but we have to plan for the worst case scenario and for falling water levels because of the attendant costs of falling water levels.
I mentioned earlier that there were other investments that needed to be made above and beyond infrastructure investments. When the hon. member talked about the infrastructure investments that would be required, she talked about big physical constructs no doubt that might better regulate water flows and so on.
There is a group called Great Lakes Our Water, or GLOW, in Georgian Bay, and we are essentially talking about Georgian Bay here. I am told that part of its focus has now shifted to another problem in the area, which is an invasive species, a kind of reed that is quickly proliferating in Georgian Bay. However, GLOW also has a campaign called “Stop the Drop”.
I was speaking to GLOW's executive director, Colin Dobell, not long ago on the phone. Then I met him on Friday at the meeting of the Freshwater Alliance here in the region. I learned that Stop the Drop was focusing on a technology that would allow us to better predict the impact of changing water levels, in this case, of dropping water levels. This is called LIDAR technology.
LIDAR technology is essentially a radar technology that allows us to construct integrated topographic-bathymetric models to visualize the impacts of variable water levels. Typically it is used to see how rising sea levels will impact on coastal areas, but it can also be used to predict what the impact of dropping water levels will be.
It is very important that the government put some money into applying LIDAR technology in Georgian Bay so the area can adapt to the impact of climate change.