A History of Neglect and Abuse

The 306-kilometre-long system of manmade locks, canals and channels of the St. Lawrence Seaway is recognized as one of the most challenging engineering feats in history and boasts the world's most spectacular lift system. The 15 locks along the journey lift ocean-going ships twice as long and half as wide as a football field, the height of a 60-storey building, allowing them to move across a vast expanse of water from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Superior.

Opened in 1959 to allow international shipping and trading in the Great Lakes, the seaway created one of the most prosperous economic regions on Earth. For the first time, deep draft ocean-going vessels were able to come right into the heartland of North America, and this created huge new opportunities for industrial growth. Major manufacturing operations in steel, paper, chemicals and automobiles set up shop or expanded, all attracted by plentiful water and ships to carry their goods to market. Large-scale farms grew up around the Lakes, now more easily able to use the seaway to export their commodities to foreign markets.

The seaway was considered an industrial miracle in its time. But like the massive dams built in the U.S. during the "New Deal" era between the 1920s and the 1940s to create employment and wealth, there are now concerns about the environmental impacts of this project. It changed watercourses and hardened shorelines. It required much dredging and blasting as well as the building of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam at Cornwall and Massena. With prosperity came unforeseen consequences — more effluent dumping from industrial agriculture; more blue-green algae; more sewage from growing urban centres; more pollution from factories; more destruction of wetlands, forests and healthy shorelines; large-scale bird die-offs and invasive species that would come to plague the Great Lakes Basin.

It is largely forgotten now that for the seaway to be built, a number of villages and inhabited shorelines along the route were submerged and their people displaced, particularly on the Canadian side. Most of the lands and villages destroyed belonged to the Mohawk First Nation of Akwesasne, which also witnessed the destruction of its fishing grounds, wetlands, arable farming land and access to the river.

Like many industrialized countries, Canada has used its water resources to promote economic development without questioning the impact on the natural world. In the post-war era, progress was seen as an unmitigated good, and millions were lifted out of poverty. Water, land, forests and minerals were so abundant it was hard to imagine any serious threat to them. Canada built its economic and development policies on the myth of abundance, assuming that nature would always provide. It is only in hindsight that we can begin to see the impact of industrial development on our water heritage.

As a consequence, generations have dumped whatever waste we wanted into water, overextracted it for chemical-laden commercial food production and diverted it from where it was needed to sustain a healthy ecosystem to where it was convenient for industry and urban populations. We dredged wetlands and canals, built mighty dams, hardened shorelines, moderated watershed levels and modified waterways, once in the name of survival, later in the name of economic prosperity.

Our understanding of the implications of such wholesale intervention in freshwater sources is slowly catching up to the damage we have caused, both planned and inadvertent, but the time for complacency is over. While it is true that compared to many parts of the world Canada is blessed with plentiful clean water, there are serious limits and threats to it, and too little is known for us to be complacent. Centuries of abuse and neglect are catching up.

The First Threat: Water Loss

Lakes and Rivers ~

We have all grown up with the statistic that claims that 20% of the world's water is found in Canada. This estimate is correct only if we calculate all the water in our rivers and lakes, but not all of that water is usable or accessible. Canada's total annual renewable freshwater supply — the rain and snow that replenish water stocks and that we can sustainably harvest — is about 3,472 cubic kilometres, roughly the equivalent to the volume of Lake Huron. This represents about 6.5% of the world's renewable water. But 60% of that flows northward in mighty rivers, leaving about 2.6% of the world's total to the 90% of Canadians who live along the Canada-U.S. border.

With the growth in population and industry, demands on this surface water are relentless, and water supplies within Canada are in serious decline. Statistics Canada reported that, between 1971 and 2004, water yield — the net income of water received in precipitation over water lost by various methods — fell each year by 3.5 cubic kilometres in southern Canada, almost as much water as is supplied annually to the residential population of the country. This represents a loss of 8.5% in just over three decades.1 In May 2016, Statistics Canada released a preliminary update to this study, covering up to 2013. While the detailed analysis will not be available until the spring of 2017, the basic linear trend line makes it clear that the decline in water yield in southern Canada continues.

Climate change will speed up this process. Lakes around the world are warming up far more quickly than anticipated, say researchers from a number of collaborating international post-secondary institutions, including Toronto's York University. In their December 2015 report, "Rapid and Highly Variable Warming of Lake Surface Waters around the Globe," the experts found that lakes are warming at a rate faster than either the oceans or the air.

But they were surprised to find that lakes in Canada are warming faster than most, twice as fast as air temperatures and twice as fast as the majority of other lakes in the study. Lake Superior has one of the fastest rates of warming in the world because its ice is now either incomplete in most years or melting earlier in the spring. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that ice coverage on the Great Lakes declined by 71% between 1973 and 2010. Warmer lakes evaporate more quickly and in greater volume.

The Great Lakes are particularly vulnerable both to climate change and the growing demand from industry and populations. The bulk of the Great Lakes water is actually ancient fossil water, in place since the Great Melt after the last ice age. Less than 1% is renewed annually by precipitation. And if lake levels fall below 80% of their historic volume, that water will never return.

In a 2014 study for the Council of the Great Lakes Region, the University of Toronto's Mowat...