MARY GUSELLA
(Présidente, Commission mixte internationale):

Bienvenue ce matin au forum public de la Commission mixte internationale. C'est un grand plaisir d'être ici à Montréal avec vous.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Montreal and to the International Joint Commission's 2001 Biennial Public Forum on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Water Quality.

I am Mary Gusella, the Chair of the Canadian Section of the International Joint Commission.

As you know, we had planned to hold this forum last month and immediately following the tragic events of September 11th, we announced that the public forum would be postponed to a later date.

While the losses of our two great nations still cast a long shadow over our lives, the time has come to once again focus our attention on the restoration of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence ecosystem.

But before proceeding, I would like to honor those who have suffered and I would like you to join me, perhaps if you would stand, for a moment of silence.

J'aimerais que nous marquions la pause de quelques instants.

(Pause)

Thank you very much.

Merci.

Well, I must say it's very exciting to see such a diverse group of people here today from the Island of Montreal, from around the Great Lakes and from beyond.

Your presence here this morning tells us that you care, that you care about the health of our magnificent shared resources – the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

I would now like to introduce my fellow commissioners who are seated at the front of the audience and I would ask them to stand as I introduce them.

First, Mr. Thomas Baldini, who is the U.S. Chair. Tom?

Next, Mr. Jack Blaney, who is the Canadian Commissioner from Vancouver.

We have one more commissioner. I'll give you his name. In fact, he is one to whom we owe a great deal of thanks for suggesting the location of Montreal as the venue for this meeting, and it is Robert Gourd. He is not with us this morning, but he is going to be joining us later on in the day. I do want to acknowledge all of his hard work and thank him on behalf of all of us.

Avant d'aller plus loin, je voudrais revenir sur la nature unique de la Commission mixte internationale et sur le rôle qu'elle joue au cours du 20e siècle.

Le Traité relatif aux eaux limitrophes de 1909 stipule que « Les eaux limitrophes entre le Canada et les États-Unis ne seront pas polluées par l'un des deux pays au détriment de l'autre. »

Et bien que les eaux limitrophes aient quand même été polluées au fil des ans, la CMI a joué un rôle clé auprès des gouvernements afin que ceux-ci corrigent leurs actions et travaillent en vue de protéger l'environnement et stimuler le développement durable.

La participation de la Commission mixte internationale à la mise en oeuvre de l'accord relatif à la qualité de l'eau des Grands Lacs, et c'est un bon exemple car dans cet accord, on a chargé la CMI de conseiller les gouvernements et d'évaluer la restauration de l'intégrité chimique, physique et biologique des Grands Lacs.

Yesterday's workshops produced a great deal of substantive information and dialogue. I would like to thank everyone who organized these sessions, as well as all of you who participated in the sessions.

After all, this meeting is not about the IJC. It is about the collective of people who care about the Great Lakes and come together at this meeting to learn, to interact and to participate to make them better.

Et plus important encore, nous sommes ici pour vous entendre. Et bien que nous ayons été présents partout à travers les Grands Lacs au cours des deux dernières années, nous sommes ici aujourd'hui pour vous permettre, en effet, de nous indiquer quelles sont les questions qui vous touchent et vous permettre de nous faire part de vos commentaires à nous, les autorités chargées, et au gouvernement de mettre en œuvre l'Accord relatif à la qualité de l'eau des Grands Lacs.

Et nous vous encourageons à vous lever et à venir déposer devant nous lorsque nous tournerons vers vous vos questions, vos commentaires, vos suggestions.

During the last two years, the IJC, its boards and its taskforces have held specific sessions in a wide variety of the Great Lakes areas. They have met with the public and they have received a lot of excellent advice.

In fact, we have more than 40 reports, documents and discussion summaries that will contribute to our assessment of the progress over the last two years. The partial list of these is available at the registration desk and many are available, of course, on our website.

Today, we are beginning with presentations from senior representatives of the two governments. And after a short break, we will be hearing from senior program managers in the governments about the progress under the Agreement and their plans for the future.

The rest of the day will be dedicated to hearing your views on what needs to be done to restore the waters of the Great Lakes basin and its ecosystem and how the governments should be addressing these needs.

I know everyone in the room is eager to hear from the governments, and it is my honor to introduce the representative from the Canadian government, Ms. Karen Redman.

In 1997, Karen Redman was elected as the Member of Parliament for Kitchener Center. As the federal representative for Kitchener, Karen has sat on a number of committees, including the Standing Committee on Finance, Health and the Library of Parliament.

The Prime Minister recently acknowledged her hard work by appointing her to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment. Karen was sworn in as the Parliamentary Secretary a year ago in September 2000.

Karen, the floor is yours.

KAREN REDMAN
(Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment):

Good morning.

It's my pleasure to represent the Government of Canada at the International Joint Commission Public Forum on Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Water Quality.

By holding this biennial forum outside of the Great Lakes basin, we have an excellent opportunity to explore new partnerships and to recognize the interdependence of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence ecosystem.

I want to thank everybody for their cooperation in rescheduling this event. I also want to welcome Environment Protection Agency Assistant Administrator for Water, Tracy Mehan, and all of our American guests.

This conference is about recognizing the interest we share with our friends and our neighbors. We appreciate this opportunity to strengthen the Canada–United States relationship by working to improve the quality of life enjoyed by both our citizens.

The Canada-U.S. Water Quality Agreement, signed 29 years ago, is a testament to our friendship, partnership and commitment. This Agreement recognizes that cooperative action does more good for the environment than the sum of our individual efforts. This sentiment has served us well in the past and I would tell you I think is no more important in our communities since the events of September the 11th.

This cooperation led to the creation of the IJC over 90 years ago, an institution that has allowed us to cooperatively manage our boundary waters to the benefit of both Canada and the United States. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement helped us turn around the near destruction of Lake Erie by overloading of phosphorus.

We should be proud of our success, but far from satisfied.

The fact is our past environmental achievements are being overtaken by new threats and unsustainable practices. Trends towards urban sprawl and more intensive agricultural practices are being compounded by global problems such as climate change. The biological integrity of the lakes is being threatened by invasive species, which is one of the United Nations' five environmental concerns.

Global demands for pesticides and manufactured chemicals are also rising. This is not the environmental legacy envisioned by the 1972 Canada–U.S. Water Quality Agreement. This is not the environmental legacy we want.

Our parents could swim in places like Hamilton Harbor and the Detroit River. We cannot. We need to make sure that our children will be able to.

Public opinion polling has consistently shown that an overwhelming majority of Canadians view fresh water as a special and precious resource, and it requires protection. This desire for action was recently reaffirmed in a report of Canada's Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

In addition to being the first report by Madame Johanne Gélinas, it was also notable for its focus on the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence ecosystem, the first time a Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has focused on an ecosystem such as this.

Her recommendations are welcomed. They're contributions to the Government of Canada in its efforts to ensure a healthy and sustainable environment.

The Commissioner posed several interesting questions. Many of them went to the heart of the challenges that we face in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence ecosystem.

Comment pouvons-nous protéger de manière coordonnée et soutenue l'intégrité écologique de ces ressources de très grande valeur? Comment les gouvernements peuvent-ils réagir de manière efficace à des écosystèmes et à des menaces écologiques en constant changement?

Je pense que les réussites qui nous avons à notre actif nous donnent quelques modèles efficaces pour l'avenir. Là où des partenariats ont été utilisés, nous avons pu constater que des progrès ont pris place.

Et nous avons pu voir une véritable passion naître dans les collectivités entraînées dans des programmes d'action coordonnés à l'échelle d'un écosystème plus vaste qu'elles-mêmes.

Nous avons vu que les réseaux auxquels participent les gouvernement, des municipalités, des groupes de protection de l'environnement et des citoyens ont la souplesse nécessaire pour pouvoir évoluer en harmonie avec les écosystèmes qu'ils protègent.

Areas like Severn Sound show hard work, coordinated efforts and sustained community involvement can bring about environmental success. Severn Sound is poised to join Collingwood Harbor as being crossed off the list of Great Lakes Areas of Concern.

No doubt, new threats will emerge. But the networks and the partnerships will be in place to respond and to take action. Municipalities, Environment Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and organizations such as the Friends of Wye Marsh have come together in Severn Sound. We're all partners. We understand our roles and we ensure that our efforts don't overlap.

The Government of Canada is supporting a number of innovations and initiatives through the Great Lakes Sustainability Fund that are seeing marked improvement throughout the Great Lakes, projects that are focusing on improving local water quality, habitat enhancement, erosion control and sewage optimization projects, and they are producing both environmental and economic benefits.

For example, we have contributed almost two million dollars to environmental projects on farms. Our major goal is to control the runoff that carries phosphorus and other nutrients which then overload our freshwater ecosystem.

An excellent example of the progress made to date can be found in the Bay of Quinte Area of Concern.

The Great Lakes Sustainability Fund has been crucial to its remediation. This funding served as a catalyst to leverage an additional million dollars from farmers and other stakeholders.

In Toronto, a coalition of government and community groups is working to bring back the Don. As their planning document entitled “Forty Steps to a New Don” suggests, this is not a simple task.

