Grassroots groups and charitable organizations are building momentum, garnering public support for restoring water levels in Georgian Bay and putting pressure on governments to fund a solution. Whose approach will win the day, or can they work together toward a common purpose?
by Janet Lees
It’s been a long battle, fraught with frustration, political intrigue, personal agendas and scientific scrutiny, but after more than 10 years of naysaying in some quarters, there’s finally some consensus and forward momentum in the fight to restore our water. Citizens, groups and government agencies are now willing to admit there is a problem – record-low water levels in lakes Huron/Michigan and Georgian Bay aren’t just a “blip” that will resolve itself – and the push is on for governments in Canada and the U.S. to intervene to keep our water from draining away.
A number of different groups and organizations are ramping up their efforts, all passionate about the issue and all trying to effect change. That said, there are differing voices and priorities among the various groups, and it’s unclear whether the often polarized factions will be able to form a united front, or for that matter which voices truly represent the interests of the communities around Georgian Bay.
On one side are those who advocate restoration – putting submerged sills or weirs into the bottom of the St. Clair River to slow down the outflow caused by sand and gravel mining, massive dredging in the 1930s and 1960s and resulting erosion. On the other side are supporters of ‘multi-lake regulation’ – including control structures in the Niagara River. Those who support the St. Clair solution see multi-lake regulation as a drastic, costly and overly aggressive measure involving intense governmental control of water levels in all of the Great Lakes – with dire environmental consequences. Meanwhile, those arguing for the ‘Niagara solution’ see the St. Clair option as a short-term measure that doesn’t go far enough and doesn’t mitigate against climate change or other factors.
Then there are those who don’t advocate any particular solution, arguing it’s up to governments and their experts to figure it out.
It’s a complicated issue with strong opinions on all sides. Is there any middle ground? Or is there room for all of the different voices to be heard without … well … muddying the waters?
Taking it to the People
The newest organization to join the fray is the aptly named Stop The Drop, a grassroots, non-profit campaign spearheaded by Colin Dobell. The effort, aimed at engaging the public, has surpassed its goal of recruiting over 20,000 members by the end of the summer to pressure the provincial and federal governments into taking concrete action to reverse the decline in Great Lakes water levels.
The group’s tools include a website, www.stopthedrop.ca, which contains information, a “community portal” and an online survey, as well as a one-on-one public information campaign at local events, and getting the word out through large billboards, signs, and radio, television and print ads. “The objective long term is to influence governments and individuals to take long-term effective action to restore and support water levels on the Great Lakes,” explains Dobell. “The short-term objective is engaging people at their different levels and different ages to get informed, get involved, and get heard.”
The first phase for Stop The Drop is getting people to say, “I care” – so far the group has garnered over 20,000 electronic signatures to its online petition. The next step is to break down the demographics, “to show that this isn’t just an isolated pocket of rich Georgian Bayers, because a lot of people think this is all a problem manufactured by a bunch of rich Georgian Bay cottagers,” says Dobell. “We need to be able to say here’s how many of them there are, here’s how fast they’re growing, here’s the age range, here is the range of how they use the Bay – boaters, cottagers, permanent residents, campers, hunters/anglers and down the list – and where they use the Bay. There are a lot of people, not just one pocket.”
The survey also gathers respondents’ postal codes, “so we know where they vote,” says Dobell. “And we’re going to send the petition to your municipal leader, we’re going to send it to your provincial leader, and we’re going to send it to your federal leader. What we’re starting to see, having already started doing the maps, is that there are some people in Windsor, there are some in Hamilton, and Guelph, and Niagara Falls. So all of a sudden the entire caucus starts to realize this isn’t just a Georgian Bay problem. Because up until now it’s been very convenient to say, ‘it’s just those five members of parliament; let’s go bitch to them.’ What we hope to show is that this is a Southern Ontario problem and in fact probably an all Ontario problem.”
Besides strengthening the message, the other purpose of mapping out the demographics is to enable individuals to connect with other concerned citizens in their area and possibly form groups or combine their efforts to communicate with their member of parliament, says Dobell. However, he adds he realizes some people may not go that far.
