If there is loose COVID cash, stop the sewage flow now
With the rosy glow from Canada Day still fresh in the memory, Canadians can reflect with pride on the watery wonderland they call home — a pristine wilderness, bordered by three mighty oceans, that contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and two million lakes.
The reality is a little less pleasant on the senses.
While 90 per cent of America’s community water systems were in compliance with Environmental Protection Agency standards in 2016, 24 per cent of Canada’s wastewater systems failed to meet Environment Canada’s quality criteria.
In that year, two billion cubic metres (more than 500 billion gallons) of untreated, or under-treated, effluent was flushed into the country’s waterways. That’s enough wastewater to fill 800,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Worse, 85 of the 491 treatment systems that were tested, discharged effluent of “acute lethality” — designated as waste that at 100 per cent concentration would kill more than 50 per cent of rainbow trout exposed to it during a 96-hour period.
Sewage isn’t sexy, which explains why politicians don’t relish spending taxpayers’ money on treating it.
On occasion, they are forced to respond to particularly noxious events.
The City of Montreal caused outrage five years ago with “flushgate,” when it released five million cubic metres or 1.3 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into the St. Lawrence. (No rainbow trout died, the city claimed.)
The City of Ottawa has long courted controversy for allowing raw sewage to flow straight into the Ottawa River — 7.3 million cubic metres or nearly two billion gallons between 2006 and 2018 — at times when heavy rains overwhelm its combined sewer overflow, a single pipe that collects sanitary and stormwater. The city is spending $750 million to ameliorate a problem that is still polluting waterways in the national capital region.
The reality is there is a massive disconnect between Canadians’ self-image and their stewardship of the country’s waterways.
Both Conservative and Liberal governments have recognized this shortcoming and made efforts to remedy a national embarrassment.
However, with so many competing demands on resources, there has been a tendency at the municipal level to neglect cleaning up rivers and lakes. Plants in a number of Canadian cities won’t meet effluent standards until 2040, including Montreal’s Jean R. Marcotte Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest in North America, which releases billion of gallons of under-treated sewage into the St. Lawrence every year. It is currently undergoing a $500-million upgrade that critics contend still won’t meet federal and provincial effluent standards.
The Liberals aroused fears last week that the number of communities allowed to pollute with impunity for another two decades is set to grow.
The government released proposed regulations that the opposition says will grant even more municipalities a 20-year extension before they have to become compliant with federal standards.
“It is shameful that as a developed G7 nation we still allow Third World wastewater practices in towns and cities, large and small,” said Conservative MP Peter Kent. “Canada is far behind other EU countries and the U.S., which has had mandatory secondary treatment since the 1970s.”
Kent was environment minister when the Conservative government introduced the Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations that require effluent to be treated to “secondary level” (a physical process to remove solid matter and a biological process to remove dissolved and suspended organic compounds).
“In 2006, Environment Canada estimated Canadian municipalities of all sizes would need as much as $20 billion over two decades to bring wastewater systems up to acceptable standards,” he said.
Many municipalities and provincial governments complained they did not have the fiscal capacity to meet the new standards and were given “transitional authorization” — or extensions — before they needed to be in compliance. Deadlines of 2020, 2030 and 2040 were assigned to cities, depending on the level of risk associated with the wastewater system.
The 2040 target was meant to be for “low risk” systems, though no one has been able to explain to me how the massive Jean R. Marcotte plant in Montreal falls into that category, given the amount of pollution it discharges.
Elaine Macdonald, healthy communities director at Ecojustice Canada, said she is worried the government has opened the door to more extensions. “We could see more municipalities added to the 2040 list, giving them the chance to de-prioritize wastewater treatment,” she said.
The Liberal government, which pledged last year to keep waters “safe, clean and well-managed,” denies the proposed regulatory amendments weaken the timeline to compliance.
Moira Kelly, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, said the process has been reopened to allow municipalities that did not receive an extension to apply for one. “During our last mandate, we approved $1.6 billion in federal funding for 1,452 wastewater projects. In comparison, between 2011 and 2015, the previous Harper government approved only 216 wastewater projects, representing $641 million in federal funding,” she said.
What that exchange suggests is that neither party has delivered on the promise to keep Canada’s fresh water safe and clean.
Catherine Mckenna, the infrastructure minister, has a $33 billion “Investing in Canada” fund that will presumably be used as part of a POST-COVID economic recovery plan.
It would seem a good opportunity to accelerate plans to end the practice of pumping a putrid discharge of “acute lethality” into waters in which fish swim and children swim.