But community efforts supported by government have already brought back spawning fish populations that have not been seen in a hundred years. This is a great example of community involvement. Bring Back the Don has staged events that have attracted an excess of 10,000 people.

Les terres humides constituent une autre habitat naturel que nous comprenons de mieux en mieux. Comme nous le savons tous, les terres humides constituent l'infrastructure écologique de la nature.

En Ontario, l'eau qui sort des robinets de la plupart des logements a été filtrée par une terre humide. C'est un capital naturel que nous risquons perdre, car les villes s'étendent et empiètent sur ces terres humides.

C'est une tendance qu'il ne sera pas facile de renverser.

Les gouvernements et d'autres organismes ont toutefois reconnu l'importance des terres humides. Nous prenons actuellement des mesures pour protéger les sites menacés et pour restaurer ceux qui ont été endommagés.

In the St. Lawrence River basin, we set a goal of protecting 120,000 hectares of natural habitats under Vision 2000. Working in cooperation with communities, various non-governmental organizations and other partners, we are making great strides towards meeting that goal.

Over 83,000 hectares have now been protected in the St. Lawrence River basin. In the Great Lakes, 5,100 hectares of wetlands and associated lands have been protected through acquisitions.

A further 12,750 hectares of wetlands have been rehabilitated and projects to restore another 1,400 hectares are well underway.

Much of this work has been made possible because of the Government of Canada's Great Lakes Sustainability Fund. As communities and organizations that work to conserve their natural heritage, governments have an obligation to support these efforts not only with funding but also by providing moral leadership that comes from working together effectively ourselves.

Over the past year, one of the key environmental issues in the media has been bulk water exports. Canadians have expressed strong opposition to the bulk export of our water. Our government agrees with Canadians that bulk water exports must be prohibited.

I'm pleased to report that the federal amendments to the International Boundary Waters Treaty were passed in the House of Commons this month. These amendments will prohibit bulk removal of water from Canada's boundary waters principally in the Great Lakes.

As you know, the International Joint Commission was given a reference from the Government of Canada and the United States to study the effects of water consumption, diversion and removal from the Great Lakes. The recommendations of the International Joint Commission in its excellent report, “Protection of the Waters of the Great Lakes” reinforces Canada's approach.

This level of commitment provides solid assurance that bulk water removal projects and export will not proceed.

Now it is time that we work together on inter-basin diversions. This is an important environmental issue and the consequences of inter-basin diversions could be serious for our environment.

When it comes to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, the relationship between the Government of Canada and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec are especially crucial.

I am pleased to report that we are strengthening both of these relationships. Consensus and cooperation have enabled the governments of Quebec and Canada to implement three phases of the St. Lawrence Action Plan. The Government of Canada and the Government of Quebec are committed to following through in helping fulfill the ambitious Vision 2000 Project by providing 239 million dollars towards this effort.

In Ontario, the Government of Canada has negotiated a new draft agreement with the province for “Protecting the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem”.

This document, the fifth such federal–provincial arrangements since 1971, is one of the primary tools in meeting our commitments under the Canada–United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

We are seeking broad public input and I encourage all stakeholders to participate in this important debate. Strengthening our partnerships with other governments not only helps us meet our domestic goals. It also makes Canada a stronger international environmental partner.

We have to recognize that some environmental problems can be fixed by Canadians. Many others will be overcome by Canadians working in partnership with other nations.

The International Joint Commission has been an instrument in coordinating the cross-border effort in the Great Lakes. We also have to recognize that our cooperation on a broader continental agenda will also accelerate our working in protecting Great Lakes ecosystems.

Climate change is real and we must work together to find solutions that will combat it and will reinsure the environmental integrity of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence.

Cleaner air means cleaner lakes and cleaner rivers. Air knows no jurisdictional boundary. Concerted actions to reduce airborne pollutants like sulphur and mercury complements the work of community-based groups addressing local sources of pollutants.

Dealing decisively with the clean air agenda also contributes to other challenges with even more profound consequences on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. I'm talking, of course, about climate change and its impact on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River water levels. Climate change will have implications for all ecosystems and all communities, including those in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

The international community must show the same sustained action and level of commitment that we have seen in the Bay of Quinte or on the Detroit River.

Canada negotiated hard at Bonn in June to reach a workable framework, and we're looking at 2002 as the target for a ratification decision after consulting with provincial and territorial governments and stakeholders.

The future continues to hold tremendous challenges. Although we are making progress, environmental issues are becoming larger and much more complex.

However, offsetting this trend is the growing sense of responsibility that individuals feel for the environment. People are coming to realize that the quality of the environment has a direct impact both on their health and that of their children.

Look at the work of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence communities. It's encouraging to see how willingly people, communities, governments and researchers have embraced their role in this conservation effort. We have to work across borders and across jurisdictions to support this kind of individual and community effort.

By working together, Canadians and Americans can produce the kind of environmental legacy we want for the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River ecosystem. As we plan for the future, it's important to understand the context of our actions.

In both Canada and the United States, we're standing on the shoulders of the people who began efforts decades ago. They reduced the flow of pollution into the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River and improved the health of the ecosystem. By looking back at their successes, we appreciate the importance of leaving behind our own environmental legacy.

We know we need to do more and we know we need to do it better. And we will. But we will do it together.

Thank you.

TOM BALDINI
(U.S. Chair, International Joint Commission):

Thank you, Ms. Redman.

The words are encouraging. There is general recognition really of the need to focus special attention, to address the issues of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

Your remarks really highlight what the Government of Canada's efforts are towards moving towards clean air and clean water, and that's very important for us.

Since as you have noted, pollution doesn't respect these nice little boundaries that political people have established over the years, we need cooperation between the provinces, the states and two federal governments to achieve the purposes that we have established under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Our next speaker this morning will address the policy challenges in restoring the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the ecosystem on behalf of the United States' government. His name is Tracy Mehan.

Mr. Mehan is the Assistant Administrator for Water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is well known and respected by many of you in this room. You have worked with Tracy perhaps over the years.

He, in his previous life, was the Director of the Office of the Great Lakes for the State of Michigan for eight years. But more importantly for our organization, he was also a member of our Great Lakes Water Quality Board, a very, very hard-working contributing member.

So let me, Tracy, extend my personal congratulations and I know, the IJC community's congratulations on your very important new position for the U.S. in managing water.

We're delighted to have a member of the IJC community and family in this very important position in the United States. And, therefore, hopefully, we'll keep the lines of communication between the IJC and at least the U.S. open and continuing.

So let me give you the Assistant Administrator for Water in the U.S., Mr. Tracy Mehan. Tracy?

MR. TRACY MEHAN
(Assistant Administrator for Water, Environmental Protection Agency):

Good morning.

Thank you, Tom. It's nice to know that I'm well known and respected and hopefully, to whom I'm well known, I'm also respected.

I've had the pleasure of participating at International Joint Commission biennial forums in my former position, but this is my first time where I have the opportunity to speak to the IJC and the public, representing a party to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

And, those of you may remember some of the theological debates that we've had in the past and who is a party and who is a partner may find that somewhat ironic.

But nonetheless, I thank the commissioners and everyone in the community.

If I might just make a personal reflection since this is, as I say, sort of a culmination of an eight-year tour of duty on Great Lakes issues, I recently had the privilege to travel to the United States southern border, to the El Paso Juarez area where we deal with a whole different suite of challenges in a binational context, an area that by U.S. standards is one of the poorest areas, but by Mexican standards is actually in fairly good shape, actually progressing with the progress under NAFTA.

Nonetheless, it's an area that gets nine inches of rain per year and has only had three inches. One cannot help but reflect on the blessings that all of us who have lived and worked in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region have both in material terms, intellectual, in terms of our economy, in terms of our resources, in terms of our strengths that we have.

It is something to think about as we undertake the important work at the IJC to not take for granted those blessings and those gifts.

I would also like to take this time to publicly salute my friend and colleague, Tom Baldini for his outstanding leadership of the U.S. section these many years, at least years that overlap with my involvement in these issues.

The entire region, certainly the State of Michigan, is grateful for your service, Tom. The Great Lakes and the people who depend upon them will, for a long time, remember your public service in this area.

It's an honor here, of course, for me to join my Canadian colleague, Karen Redman, in sharing with you some of the policy challenges that we continue to face in working to protect the outstanding binational treasure of the Great Lakes.

I love the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence region. I had the good fortune to marry a woman who grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan and, of course, the good fortune to work on these issues the last eight years.

From my new position, the challenges facing the Great Lakes look just as formidable as they were in my old position. Yet so do, as I mentioned, the talent, the resources and the energy that we collectively bring to these challenges.

Progress has been substantial – Karen noted that – but sometimes slower than we would like. But nonetheless, the progress has been real. It has been a decades long success story and it is still in the making.

The U.S. and Canada are the closest of partners in many arenas, including the protection of our shared environmental treasures. From the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 through the 1972 signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and its subsequent updates, our two nations have successfully addressed phosphorus loadings, for instance. We have reduced the input of toxics into the waters of the Great Lakes and we are currently addressing the legacy of toxic pollutants in medium such as sediments.