“There is a hierarchy of engagement. Some people might say, ‘I’m just delighted to find that other people care, too.’ That’s a start. And there are lots of people like that. They’re not ready to go and spend time or money. And then above that there are people who say, ‘Maybe I should learn a little bit about this.’ And then above that there are people who say, ‘I’d like to actually learn how to talk about this so I can be heard.’ And then there are people who say, ‘I want to go out and help.’ Our real mission is to take everybody in, recognize where they are and then engage each one of them in activities that help them move up the chain.”
Stop The Drop does not advocate a particular solution to the water level issue, and Dobell says that makes the group more inclusive and puts the onus on government scientists to come up with the answers. “We don’t advocate this versus that. We advocate pressure. It’s not acceptable to do nothing,” says Dobell. “The image I use is when JFK said in 1960, ‘by the end of this decade we’re going to put a man on the moon,’ nobody said to him, ‘what kind of rockets are you going to use?’ He was reflecting the will of the people, so when he said that he was saying, ‘this is where we’re going to be taking leadership and we’re going to be putting money behind it’ and then the scientists fell in underneath and they developed technology that didn’t even exist when he said that. Imagine if either Baird or Harper stood up and said, ‘we take this really seriously, and we’re going to figure out how to solve this problem by the end of the decade, and we’ll do whatever it takes to get it fixed.’ Boy, would that ever be cool, and we wouldn’t have to argue anymore. I think that’s conceivable.”
Dobell says he also wants to keep people engaged over the long-term. “The issue is how do you keep a sense of direction, of accomplishments, of milestones, that let people engage and feel like they’re getting somewhere, but don’t make it an all-or-nothing thing, because suppose the government said we’re going to do this and it’s going to take us 10 years, then everyone would go back to sleep again. They might just say, ‘okay, it’s done.’
“We are going to have to live with much more variable, much more unpredictable, much more dramatic levels. Regardless of what the solutions are, each community needs a plan to deal with potentially long-term or unpredictable low water levels. How do you get those people to come together in the community and make a plan to deal with it? This is a problem that won’t go away overnight, and we need to work together on a number of different levels to deal with it.”
Lobbying Governments
Another group that is engaging the public is Restore Our Water International (ROWI). Stressing ecological impacts, ROWI held multiple public meetings and events in communities around Georgian Bay throughout the summer, and continues to talk to interested groups about the issue of water escaping through the St. Clair River. It’s a man-made problem with a man-made solution, argues ROWI: placing structures in the St. Clair to compensate for the increased outflow and restore what has been lost through human intervention. ROWI’s position has a great deal of support, not to mention an existing agreement for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to install compensation structures in the river such as the IJC has now advised.
ROWI is now focusing on educating and lobbying governments, and because of its bi-national clout, it has the ear of both the Canadian and U.S. governments and agencies. In addition to briefing all of the relevant Ontario ministries and the Premier’s office, ROWI chair Roger Gauthier and vice chair Mary Muter have met with U.S. House of Representatives and Senate leaders, and with engineers from the USACE. Gauthier, himself a retired USACE senior hydrologist, recently sat on a panel on water levels in Milwaukee hosted by the Great Lakes Commission. The three-day event also featured presentations by the International Joint Commission (IJC) and the Healing Our Waters Coalition.
“The panel that Roger was on generated more discussion than anything else on the Great Lakes Commission’s agenda,” says Mary Muter, adding, “the executive director of the U.S. National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office, Andy Buchsbaum, said to me, ‘Mary, I learned a whole lot in that panel, and I’ve known about this for a while, but wow.’”
Getting the Canadian government on board is key, but the real stumbling block is the U.S. government with all of its complexities and competing interests. “Right now there are some lines in the Canadian budget for money for this. There’s also a new [U.S.] house transportation bill that’s just been announced, and we may go down to Washington to those hearings simply to get this included as a budget line,” says Muter.
“People need and want to know that structures can go in the St. Clair River responsibly in consideration of both downstream and upstream conditions with co-benefits for fish habitat. Without that information, we will never be able to get Americans to support restoration.”
