To restore the damaged Great Lakes, in 1972, the Canadian and U.S. governments established the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). The policy affirmed both countries’ commitments to cleaning up the lakes. In Canada, the GLWQA is implemented by a number of agencies working together, such as Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Health Canada. The Canadian government has the power to regulate water pollution via a series of acts of parliament—most notably, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, or CEPA, which is concerned with protecting the environment and human health. But there is also the Fisheries Act, which includes provisions that protect fish habitats, and the Canada Water Act, to manage the quality of the country’s water. Together, these laws enable officials to set limits for the release of nutrients and chemicals into the water, known as pollution standards. Recent changes to these acts, however, have weakened their ability to protect water quality and aquatic habitats.
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One major feature of the Canadian regulatory system is shared responsibility—each level of government has the ability to create laws that protect the environment. As a result, often the federal government will create a guideline—for instance, establishing which chemicals should be regulated—and then leave it up to provinces, territories, regions, and municipalities to set maximum allowable levels for those chemicals and to enforce those limits. While this ensures that different levels of government must collaborate and cooperate, problems can occur when one agency simply passes responsibility for a problem onto another.
Even if all levels of government work together well, pollution can be a tricky problem to address. Point sources are relatively easy to remedy: identify the source and make a change. Pollution from non-point sources is much more intractable because there is no single discharge point that can be pinpointed. “These non-point sources of pollution are so difficult to control,” says Watson, “because we don’t know exactly what all farmers are doing, how much fertilizer they use, and how they use it.”
Attempts to clean up the lake in the 1970s were relatively successful—household detergents were modified to contain fewer phosphates, industries were required to reduce pollution, and billions were spent to upgrade wastewater treatment plants that once released raw sewage into the lakes. Farmers made changes to reduce runoff of soil, chemicals, and nutrients. Lake Erie was restored as a premier vacation spot for boating, fishing, and lounging on the beach; fishers and anglers tugged millions of fish from the restored lake every year.
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Then, after a few decades of relative ecosystem harmony, some funny colours began to reappear in the crystalline waters.
During her recent surveys of Lake Erie and Ontario, Watson would scoop up water samples that contained what looked like grass cuttings, tiny green blobs, or thin wisps of blue-green she had to squint to see; suspended material was sometimes a brilliant blue, a dark willowy brown, or even pink. All of this, she says, is algae.
Shear got the news in a phone call from a former colleague. The algae are back, the colleague said—would you come speak at a community meeting near Lake Ontario about the problem? There, Shear listened to local representatives talk about how they would pull sheets of some species of algae from the water, stuff them in garbage bags, and bring them to landfills. This won’t work, Shear told them. “It’s like cutting your grass—it’s going to keep growing back. You’re not addressing the problem, you’re addressing the result.”