We are moving to stem the loss of vital wetlands and habitat and we will continue to work to prevent future introductions of exotic species.

Much of our binational cooperation takes place through the Lakewide Management Plans, the Remedial Action Plans, the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network, the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference and through a variety of other actions called for under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

And the Agreement continues, at least in my mind, to be a world model of binational and international cooperation for this sharing of natural resources.

We are proud of this progress that we have made in protecting and restoring the Great Lakes with our Canadian neighbors.

However – and Karen uttered these same sentiments – we cannot are not complacent. We still have much work to do before we can, without qualification, answer yes to four questions that are frequently asked by our citizens:

• Are the Great Lakes fish safe to eat?
  
• Are the beaches safe for swimming?
  
• Do the Lakes provide a healthy natural environment for people and wildlife?
  
• And finally, do the Lakes continue to provide a safe source of drinking water?

I know these four questions don't cover the full complexity of the issues facing us, but they are strong general indicators of the overall health and integrity of the Great Lakes and they are of paramount importance to all our citizens.

Later this morning, my colleagues, Gary Gulezian and John Mills will highlight in some detail the progress that is being made in all these areas.

Nevertheless, because of the urgency imposed by recent events, I'm going to address first the question of drinking water safety. Until recently, most public questions about drinking water safety focused on the quality of source water, our compliance with standards or microbial or chemical contaminants.

The events and aftermath of September 11th have immediately and drastically changed the focus of those questions to one of the fundamental security of our drinking water and wastewater systems from malign threats.

Building on existing efforts, we are rapidly accelerating the steps to ensure that all drinking water providers and wastewater system operators possess the tools to assess, minimize and respond to all potential threats to the safety of drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities.

We are working basically in five specific areas or fronts: tools, training, secure information, an expanded knowledge base and networking.

I would like to briefly review some of those areas of efforts that are undertaken right now.

We are presently developing tools to safeguard water in concert with numerous partners, public and private. These include, for instance, immediate notices sent to all utilities and local law enforcement outlining security measures to be put in place expeditiously.

We are initiating crosschecks of all utility employees with FBI's various watch lists.

We are encouraging and promoting vulnerability assessments and remediation plans for systems, as well as emergency operation plans for drinking water systems and the like.

We are developing training programs for utilities, including general managers, security officers and consultants, as well as states and E.P.A. regions and tribal jurisdictions.

In the area of information, we are pursuing rapid information sharing for alerts of threats, notices of vulnerability and incidents using the FBI secure information system to notify all drinking water utilities, as well as utilizing a virtual center to coordinate among utilities, our regional offices, states and local emergency and drinking water contacts.

As to improving the knowledge base, we are pushing new and ongoing research and analysis for a better understanding of the range of potential contaminants and how to respond to them, including the nature of the contaminants, detection of the contaminants, how the contaminants respond to treatment and the fate and transport of contaminants within the environment and within a treatment system.

As to networking and collaboration, E.P.A. realizes that safeguarding the nation's drinking water is not entirely in our hands, although we play a critical role.

We will continue to improve coordination, dialogue and information dissemination with other federal agencies, with the E.P.A. regions and states and tribes and with the principal water organizations responsible for the front line defense.

Recently, my boss, E.P.A. Administrator Whitman, announced the formation of a Water Protection Task Force to help federal, state and local partners to expand all their tools to safeguard the nation's drinking water supply and wastewater treatment facilities from terrorist attack.

While E.P.A. already has a strong coordinated partnership program, the Task Force will expand E.P.A. services to the community water systems, as well as wastewater treatment systems – an area we haven't paid nearly as much attention to as the drinking water systems – while intensifying our overall security efforts.

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that physical destruction to our systems, not necessarily the exotic biological and chemical threats, remains the biggest threat to things such as reservoirs, aqueducts, chlorine tanks, sewer lines and the like. Physical security has to be our primary concern.

Let me just quickly summarize the numbers. In the U.S., we have 168,000 systems, water systems, which go all the way down to the size of a trailer park.

We have about 330 systems with 100,000 customers or more on the drinking water side.

We have 16,000 publicly-owned treatment works and 600,000 miles of sewer lines.

This is a vast infrastructure to protect and yet, nonetheless, while we are looking at things like exotic bio-agents and contaminants and chemicals, it's protecting the physical structure of these systems. I mean, for instance, imagine a loss in water pressure timed to coincide with a fire bombing. I need say no more.

But let's return to our more traditional concerns in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence ecosystem. In order to continue to reduce the levels of persistent bioaccumulative toxic chemicals in the environment, the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy in April of 1997, which sets specific reduction goals for the most troublesome persistent chemicals, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins.

I'm proud to say that I was involved with the beginning of that project and look forward to supporting it in any way I can in my present position. We are continuing vigorous implementation of the strategy.

Stakeholder involvement is the cornerstone of the strategy and I'm pleased to say that we continue to secure commitments from additional stakeholders for phasing out use or reducing emissions of these persistent pollutants.

Here are some of the indicators of progress in reducing toxics in the basin, generally. Over the last decade, net deposition of DDT to the five Great Lakes has decreased by 85 percent and the atmospheric inputs of PCBs to the Lakes have decreased by half.

We have achieved or we are on a track or a road of achieving the strategy goal of a 90 percent reduction of high level PCBs used in electrical equipment.

Dioxin emissions decreased an estimated 77 percent between 1987 and 1995 and are expected to decline an additional 66 percent between 1995 and 2006, primarily as the result of controls on emissions from incineration in copper smelting.

The binational strategy sets a goal of reducing mercury use and emissions nationally by 50 percent by 2006. While high quality data are difficult to acquire on mercury use, best available data indicates that mercury use decreased approximately 50 percent between 1995 and 2001.

Preliminary data indicates that mercury emissions declined by close to 40 percent between 1990 and 2001, largely as the result of decreasing emissions from incineration of municipal and medical waste.

Further reductions from this sector will occur as regulations affecting these facilities are fully implemented over the next few years under our Clean Air Act.

But mercury, nonetheless, continues to be a problem in Great Lakes fish and many other waters across the continent. My State of Michigan, all 11,000 lakes are under some form of fish consumption advisory, for instance.

E.P.A. will take additional steps to substantially reduce airborne mercury emissions from the single largest remaining emission source: coal-fired utility plants.

In December 2000, the Agency determined that mercury emissions from coal-fired electric power plants warrant further control. These plants emit approximately 43 tons of mercury each year.

By 2003, E.P.A. will propose a maximum achievable control technology regulation under the Clean Air Act to control mercury emissions from the coal-fired utilities. This rule will be finalized by 2004.

An alternative means of emissions control is being actively explored within the Administration – the so-called multi-pollutant strategy for coal-fired power plants. This approach recognizes that utilities are likely to be further regulated in upcoming years for three pollutants: mercury, nitrogen and sulphur oxide.

This approach would set an overall cap on emissions for each of the three pollutants and allow utilities to trade emissions among facilities to achieve and maintain the cap.

E.P.A. believes that greater reductions of each pollutant can be achieved at lower cost if a multi-pollutant approach is followed. This approach requires enabling legislation by the Congress, and E.P.A. will work to see if we can make this approach a reality.

If implemented, it would replace the 2004 rule on mercury emissions for coal-fired power plants, as well as several other regulatory programs for nitrogen and sulphur dioxide.

Either way, MACT, Maximum Achievable Control Technology Regulations for coal-fired power plant emissions are a multi-pollutant program. Either way, the U.S. aims to achieve substantial additional reductions over the next decade.

One of the most intractable problems in the Great Lakes is contaminated bottom sediments. Contaminated sediments impact virtually all the areas of concern and are a source of continuing pollutant loadings to near shore areas and to the Lakes as a whole.

Cycling of contaminants from bottom sediments is a leading source of contamination of the Great Lakes food chain. Contaminated sediments problems have been addressed at many sites throughout the basin. Remediation activities have been completed at 20 sites since 1997 alone.

Over that four-year time frame, we have remediated more than 1.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediments in Great Lakes rivers and harbors.

We will continue a pace to address these sites, though it must be admitted that some of the largest most challenging and most expensive sites remain.

We're working towards an objective of initiating three remedial actions per year, beginning in 2002.

Through these efforts and many others, we will steadily continue to reduce levels of toxics in fish. Some day, some day, we will answer the question, albeit for our great-grandchildren that yes, Great Lakes fish are safe to eat by anyone anywhere.

Now, most Great Lakes beaches provide a safe and enjoyable location for outdoor recreation swimming. Monitoring studies show that beach pollution is usually confined to areas near pollution sources, after a heavy rainfall or where a sewage plant malfunctions.

Nonetheless, there have been a number of closings in recent swimming seasons and these have a direct effect on the enjoyment of the resource.

Of more concern, we may not have enough monitoring information to know when beaches should be posted or closed, and this lack of data could pose a potential health risk to swimmers through exposure to harmful microorganisms.

We are working hard to make beaches safer for swimming nationwide. In fact, in the year 2000, Congress passed the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act, or the Beach Act.

E.P.A. is working with state and local agencies to implement the Act which requires all states with coastal waters, including the Great Lakes, to review current water quality standards for pathogens in recreational waters and to adopt more protective standards where necessary.