ROWI has also hired renowned American lobbyist Gerry Sikourski – the former U.S. senator who took the acid rain legislation through Congress – to work the U.S. government channels. Muter describes Sikourski as “brilliant” and “totally behind restoration in the St. Clair River” – however, at a rate of $800 per hour, the cost of his lobbying efforts will be high. Sikourski’s law firm, Holland & Knight, has pledged to provide matching pro bono work worth up to $10,000 per month. Muter says ROWI is hoping to raise between $5,000 and $10,000 per month to cover Sikourski’s fees. “Fundraising is definitely a challenge for us,” says Muter. “Public education and lobbying are expensive; they are incredibly expensive, but we know enough about it to know it’s not going to happen without U.S. support. So we’re now figuring out our next visit to Washington.”
Like Stop The Drop and Restore Our Water International, Georgian Bay Forever (GBF) also plays a public education role. However, GBF is not involved in advocacy or lobbying due to its status as a charitable organization, says executive director David Sweetnam.
“We try to stay away from political activity; activity where we would go out and actually tell people what we think of a particular government program or policy or regulation, etc.,” explains Sweetnam. “Expressing our opinion to the public … isn’t something we do. We just try to inform the public in a balanced way as to what the issues are and what the real science is behind those issues so that the public discussion can be an informed one.
“Our role is not advocacy. Our role as some would think of advocacy, is actually defined as charitable activity. So I don’t have to register as a lobbyist to go and request or meet with any elected representative or government official on either side of the border, Canadian or U.S., and express to them in sensible, well-considered opinions, our take on a particular issue or topic or piece of legislation or opportunity. We do that, which some might call advocacy because we’re talking to political leadership, but it isn’t. It’s defined for us as pure charitable activity because it works to the public’s benefit; it works to increase and improve the level of understanding of our elected officials. What we wouldn’t do is go out and wave placards outside and say ‘this is what you should be doing.’
“It has to be defensible; we have to have the ability to prove our position. It has to be based on the best available science and in balanced and considered opinions, and it has to be fair. We can’t skew the information to only prove our point; we have to come out with a balanced report that says, ‘here’s the pros, here’s the cons, here’s the science that suggests that this would be the best way forward.’ “
It’s a fine line, and one that ROWI and others dispute.
Studying Economic Impacts
Georgian Bay Forever’s latest effort is an economic impact study, which Sweetnam admits is somewhat outside the GBF’s mandate. “We thought an economic impact study was a little bit outside our scope as an aquatic ecosystem organization, but we realized that in order to give this issue some real legs, that we were going to have to change the framing of this discussion away from protecting fish and fish habitat and really towards protecting the economy and the impact on the economy,” says Sweetnam.
“We realized nobody else was actually out there talking about the economic impacts of declining water levels in the Great Lakes right now. So we approached the Mowat Centre at UofT, and the Council of the Great Lakes Region, and they actually got excited about the project and agreed to take it on as their first binational project. So we are funding the study that is in process right now.”
The study will examine the impacts on a variety of different economic stakeholders, including municipal water takers, power generators, shipping, manufacturing industries, food processing and agriculture, as well as First Nations fisheries and social impacts.
“We’re trying to come up with hard numbers, not soft numbers,” says Sweetnam. “Soft numbers would be, ‘what is a wetland worth as far as providing services to the environment goes?’ And that’s a really soft number that you can get into a lot of arguments over. What we wanted were very hard numbers – real numbers that you couldn’t argue with. So if a ship has to take 25 per cent less cargo because it just can’t go down that deep, there’s a real, hard number to that; you can figure out exactly what that cost is. So those hard numbers we felt would be substantial on their own, even without the softer numbers, without the social costs or trying to value water from a spiritual perspective.”
The economic impact study, due out in early 2014, will be fully peer reviewed, says Sweetnam, adding, “It will be a report that will actually inform and be useful in furthering the decision-making process.”
However, some question how credible the report will be, given that GBF recently named Rod Jones, president and chief executive officer of Canada Steamship Lines, to its board of directors, while Robert Lewis-Manning (president of the Canadian Shipowners Association) and Kirk Jones (vice president for sustainability, government and industry affairs, Canada Steamship Lines) are on the study’s steering committee – the only direct industry representatives on that committee.
