Great Lakes focus has tanked: report

[Spiel]

Great Lakes focus has tanked: report

Put cleanup back on the nation's radar

 

 

Eric McGuinness / February 02, 2008

The Hamilton Spectator

 

 

Kitchener environmentalist John Jackson accuses Canadian politicians and bureaucrats of actively discouraging public interest in the Great Lakes to reduce pressure for more government action.

 

Jackson is co-author of a new report recommending ways to put the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin back in a prominent place on the political and public agenda. Among other things, it calls on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to appoint a minister responsible for the lakes who would chair a cabinet committee on the basin.

 

He and Karen Kraft Sloan, former Liberal MP and Canadian ambassador for the environment, also want to see a parliamentary committee responsible for Great Lakes matters with an independent, non-partisan secretariat that would keep MPs and senators informed on the state of the lakes.

 

"The problems of the Great Lakes have not disappeared," Jackson said in a telephone interview. "We've made some improvements, but there are new and greater problems out there, so it is critical we get governments focused back on the lakes."

 

He recalls big turnouts in the 1970s and 1980s for meetings of the International Joint Commission (IJC), which oversees implementing the 1972 Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Many people on both sides of the border were active then in organizations campaigning to reduce toxic chemicals, improve sewage treatment, protect fisheries and on other issues.

 

But sometime in the 1990s, he says: "Government quite consciously dampened that enthusiasm of the public, dampened engagement and involvement of the public. It was, and continues to be, a time when governments were making cuts and felt people were being too negative, too critical.

 

"Staff of Environment Canada's Great Lakes office in Downsview stopped coming out to meetings, stopped reporting what they were doing, so citizens went off and worked on other issues."

 

Gail Krantzberg, one-time director of the IJC's Great Lakes office in Windsor, now director of McMaster University's Centre for Engineering and Public Policy, says governments listened when the public participated in large numbers, but "that's not happening anymore and it's very troubling."

 

"If the public is not engaged, then the voice of the people to pressure government to do more is not there. When there is a public voice calling for action, it brings action."

 

While she welcomes the report titled A Way Forward, commissioned by the Canada-U.S. coalition Great Lakes United, Krantzberg is skeptical about a minister ever being appointed.

 

Calling the idea of a parliamentary committee excellent, she says, "That could happen if the federal government realized the Great Lakes are a national issue, not regional ..."

 

She points to one of the new report's recommendations as "of paramount importance -- that the water quality agreement be renegotiated and signed by the president and prime minister in 2009, as was done with the original pact in 1972."

 

While she applauds pledges to clean up coal-tar contamination at Randle Reef in Hamilton Harbour, she says, "That's a very small amount of what needs to happen to return it to a healthy, functioning harbour."

 

The full text of the report is available at www.glu.org.