The Act also requires E.P.A. to develop guidance for beach monitoring and public notification of closings and to provide some funding of state efforts to implement monitoring and notification programs.

Key objectives we have identified for Great Lakes beaches are that by 2005, 95 percent of high used Great Lakes beaches will have monitoring and public notification programs that comply with E.P.A. guidance.

By 2007, we're aiming for 90 percent of these beaches to meet bacteria standards for more than 95 percent of the swimming season.

Meeting that objective will not be easy. Many of the sources affecting beaches, such as discharges from sanitary sewers and storm water, are difficult and expensive to fix.

Of the various environmental threats we must manage, few are more potentially damaging than invasive species which pose a growing and potential threat to the region's economy and environment. We now have, as most of you know, approximately 160 such pests in the Great Lakes system, and it's likely that more are on the way.

We must do more to close out invasive species entirely from the Great Lakes system.

The invasive species problem manifests itself locally, but the solution must be regional, national and obviously, international in scope. The ultimate response must be fully coordinated across agencies and international boundaries, and many of us have a role to play.

For this reason, I certainly applauded the IJC's Water Quality Board's recent report, “Alien Invasive Species and Biological Pollution of the Great Lakes Basin System”. I was part of the Water Quality Board at the time, so I have some proprietary feeling about that effort.

Many aquatic nuisance species have been introduced over the last four decades as a result of increased shipping and international trade, which is a good thing, but with the ballast water being the primary, though not only, vector for aquatic invasion.

Now, E.P.A. just issued a report that considers the agency's role in better control of ballast water introductions and presents options for addressing invasive species. The report titled “Aquatic Nuisance Species and Ballast Water Discharges: Issues and Options” is out in draft form for public comment through January 11th, 2002 and it is posted our website.

This report was drafted before I was confirmed by the U.S. Senate but released after my confirmation. So I will say I don't have ownership in this report yet, so I'm very, very interested in the comments from all of you in the Great Lakes community, and the community nationally on this report. We'll very much review those comments carefully that come in by mid-January.

This draft report finds that the greatest impediments to effectively controlling ANS introductions from ballast water discharges is the current lack of technical solutions to remove aquatic nuisance species from discharges.

Among the other findings of the report, it proposes as follows:

• A more active agenda for research, outreach and technology developments through established taskforces and councils on invasive species.
  
• Supporting the U.S. Coast Guard's efforts to maximize compliance with its regulations, evaluate their effectiveness and to revise them if necessary.
  
• And continuing E.P.A.'s participation on the U.S. delegation to the Ballast Water Working Group of the Marine Environmental Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization.

While recommending – and this is the report speaking now – while recommending the E.P.A. defer consideration of applying a national pollutant discharge elimination system permit to ballast water discharges pending these other actions, it acknowledges that NPDES permitting of ballast is one option along with others provided by the Clean Water Act.

I might add we are experiencing some litigation right now over an exemption that E.P.A. has had for decades for ballast water discharges.

Coastal wetlands are one of the Lakes' greatest treasures, as Karen indicated. Only a fraction of the region's wetlands and coastal marshes have survived to date and the restoration and protection is essential.

In addition to providing a tremendous recreational value to the region, they provide critical fish and wildlife habitat, prevent shoreline erosion and help store and cycle nutrients.

Over the last several years, the quantity and quality of Great Lakes coastal wetlands have received increasing attention among Canadian and United States scientists and resource managers.

The Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands Consortium has been convened to monitor the size and ecological health of Great Lakes coastal wetlands in order to guide their protection and restoration.

E.P.A. has been pleased to support this effort through its Great Lakes National Program Office and over the next two years, the Consortium will do the following: it will design and validate indicators to assess the ecological integrity of the Lakes Great coastal wetlands; will design an implementable, long-term program to monitor Great Lakes coastal wetlands; and finally, to make this data accessible to scientists, decision-makers and the public.

There are a number of other things happening in the region that I think merit your attention.

The first of these is the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference, or SOLEC. The SOLEC process and indicators development reflect the commitment of the U.S. and Canada to regular reporting on progress towards the goals of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and development of a consistent and appropriate set of indicators for the ecosystem as a whole.

The second effort is the Great Lakes Strategy nearing completion by something called the U.S. Policy Committee, a forum of senior level representatives from federal, state and tribal resource management and environmental protection agencies.

The strategy includes long-term goals consistent with the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, measurable mid-term objectives and key actions that will be taken over the next several years by the Great Lakes states, tribes and several federal agencies.

Where appropriate, progress towards the objectives are measured using SOLEC indicators. A draft strategy was made available for public comment this summer and the final strategy is expected late this fall.

In the Great Lakes, we're working towards ambitious long-term goals that will only be achieved by sustained and concerted action over many years. To chart a path, engage our progress towards these goals, it's critical that we agree on mid-term objectives, identify action geared to those objectives and continue to gauge our success towards our ultimate targets.

I think we are doing a much better job of that and, as a result, the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence success story will continue.

If we persevere, we will be able to probably answer those four questions:

• Yes, the Great Lakes provide a safe source of drinking water.
  
• Great Lakes fish are safe to eat anywhere, anytime.
  
• The beaches are open and healthy for swimming
  
• and the Great Lakes is a natural environment where people and wildlife thrive.

I want to thank each one of you for your continued efforts for the Great Lakes and a special thanks to the International Joint Commission for helping Canada and the United States continue to advance our common goals.

Thank you very much.

MARY GUSELLA:

Well, thank you very, very much, Tracy, for your comments.

We're very grateful that you've taken the time to share with us your perspective from your new position and to link it to the challenges of the Great Lakes which you know only too well.

Well, at this point, the morning is launched and it's time to take a short break. We are going to be asking you to return to the room at 10:15.

Alors, nous allons prendre une petite pause. Si vous voulez revenir pour 10h15.

Et quand nous serons de retour, nous aurons l'occasion d'entendre des commentaires des fonctionnaires chargés de la mise en œuvre de l'Accord sur la qualité de l'eau des Grands Lacs.

So when we come back, we will be hearing from the representatives of the governments with respect to the implementation of the accord, the Water Quality Agreement. So we will see you back here at 10:15.

Alors, à 10 h 15.

(BREAK)

JACK BLANEY:

The Commission would like to take a moment of personal privilege this morning.

On behalf of the International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes community, I would like to extend our warmest thanks to Mr. Tom Behlen – Tom, please stand – for his leadership and guidance as the Director of our regional office in Windsor.

As many of you know, Tom will be completing his term of office as the Regional Director and we wanted to take this opportunity to express to him publicly how much we appreciated his four years of service and contribution and what he has done to help move along the office and, more importantly, the Water Quality Agreement.

The Commission will recognize Tom in a much more formal way at a later time this week. But we wanted to take this opportunity to mention the fact that this will be Tom's last meeting with the forum in official capacity.

I'm pleased to thank him publicly here for what he has done. So please join me in thanking him.

Thank you, Tom.

The Director's position, as I've indicated, alternates every four years between the United States and Canada. To succeed Tom Behlen at the International Joint Commission as the Director of our regional office is Dr. Gail Krantzberg, who is no stranger to many of you here.

She is an eco-toxicologist and an environmentalist, and she has had a very distinguished scientific career in public service with the Ontario public service government and has played really an important role in many of the things that directly impact the work of the IJC and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

And so we're very pleased to have you join us, Gail. Welcome. Please join me in welcoming her.

Thank you very much.

MARY GUSELLA:

Well, let me add my own personal thanks to Tom Behlen and a warm welcome to Gail Krantzberg.

The Great Lakes office, I think as you appreciate, is a critical one in the role of the IJC and we do rely very heavily on its director.

Under the Canada–United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the government's stated purpose is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem. It explicitly recognizes that a comprehensive approach is required to cope with pollution.

The concepts of virtual elimination and zero discharges, as well as areas of concern, have made the agreement noteworthy and have captured the interest of many other nations as they grapple with similar problems.

We're fortunate and even honored to have the top Great Lakes program managers from both Canada and the United States here today to highlight what our governments are doing to meet their commitments under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Now, we have asked them to keep their comments short to allow for discussion and their presentations are going to be followed by an open-microphone session when we will have more opportunity for dialogue with you and an opportunity for you to ask questions.

So please join me in welcoming our two presenters. They will be kind of coming up and taking over from here. Both of them, Mr. John Mills, the Director of the Ontario Region for Environment Canada, and Mr. Gary Gulezian, the Director of the Great Lakes National Program Office.

So if you will join me in welcoming John and Gary.

JOHN MILLS
(Director, Ontario Region for Environment Canada):

Bonjour. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Premièrement, nous tenons à remercier la Commission mixte internationale de donner l'occasion aux gouvernements du Canada et des États-Unis de faire un rapport sur les activités relatives à la qualité de l'eau dans le basin des Grands Lacs, y compris quelques faits saillants pour le fleuve Saint-Laurent.

Now, we can't give you the whole full story in just one hour. So let me refer you to our websites, the recently released “State of the Great Lakes Report”, our responses to the IJC recommendations in their 10th Biennial on the Great Lakes Water Quality and to the U.S. E.P.A.'s “Great Lakes Ecosystem” report for more detailed information.