Sweetnam argues that shipping has a vital role to play, and an obvious stake in ensuring water levels are restored, as ships now have to be ‘light loaded’ in order to navigate the diminished water levels of the Great Lakes. However, Mary Muter argues that the shipping industry is only concerned with the depth of the water in the navigation channels, not the impact of water levels on the surrounding shorelines or on wetlands fish and wildlife. “They’re two very different agendas,” asserts Muter. “Canada Steamship Lines is aggressively lobbying for their solution, which is to blast the St. Mary’s River, and maintain depths there because that’s their only pinch point, and they couldn’t care less about where the water levels are along the shoreline. We know they’ve got a lobby firm in Washington and they are pushing very, very hard.”
Sweetnam maintains that the economic impact study will be unbiased. “We’re dispassionately trying to come up with a balanced report that shows the impact.”
Is There Any Common Ground?
The Georgian Bay Association, which represents more than 20 cottagers’ associations on the east and north shores of Georgian Bay, supports GBF’s economic impact study and sits on its steering committee. Despite close ties to GBF, the GBA appears to be taking an approach similar to Stop The Drop – pressuring government to act rather than advocating specific solutions.
“We’re far more focused on getting the governments to give the mandate to their chosen experts to fast-track a solution,” says the GBA’s executive director, Bob Duncanson. “What we’re asking our government to deliver is a healthy historic range of water levels. How they get there is going to be their decision and their decision only. Quite honestly, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter a whit what these other organizations have to say other than that they’ll inform whoever the government appoints to come up with a solution.”
He adds, “The St. Clair is clearly a great place to start. Is it the be-all and end-all? I can’t tell you. The rear-view mirror is to just fix what mankind has screwed up, and yes, that’s probably a good place to start, but I’d like to also see the government look out in time and be a bit more proactive.”
GBF’s Sweetnam says his organization is not taking an either-or approach to finding a solution. “We are saying you need to look at both – look at St. Clair, but also look at the Niagara River because data shows that if you’re going to put one new structure in, it should be in the Niagara River. If you’re going to put two in, then put them in the Niagara and the St. Clair. But if you’re only going to put one structure in, it should be in the Niagara River.”
ROWI’s argues the opposite position, saying its solution is aligned with two key recommendations from the International Joint Commission (IJC) to the Canadian and U.S. federal governments, one recommending that the governments undertake further investigation of structural options to restore water levels in Lake Michigan/Huron by 13 to 25 centimetres (about 5-10 inches), and the second recommending that multi-lake regulation not be pursued at this time.
“GBA and GBF are confusing the issue,” says ROWI’s Muter. “These two organizations are advocating for a solution to the problem that is untenable. Their solution would require locks and dams be constructed at the head of the Niagara River costing at least $3 billion dollars. This option has been consistently refuted by three prior International Joint Commission studies because of adverse economic and environmental impacts throughout the system. ROWI, in distinct contrast, is advocating for underwater sills in the over 60 feet deep eroding sections of the St. Clair River to offset prior dredging and erosion problems, costing no more than $300 million. This solution can be sold in the United States.”
Everyone we interviewed for this story agreed that there is strength in numbers, and a cohesive approach has a much better chance of garnering the political support – and bi-national government funding – that will be necessary before anything can be accomplished. Whether the various factions can set aside their differences and work together remains to be seen.
Where Do You Fit In?
It’s unclear whether the various groups will be able to agree on viable solutions to declining water levels, or whether polarity and competing interests will water down or confuse the message to government and the public. It’s up to the individual to decide whose efforts to support.
No one solution is likely to combat the ongoing effects of climate change on our water levels, but there is at least one solution that will mitigate the man-made issues and restore our shoreline to some semblance of normalcy until long-term measures can be implemented. One thing is sure: nothing will happen without public pressure. So get informed, get involved and make your voice heard!
Have Your Say!
Where do you stand on this issue? Which group(s), approach(es) or solution(s) do you support, and why? To write a letter to the editor, go to www.onthebaymagazine.com and click on “Have Your Say!” ❧
