News & Views
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ONTARIO TO CHARGE FIRMS FEES TO TAKE WATER FROM LAKES by the Canadian Press. Companies that take water from Ontario's lakes and rivers will have to pay for that privilege under new legislation, Environment Minister Leona Dombrowsky said. "We will charge," she said, adding that, "I'm not sure what the structure's going to be that will assign that." As the Ontario Government begins to work on new legislation to protect the province's drinking water resources, it has released a discussion paper and launched public consultations "to ensure our legislation is fair, practical and effective," Dombrowsky said at a news conference. The discussion paper, which sets out a framework for water source protection plans, also invites discussion on two key issues: whether water bottling and other companies have to pay for the water they take out of the system and how to strengthen the rules surrounding the water-taking permits. However, Dombrowsky said she'll wait to see what recommendations come forward from the consultations as to whether water-takers should be charged for a permit or on a volume basis. It would be a Canadian first for Ontario to charge water-takers by volume, she said. In December, the province put a moratorium on new water-taking permits, Currently, there are 5,300 water permits that have been issued, and some allow companies to take millions of litres of water out of the system daily, Dombrowsky said. But the province doesn't have a system to track how much water is being taken out on a daily basis, nor does it know whether the system is being damaged by the volume of water being extracted, she said.
Alien species invasion threatens Great Lakes This was a headline on page 1 of the National Report section of the Toronto Star on Saturday July 5, 2003. The article, which utilized one full page in total, began with the subject of Lake Erie and the botulism problems of last Fall as described by Jeff Robinson, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. He and his collegues are concerned that this assault on the environment is another of a series which began with "the invasion of non-native creatures from microscopic viruses to heavyweight fish."
Eight Aliens Impact the Great Lakes (Graphics from the Toronto Star July 5, 2003) "The Key issue, scientists say, is the invasion by species that overturn life under the surface and cause deterioration that is impossible to reverse. On average, one sets up residence in the lakes every seven months, says Anthony Ricciardi, an environmental scientist at Montreal's McGill University. The rate has nearly doubled in the past couple of decades. The number of successful colonizers is now 173. These are symptoms of an insidious problem."
Asian Carp are probably the most potentially devastating of all invaders to threaten the Great Lakes. They were imported during the early 70's to clean up algea and harmful molluscs from southern U.S. fish farms and somehow they got into the Mississippi River where they now make up 99% of the fish population.
The following are a few of the many reports that have been published in the last two years on asian carp.
Phil Ryan, fisheries ecology supervisor at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources site in Port Dover states that "we haven't measured phosphorus since 1994," the major cause of the problem in the first place for nine years."
The American government estimates the economic losses and the cost of fighting invasive species come to about $135 billion (U.S.) annually. Canada makes no such estimates. Scientists have now identified more than 360 chemical compounds in the Great Lakes and Environment Canada repports "Various species of fish now suffer from tumours and lesions, and their repoductive capacities are decreasing."
A quick search on the internet will list over 39,000 web sites dealing with asian carp because of the potential threat to our fisheries in North America, however, none of them describes a plan or corrective action to protect our lakes.
The September/October issue of the Canadian Geographic magazine contains a text by Walter Stewart reporting on various elements currently degrading the ecological balance of Lake Erie. It discusses Lake Erie's "Dead Zone" in some detail and graphically describes the primary area involved.
It is reported that the cost of cleaning up the pollution in Lake Erie between 1978 and 1988 was in excess of $10 Billion (U.S.), and the lake water became clear, beaches were safer and fishing was becoming productive. Then, confident that the job was done "the bureaucracy put in place to guard the environment, cut the regulatory oversight" by almost 50%, 40% lower in staff numbers than in 1995, "neglected to pursue polluters and decided to let the envoronment take care of itself." Paul Muldoon, the executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, states "What is happening in Lake Erie is what happened in Walkerton, Ontario, when 7 people died and 2300 others became ill. It was a failure of oversite."
"If you are not involved in pressing for a solution.......you become part of the problem! There is no middle road in this issue.