Copies of some of these reports, or many of them, are available in the lobby.

As has been noted, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is almost 30 years old and we have made a lot of progress in restoring and protecting the waters of the Great Lakes.

But the job is far from complete. In fact, the job of protecting – as Commissioner Gusella has indicated – the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem will probably never be complete. That is because in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence ecosystem, we are always faced with three principal challenges.

The first is the challenge of balancing interests. The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence ecosystem is a huge and wondrous natural resource. But it's also the home of an industrial heartland for two nations. And at times, these interests frequently compete.

The challenge of change, the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence ecosystem is not static, nor are the influences that act upon it. It's an ever-changing ecosystem. Maintaining awareness and understanding of these changes, their interaction and how to intervene most effectively will be ongoing.

And thirdly is the challenge of coordination and cooperation. There are over 40 million people living in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin, in two different countries, in eight states, in two provinces, and a large number of First Nations and tribes.

Our presentation today is intended to give you some insight into how we, as governments, are leading the response to these challenges and the progress that collectively we are making.

We respond through three broad strategies. First is through implementation of a binational agenda with initiatives such as many of you are aware, RAPs, LaMPs, the Binational Toxic Strategy, IADN, SOLEC and the Niagara River.

Second is through strong domestic programs. While the ecosystem of the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin is shared between Canada and the U.S. and the stresses through that ecosystem have potential impact on both countries, the responses to those stresses do not always take the same form. The important thing however is that those actions further the goals of protecting and restoring the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Third, and probably most importantly, is the strategy of engagement of a broad spectrum of Great Lakes stakeholders within and outside government.

Tom and I will highlight some of the things we have accomplished using these – excuse me, Gary, I have just given you a promotion, Gary.

Gary and I will highlight some of these things we have accomplished using these three broad strategies. And Gary will wrap up the presentation today by outlining some of the challenges that we still face.

Let me begin by telling you about our Great Lakes Binational Program. We are committed to maintaining momentum on lake-wide management plans and remedial action plans.

For those of you who are not familiar with these terms, remedial action plans, or RAPs, document specific action to fully restore environmentally degraded local areas like rivers or harbors that have been designated as areas of concern.

Lake-wide management plans, or LaMPs, serve a similar purpose, except they are restoration plans for whole lakes rather than local areas.

Of course, restoration of the lake-wide impairments often starts with the restoration in those degraded areas. So the RAPs and LaMPs are interdependent. RAPs and LaMPs are the cornerstone of our efforts to restore and protect the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Let me talk about LaMPs first.

Since the last biennial forum, we have reinvigorated and accelerated LaMP reporting, emphasizing action over planning. We have increased the transparency of the LaMP process to improve accountability to Great Lakes stakeholders.

We published updates last year for all of the lakes and have committed to updating these living documents every two years thereafter.

And we have challenged the LaMPs to be opportunistic and take specific restoration action whenever possible while concurrently carrying out the planning process rather than waiting for all the plans to be complete.

For Lake Ontario and the Niagara River, the four parties hold annual public meetings alternately between Canada and the United States. We report out on our progress in restoring the beneficial uses of those water bodies and describe our binational work plan for the next two years. Our last meeting occurred last Tuesday in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Many of the easy actions recommended in the LaMPs are funded and underway. Our main challenge from hereon in is the implementation of tougher, more costly and longer-term actions that have been identified.

These will require considerable more effort, innovation and extensive cooperation with our network of partners to help finance and implement those actions. The new biennial reporting cycle that we have introduced will require us to better track progress and outline where further action is needed.

Moving on to remediated action plans, we have made significant progress in a number of areas of concern. From the Saginaw River and Bay on Lake Huron, the implementation of a natural resource damage assessment resulted in 90 percent of the PCBs in the sediment of the lower Saginaw River were removed ahead of schedule and below cost.

This ten million-dollar project removed nearly 350,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment and is surely a great step towards making fish in the Saginaw River and Bay and Lake Huron safer to eat. The Saginaw River restoration effort was a model of stakeholder cooperation between federal, state and tribal partners.

Major sediment remediation projects are also underway in a number of binational connecting channels.

On the St. Lawrence River, at Massena, in the New York Area, sediment cleanup at ALCOA, General Motors and Reynolds Metal are in the process of remediating hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of PCB contaminated sediment.

On the St. Mary's River, 33,000 tons of tannery waste contaminated with heavy metals were removed from the Michigan site.

On the St. Clair River, Dow Chemical is working closely with the federal and provincial governments to develop a sediment remediation plan for contaminated sediment immediately adjacent to its property.

And along the Niagara River, we continue to make progress in the remediation of 26 priority hazardous waste sites located there.

Collectively, we have spent over 370 million dollars on these cleanup efforts thus far, which has reduced the potential inflow of those toxic chemicals from those sites by 90 percent.

We estimate that an additional 260 million dollars of cleanup effort remains to be done.

We're also attacking the thorny issue of how we determine and document when we fully restore an area of concern. In other words, when we can take it off the AOC list.

This is particularly the case in the U.S. where guidelines are being prepared for delisting the AOCs to better lay out the steps for delisting under the Agreement. The goal of this is to harmonize on both sides of the border with Canada and the U.S. delisting process.

This will foster more consistency and common expectation among those implementing and observing the RAP process.

I'm pleased to report that we have several areas of concern that we hope to start the delisting process in the near future.

In Canada, we hope to soon delist Severn Sound, which was noted earlier this morning, which is also located in the Georgian Bay area of Lake Huron. And in the U.S., we hope to be able to delist Manistique River in Michigan, Waukegan Harbor in Illinois and Presque Isle Bay in Pennsylvania.

The State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference continues to be a key mechanism to bring focus to binational monitoring and reporting activities for the state of the Lakes.

Building upon previous SOLEC efforts to develop indicators of ecosystem health, at the 2000 SOLEC in Hamilton, we reported on 33 of the 82 SOLEC indicators. We have just released the Canada–U.S. State of the Great Lakes Report.

The conclusions drawn from the State of the Great Lakes Report from examining those 33 indicators are mixed.

We have some reason to celebrate. The surface waters of the Great Lakes are still among the best sources of drinking water in the world. Progress has been made in cleaning up contamination and rehabilitation of some fish and wildlife species. The efforts to reduce the amounts of phosphorus in the Lakes have paid off. The levels of toxic contamination continue to drop in many species of fish.

But as has already been noted this morning, we have some areas and some reasons to be concerned. Invasive species remain a significant threat. Atmospheric deposition of contaminants from distant sources continue. Urban sprawl threatens natural areas, rare species, farmland and open spaces and development drainage and pollution continue to diminish our wetlands.

The next SOLEC, to be held in Cleveland a year from now, will emphasize biological integrity and will examine the impacts of invasive species on natural biological communities.

We are continuing vigorous implementation of the Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy to effect significant reductions in some of the most troublesome persistent toxics plaguing the Great Lakes.

Stakeholder involvement is a cornerstone of the strategy. I am pleased to report that we continue to secure commitments from additional stakeholders for phasing out use or reducing emissions of pollutants targeted by the strategy.

Some of the commitments made over the last two years include Daimler-Chrysler, Ford and General Motors have agreed to remove all their PCB containing devices.

Thirty municipal power utilities in Ontario have signed on to the strategy PCB reduction challenge.

Three steel mills in northwest Indiana have developed mercury reduction plans.

Vigorous outreach programs to dentists are underway in both countries to provide information on why and how to retrieve mercury from dental amalgam in the waste stream.

The Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, which represents car manufacturing in North America, committed to phasing out mercury switches in convenience lighting and agreed to work on pilot programs to encourage auto dismantlers and scrappers to remove mercury switches before those vehicles are recycled for scrap.

For more detailed information on our progress, we refer you to the latest progress report which is available on the strategy website.

As has been noted, air deposition is a major pathway for toxic chemicals entering the Great Lakes. To track air deposition, the U.S. and Canada operate the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network, or IADN, which is considered a model for long-term atmospheric deposition monitoring.

IADN already monitors organochloride pesticides, PCBs and a suite of poly aromatic hydrocarbons.

To further enhance IADN, we are adding wet deposition mercury monitoring to a U.S. IADN station this year and we have enhanced quality assurance efforts to ensure comparability of the measurements.

Next year, Canada will also begin routine measurements of mercury in precipitation to augment the monitoring of atmospheric mercury that has taken place since 1997.

Additional measurements of dioxins and furans are also planned.

All of these activities will significantly assist in quantifying the deposition of these substances in the Great Lakes basin. Recent IADN results indicate that loadings in concentrations of banned organochloride pesticides and PCBs are decreasing or leveling off.

In many cases, loadings are approaching equilibrium between air and water while concentrations of loadings of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and metals remain relatively constant over time.

These results give us new impetus to work towards further reduction or further reduce the use of these chemicals in other countries. Once everybody stops using these chemicals, the global ecosystem can start the slow road to recovery. The latest report on loadings of these persistent toxic substances to the Great Lakes, based on the IADN data, will be published early next year.

Communications is a key to our Great Lakes restoration and protection efforts. We must make sure all Great Lakes stakeholders are involved in the process and we must all be well informed if we are to effectively participate.

I am very pleased to announce that the U.S. and Canada are developing a binational Great Lakes website, binational.net. Binational.net will streamline and consolidate the posting of binational program information, eliminate in the duplication that currently exists when each of our countries reports on its part of binational activities.

Pooling our resources will result in more frequent updating which will ensure that we are always providing the most current information.

Permettez-moi maintenant de vous présenter la seconde grande initiative axée sur l'écosystème et visant la concertation, le partenariat et l'action, le plan d'action Saint-Laurent Vision 2000.

Au Québec, la gestion du fleuve Saint-Laurent se fait depuis 13 ans en concertation avec le gouvernement du Québec et par le biais de l'entente Canada-Québec.

La troisième phase du plan d'action, qui a débuté en 1998, vise trois grands objectifs : la protection de la santé de l'écosystème, la protection de la santé humaine et l'implication des communautés riveraines.

Permettez-moi de vous présenter quelques réalisations importantes.

Au cours des années, 14 groupes de citoyens mieux connus sous le nom de comité Zone d'interventions prioritaires ont vu le jour et oeuvrent à la conservation et la restauration du fleuve à l'échelle de leurs communautés.

Les projets varient de nettoyage des berges à la restauration d'habitats pour les poissons et la création d'accès.

L'implication de l'ensemble des citoyens a été un franc succès, plus de 200 projets communautaires ayant été réalisés par nos partenaires du milieu pour le bien du Saint-Laurent.

Deux comités Zone d'interventions prioritaires ont su créer des consensus locaux pour intervenir à propos des sédiments contaminés dans leurs localités, rivière Saint-Louis et Port de Montréal.

Dans les deux cas, les choses ont commencé à bouger lorsqu'ils ont réussi à persuader les entreprises riveraines de s'engager dans la décontamination. Dans le cas de la rivière Saint-Louis, un tributaire du Saint-Laurent, le partenariat volontaire a été créé pour l'assainissement des sédiments et de bouger sur un accord ALCAN-Beauharnois et PPG Canada pour le financement et l'exécution d'un plan d'assainissement des sédiments. Ce plan a une valeur de trois à cinq millions de dollars.

L'implication des collectivités riveraines demeurera au cœur des actions que nous voulons entreprendre et continuer au cours des prochaines années. Depuis 1998, l'action conjointe des gouvernements et des entreprises a permis une réduction de 90 pour cent des rejets liquides toxiques des 50 usines les plus polluantes le long du Saint-Laurent.

L'innovation a été une composante importante de la démarche, un total de 28 projets ayant été réalisés dans le Saint-Laurent en vertu d'un programme pour promouvoir la mise au point et la démonstration de nouvelles technologies environnementales.

Entre autres, 60 projets technologiques sont actuellement en cours de réduire l'utilisation des pesticides agricoles et donc, la contamination de l'eau par les pesticides dans les tributaires du Saint-Laurent.

L'acquisition de connaissances réelles des problématiques et la détermination des solutions avec les intervenants du milieu ont donné des résultats plus satisfaisants dans un nombre de domaines.

Par exemple, les collectivités riveraines ont longtemps soutenu que la vitesse élevée des navires et des embarcations de plaisance accélérait l'érosion des berges du Saint-Laurent à de nombreux endroits.

On a réparé les problèmes d'érosion des berges dans les secteurs à grande valeur écologique et on a obtenu de l'industrie du transport maritime une réduction volontaire de la vitesse des navires dans les secteurs désignés le long du Saint-Laurent, c'est-à-dire entre Montréal et Sorel.

Depuis 1998, plus de 130 000 hectares de milieu naturel ont été protégés le long du Saint-Laurent, incluant la création du parc marin Saguenay–Saint-Laurent.

Le plan d'action Saint-Laurent a permis d'élaborer des plans de rétablissement pour 27 espaces fauniques et floristiques prioritaires. Le plus récent relevé de la population de bélugas dans le Saint-Laurent nous incite à croire que le nombre d'individus se stabilisent et que le béluga n'est plus une espèce menacée.

Des recherches visaient à réduire l'exposition de la collectivité à l'eau utilisée dans les fins récréatives, à l'eau potable et aux produits aquatiques potentiellement contaminés sont encore dans le Saint-Laurent.

Comme le cas des Grands Lacs, des progrès considérables ont été accomplis concernant la surveillance du Saint-Laurent. Plusieurs ministères participent à un programme de surveillance en deux parties et des travaux sont en cours en vue de faire rapport sur un premier ensemble d'indicateurs.

Ce programme de surveillance intégrée nous permettra de mieux comprendre et faire connaître l'état du Saint-Laurent.

Nous vous invitons à prendre connaissance de notre dernier rapport sur les réalisations du plan d'action Saint-Laurent Vision 2000. Vous pouvez le consulter sur le site Internet, c'est-à-dire SLV2000.

At this time, I'm going to turn the mike over to Gary who will tell you about some exciting on-the-ground actions being delivered through domestic programs and through actions of non-government Great Lakes partners.

Gary?

GARY GULEZIAN
(Director of the Great Lakes National Program Office):

Thanks, John.

Bonjour, Mesdames et Messieurs. C'est un grand plaisir d'être ici à Montréal aujourd'hui.

As John alluded to earlier, I'm here on behalf of Tom Skinner. Tom is E.P.A.'s Regional Administrator in Chicago and also is Great Lakes National Program manager. Unfortunately, Tom came down with the flu yesterday and can't be here with us today.

I know that Tom very much wanted to be here to meet and talk with all of you. He has worked with the State of Illinois as their Environmental Director for several years, but he is relatively new to Great Lakes programs and he really wanted to have this opportunity to learn more about the program. I extend his sincere regrets for not being able to be here.

As John has said, the progress that has been made in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin and the significant work that remains is not solely the domain of the federal governments in Canada and in the United States.

While the federal governments do have a leadership role, the reality is that there are many other levels of governments, interest groups, First Nations, industry, private citizens and others who, in their own right, contribute immensely to environmental cleanup and protection in the basin.

What I would like to do in my remarks today is to highlight some examples of domestic and regional initiatives which are being carried out by the broad Great Lakes basin community.

I'm going to be highlighting several different initiatives. It clearly isn't the full range of everything that is going on and I hope not to offend many of you who may be working on some initiatives that I won't be talking about. But these are just examples – not necessarily the best examples – but are just examples of how we are working in partnership.

These initiatives and partnerships are essential to sustaining the kind of progress that we are making in the Great Lakes. We need to continually foster and strengthen these partnership efforts to help Canada and the United States achieve the ambitious plans that have been outlined earlier by John.

Let me start by summarizing some new domestic initiatives that are moving us forward.

Last year, the Government of Canada announced an additional 40 million dollars over five years, including a new 30 million-dollar Great Lakes Sustainability Fund to accelerate work in areas of concern.

And the new Canada-Ontario Agreement, or COA has just been posted for public comment. This will be the fifth such arrangement that coordinates the work of Canada and Ontario in the Great Lakes basin.

Similarly, in the United States, a series of public workshops were held this past summer on the draft Great Lakes strategy, which is in its final stages of completion. This strategy will help coordinate the environmental protection and restoration efforts of federal, state and tribal agencies in the basin. It identifies joint priorities and objectives and the key actions necessary to achieve our basin-wide goals.

Now, let me give you an example of an initiative undertaken by our provincial partner. Last year, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources announced the Great Lakes Heritage Coast initiative. The Great Lakes Heritage Coast will be an area of special planning and management with the objective to develop an overall vision of protecting and enjoying the significant values along Ontario's coast.

It will apply to all Crown lands, waters and lakebeds along the Ontario coastline of Lake Superior, the north shore of the St. Mary's River and the coast of Lake Huron, extending to the eastern coast of Georgian Bay. This area stretches almost 3,000 kilometers of shoreline, covering an area of more than one million hectares.

The Heritage Coast presents a significant opportunity to help protect natural ecosystems and promote the potential for recreation, tourism and other economic benefits through our network of parks and protected areas. We are expecting to hear more on this important program from the province of Ontario very soon.

In addition to the Heritage Coast, our colleagues in Parks Canada have been challenged to explore the feasibility of establishing a national marine conservation area on Lake Superior.

In Canada, national marine conservation areas are marine areas managed for sustainable use containing smaller zones of higher protection. They include the seabed, the water above it and any species which occur there. They may also take in wetlands, estuaries, islands and other coastal lands.

Currently, there are agreements in place for three national marine conservation areas across Canada. One is the Gwaii Haanas National Marine Conservation Area Reserve in British Columbia.

A second is the Fathom Five National Marine Park in Georgian Bay, Ontario.

The third is the Saguenay–St.Lawrence Marine Park in Quebec.

After three years of public debate and consultation, a regional advisory committee has recommended in favor of a fourth national marine conservation area on the north shore of Lake Superior.

The proposal includes recommendations for sustaining uses, enhancing protection, conducting research and engaging in public outreach and education. Their well-researched consensus-based report will be the basis for discussion between the federal and provincial governments.

What is exciting about both these special designation initiatives is that they further the vision of the Canada-U.S. Lake Superior Binational program which, this year, I believe is enjoying its 10th year anniversary.

Turning to a new domestic program initiative in the United States – which was touched on earlier by Tracy in his remarks – there is a major effort underway to ensure the safety of swimming beaches in response to the growing concern about public health risks posed by bacterial contamination.

In implementing the provisions of the recently passed Beach Act, E.P.A. is providing the states two million dollars nationally this year to develop and implement beach monitoring and public notification programs. Next year, states will be eligible to apply for implementation grants.

Major components of E.P.A.'s beach program include strengthening beach standards and testing, providing faster laboratory test methods, predicting pollution, investing in health and methods research and informing beach managers and the public.

Strengthening beach monitoring is a necessary first step since many beaches are not currently monitored on a regular basis or are using outmoded monitoring methods.

In addition to warning the public, monitoring will help us track down the pollution that causes beach closings like leaking sewer lines and sewer overflows. Stopping these pollution sources is important in achieving our restoration goals in virtually all of the areas of concern.

I would like to highlight another effort which is helping the areas of concern. In 1995, the government of Ontario implemented the Natural Heritage Policy under the Planning Act. The policy directs municipalities to identify and protect natural heritage systems, including significant wetlands, woodlands, fish and wildlife habitat in areas of natural and scientific interest.

At the same time, Canadian Areas of Concern were developing comprehensive plans to rehabilitate and protect fish and wildlife habitat in these same areas.

To assist these efforts, a document entitled “A Framework for Guiding Habitat Rehabilitation in Great Lakes Areas of Concern” was prepared by Environment Canada and the Ontario ministries of Natural Resources and the Environment.

The framework document, along with the enabling provincial Policy on Natural Heritage has resulted in 28 municipalities and regions that have either completed or are developing natural heritage strategies and/or watershed strategies in seven different areas of concern. This is a major contribution to the Remedial Action Program.

More importantly, municipalities are placing these strategies in their official planning document, helping to sustain the rehabilitation effort. Further, innovative fish and wildlife rehabilitation planning and implementation initiatives first conducted in the areas of concern are now finding widespread application in other jurisdictions across the Great Lakes basin and beyond.

Next, we want to acknowledge some of the significant contributions being made through partnerships led by other Great Lakes stakeholders to safeguard and restore the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence ecosystem.

In the United States, we have an innovative initiative on a more local scale that is reaping significant benefits. Chicago Wilderness – and I know it sounds like an oxymoron – is a regional nature reserve comprising 200,000 acres of protected globally significant natural communities. The woodlands, grasslands, forest, streams and wetlands are found in the crescent of land from southeastern Wisconsin through the six county area of Chicago, onto northwestern Indiana.

Chicago Wilderness is an unprecedented partnership of more than 150 public and private organizations that have joined forces to protect, restore and manage these natural lands and the plants and animals that inhabit them. Protection of these remaining natural areas is essential to a healthy Great Lakes ecosystem since so much of the original habitat has been lost to development.

The recently completed Chicago Wilderness Biodiversity Recovery Plan, which lays out an action plan for the Chicago Wilderness area, was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Planning Award from the American Planning Association.

Moving on to an industry initiative, Responsible Care was first established in 1985 by the Canadian Chemical Producers Association. It is now a global initiative focused on continuously improving all aspects of the chemical industry's environmental health and safety performance.

The program continues to grow. The Canadian Chemical Producers Association now represents member companies that produce over 90 percent of the industrial chemicals in Canada, of which half are located in Ontario. The Association has reported a significant decline in the emissions of toxic substances, including a reduction of 1,875 tons of toxics targeted by the Accelerated Reduction Elimination of Toxics program, better known as ARET, between the years 1992 and 1997.

These kinds of reductions are making a considerable contribution to some of the targets we've identified under the Binational Toxic Strategy.

Next, I'll highlight a binational partnership between both governments and industry. In a cooperative voluntary effort to bring more energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly products to consumers throughout North America, the United States and Canada signed an agreement which will bring Energy Star products to Canadian citizens and businesses.

The Energy Star label makes it easy for consumers and businesses to identify energy-saving products. These products use energy more efficiently, save money, conserve natural resources, decrease emissions from power plants and help protect the environment.

Through commercial, industrial and public participation in the Energy Star program, in the U.S. alone, we have had some pretty significant achievements, including annual greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 23 million metric tons in 1999, which is the equivalent to eliminating the emissions from more than ten million cars.

Annual emissions of nitrogen oxide were reduced by over 100,000 tons, which is the equivalent to the emissions from 70 power plants. Energy Star building partners, who represent 15 percent of the commercial, public and industrial building market, saved more than 20 billion kilowatt/hours of energy in 1999 and U.S. residents saved over 25 billion kilowatt/hours of energy by purchasing more than 100 million Energy Star products in 1999.

These effects pay off in additional ways as well. Current estimates are that consumers and businesses will achieve a cumulative savings of nearly 50 billion dollars through 2010.

As a final partnership example, in November of last year, U.S. E.P.A.'s Great Lakes National Program Office awarded a cooperative agreement to the Great Lakes Commission for the first large-scale binational collaborative effort to assess the ecological health of Great Lakes coastal wetlands.

The consortium, which has pulled together 600,000 dollars for the first year of its three-year program, includes Great Lakes wetlands scientists and resource managers from both federal governments, states and provinces, non-profit organizations and academia.

The program will design and validate indicators to assess the ecological integrity of Great Lakes coastal wetlands. It will design an implementable long-range program to monitor Great Lakes coastal wetlands and create a binational database accessible to all scientists, decision-makers and the public.

The consortium's work will greatly expand the monitoring and reporting capabilities of the United States and Canada under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and make a major contribution to several indicators under our SOLEC program.

These are only a few of the many examples where partners have joined together to help achieve Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement goals.

I would like to conclude our presentation with a look at what we expect to be some of the foremost challenges facing the Great Lakes basin. These challenges are not new to many of you. But hopefully, we can offer some indication of how we might address them.

I can tell you that in Canada, over the next 20 years, the Great Lakes basin will account for one-half of the nation's total population growth. By 2020, the number of Canadians in the basin will have increased by more than two million, an increase of 22 percent, almost all of which will occur in the Greater Toronto Area.

In the United States, population in the Great Lakes states is expected to grow by 6.5 million by 2025.

Naturally, this presents a considerable challenge. Urbanization rates like these could potentially jeopardize some of what we have accomplished in the basin. Increases in the demand for water and other natural resources, increased waste generation, greater demand for recreational spaces and increases in urban and rural runoff are all major pressures.

While we certainly can continue and enhance the extent to which we integrate land use in ZIPs, RAPs, LaMPs and in SOLEC and while we can continue to make this a major priority in existing funding programs, the reality is that much of the urban growth pressure is beyond the direct jurisdiction of senior levels of government. We are increasingly convinced that more study is not the answer.

Instead, the better integration of land issues into existing programs holds more promise. Also, many communities in the basin are exploring and implementing smart growth policies, and the more successful experiences should be widely shared and emulated.

Climate change invariability has the potential to influence many, if not most, environmental issues facing the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin, including water quality, toxic substances, biodiversity, invasive species and water availability.

While much is yet to be learned about the regional impacts of climate change, scientists are suggesting that the basin is likely to become warmer, water supplies in lake levels may decline, soil conditions may become drier and extreme weather events may become more frequent and severe.

Without appropriate actions, the basin may well see increased vulnerability of urban infrastructure due to more frequent and severe storm events, greater competition for water supplies, loss of critical habitat and restored shoreline habitats due to receding water levels and impacts on human health due to greater heat stress and increasing atmospheric pollution.

The impact of climate change invariability on our binational programs may seem somewhat distant at first glance, but some are convinced that the effects are already here.

Clearly, out of the basin inputs of atmospheric pollution is another area that seems beyond our immediate control but demands attention if we plan to meet some of our commitments.

For example, some of you may know that the Lake Superior LaMP has targeted an 80 percent reduction of mercury from in-basin sources by 2010 and zero discharge by 2020. Although some progress has been made, it may be difficult to achieve these targets.

Given the larger contribution from out-of-the-basin coal fired power utilities in addition to emissions from the mining sector, significant reductions at the national, provincial or state levels are required for the LaMP to succeed in this regard.

The Binational Executive Committee that John and Tom Skinner co-chair gave this matter considerable attention at their last meeting.

While one might argue that this issue is beyond our immediate purview, it is important that we closely monitor to ensure that national mercury regulatory processes in both countries follow schedules for implementation and compliance.

In the meantime, we are making every effort to pursue voluntary agreements with non-regulated combustion sources.

The Great Lakes continue to suffer from the impacts of aquatic invasive species introduced mainly from the ballast water of ships from foreign ports. The financial impacts are huge. Estimated annual costs in the U.S. alone exceed 100 billion dollars from both terrestrial and aquatic invasives.

And the ecological impacts are also devastating. We are seeing the decimation of key members of the food chain like diporeia, an important bottom-dwelling crustacean.

We are seeing white fish in Lake Ontario declining in abundance, survival condition and reproduction status. And we are seeing algoblooms causing beach closures and taste and odor problems in drinking water.

Recent reports of Lake Erie fish and shore birds dying from a mysterious outbreak of type E botulism are but the most recent reminder of the potential impact of invasive species in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin ecosystem.

We think that many of these impacts are directly or indirectly related to disturbances in the native ecology caused by these introduced invaders. Our governments are already working closely in this area and we are making some progress.

Canada has stated its intention to develop ballast water management regulations for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River in 2002. These proposed regulations are being developed in consultation with the U.S. Coast Guard so that they will be harmonized with existing U.S. regulations.

Canada and the United States are also working through the International Maritime Organization, the IMO, to develop international regulations and standards since the problem of invasives is an international one.

Work continues to move forward on the development of testing of promising ballast water treatment technologies.

In a thrilling example of partnership, just two months ago, the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence governors and premiers signed a landmark agreement on Aquatic Nuisance Species Prevention and Control, agreeing on a single set of principles to act to achieve these goals, preventing unauthorized introductions, limiting the spread of established nuisance species and minimizing the impacts of those already present.

What makes this issue so important is that the rate of introduction of exotics could well increase as a consequence of increased global trade and the effects of climate change.

We would like to thank the International Joint Commission for the opportunity to briefly outline some of our activities. We have come a long way since the signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972.

Some of the problems that we had at that time are no longer with us, while other issues have increased in importance or are entirely new. Managing a system as expansive as the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin is an exercise in adaptation. The system is forever changing.

We believe we are entering a period of renewal in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River basin. There is room for optimism, but to achieve our goals, we will need to assure that we have continuing priority placed on ecosystem and environmental restoration at the local, regional and national levels.

Thank you very much.

JACK BLANEY:

Mr. Mills and Mr. Gulezian, thank you very much for joining us here today and for your presentations. We appreciate that you will participate in our open forum, which will now begin.

We, in IJC, believe that dialogue that takes place among all basin stakeholders is the heart and soul of the public forum. While we're on the subject, we want to encourage all forum participants to visit the IJC booth and comment on IJC's priorities for the next reporting cycle. Your comments will help guide our work over the next two years.

At this point, before inviting everyone or anyone who wishes to ask questions or make comments and to step up to the microphone, I would first like to ask the representative of the Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to come forward and to make a statement on the report recently published on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River basin.

A representative of the General Accounting Office of the United States government will also indicate their plans for an upcoming similar review on their side of the border.

From the Canadian Office of the Commissioner of the Environment is Mr. Frank Barrett and from the U.S. General Accounting Office is Mr. John  Wanska. Prior to their remarks, however, we are going to make this place look as open as we want it to be and the podium will be removed. All commissioners will join us on the podium, and secretaries.

Mr. Barrett and then Mr. Wanska.

FRANK BARRETT
(Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Representative):

Good morning.

I would like to thank the commissioners for inviting me to tell you about our recent work.

I'm a Director with the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. We conduct independent audits of the Canadian federal government and report directly to Parliament and the public.

In 1995, the Auditor General's Act was amended to add a Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development within the Auditor General's Office.

As Ms. Redman told you earlier this morning, Johanne Gélinas is the Commissioner and I work for her.

One of our roles is to conduct independent audits of the federal government on environmental issues.

I'm here today to tell you about a major audit we just completed on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River basin. We conducted this work for many reasons.

First, the basin is a critical environmental resource for the world. We have an obligation to manage it well.

Second, 16 million Canadians, as well as 25 million Americans depend on the basin for clean air and drinking water and for personal health, employment and recreation.

Third, the basin is in a way a sustainable development laboratory, testing the government's ability to achieve its goals of economic prosperity, social well being and environmental health.

De plus, au cours de la prochaine génération, la population canadienne du basin pourrait augmenter jusqu'à trois millions de personnes et selon les prévisions, le PIB sera supérieur de 60 pour cent.

La croissance intensifiera la demande d'eau, de terre, de poisson, des produits agricoles, d'installations de traitement des eaux usées, des parcs d'aires et de l'état naturel, de logements, d'énergie et d'autres éléments.

This brings us to our two main findings:

First, there have been some remarkable environmental successes and improvements over the past three decades.

Second, the future of the basin is at risk. Federal efforts have lost momentum. The leadership, innovation, science and diligence that served the basin in the past have diminished. There is an overwhelming sense of complacency and resignation instead of urgency and inspiration.

Our audit focused on four main subject areas: water, agriculture, species and spaces at risk and fisheries and looked at dozens of issues in these areas.

It also examined the government's management of its regional ecosystem initiatives, the Great Lakes 2000 Program and SLV 2000 and its relationship with the International Joint Commission.

Notre rapport vise à répondre à trois questions qui peuvent paraître simples:

Quel est l'état du basin?

Quel est le rôle et le rendement du gouvernement fédéral en ce qui concerne ces domaines interdits?

Et comment le gouvernement peut-il améliorer son rendement?

Our audit conclusions emphasize four major themes.

First, important matters are being left to drift. Key domestic and international commitments are not being met. Priorities and commitments and the resources allocated to them are out of sync. For example, many of Canada's international commitments under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement have not been met.

Second, long-term basin-wide strategies for key threats are missing. On key issues, there is no coordinated and consistent federal voice in the two regions.

Third, scientific research, monitoring and measurement systems are impaired. There are major gaps in the information needed to make quality decisions in areas like wetlands, soils and fish habitat.

Fourth, the federal role is changing and waning. The government seems afraid to tackle the tough issues. It's not using the authorities and tools it has at its disposal. It relies increasingly on partnerships to meet its objectives.

The audit has raised serious fundamental questions about the government's role in overseeing the actions of its partners and in providing assurance that federal and national objectives are being met.

Cela ne présage rien de bon pour l'avenir. Nous croyons que le gouvernement fédéral n'est tout simplement pas prêt à relever les nombreux défis du 21e siècle.

Let me give you just a few of the dozens of specific findings.

Unstable and declining funding to departments has impaired their ability to meet their mandated responsibilities. Federal plans to restore areas of concern are incomplete and unclear.

Almost 14 years after the federal government committed to develop lakewide management plans, most of them are still in their early stages of development. Most do not yet recommend actions to be taken.

In our opinion, aside from Environment Canada, the federal government's engagement and support of the LaMP process has been uneven and ad hoc. Throughout the 14-year life of the federal water policy, the government has never formally identified its top priorities or decided how it would put them into effect in Canada's fresh water bodies. It has not reported on any progress made towards implementing the water policy since 1992.

The problem of how to safely manage manure from livestock operations is getting worse. Yet, the government has no action plan to meet its objectives to control the problem. Invasive aquatic species such as zebra mussels are a serious and growing threat to the basin. The government relies on voluntary guidelines and U.S. regulations to control them.

Our report makes some two dozen recommendations to seven federal departments and includes each department's responses to these recommendations.

Our report also presents our assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the federal government's performance on each issue. In several cases, we specifically credit the federal government for its role in contributing to improvements in the basin.

Et pourtant, malgré leurs réussites, les données scientifiques les plus probantes à l'heure actuelle indiquent que l'état global des lacs et du fleuve est mixte. Le basin s'améliore à certains égards, mais visiblement, il y a aussi une détérioration à d'autres égards.

I would also like to take just a moment to let you know about the Commissioner's petition process. Amendments to the Auditor General's Act that created the position of Commissioner also instituted a new process for petitioning your government on environmental issues.

Through this process, any Canadian resident or group can write to the Auditor General on any environmental issue related to sustainable development that involves one or more federal departments and the government is bound by law to provide answers.

Our office monitors the whole process and can use it as a source of future audits.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the commissioners of the IJC for inviting me to let you know about our work. Copies of our Great Lakes audit and the report that describes how to complete the petition process are available in the lobby dans les deux langues officielles.

If you have any questions, I will be around throughout the day.

Thank you very much.

JACK BLANEY:

Mr. Wanska, please.

JOHN WANSKA
(U.S. General Accounting Office Representative):

Good morning. I'm John Wanska with the United States General Accounting Office.

I just wanted to make some brief comments here about work that we're starting on the Great Lakes. It's a similar review, a large-scale review that we have done in the past. We have started this in September and it will continue on for a number of months.

But first, let me go over a couple of things. We're with the General Accounting Office and we're one of three federal agencies that work for the United States Congress.

Our primary goal is to provide information to congressional committees and chairs, to give them information that they request at our office on matters that they have jurisdiction over. These topics range on a number of issues. A lot of them however do involve environmental matters.

Most of our reports are on the web page. It's www.gao.gov, if you want to see the type of products that we put out. Our prior Great Lakes works, I believe, are not readily on the web, but you can order them through that website.

The first comprehensive review that we did on the Great Lakes dated back to 1982. That looked at the U.S. efforts to fulfill the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Our conclusions there are that the efforts have been hampered by various factors and we made several recommendations to the Congress and the E.P.A. to solve that. Actually, the title of this report back in 1982 was “A More Comprehensive Approach is Needed to Clean Up the Great Lakes”.

The second comprehensive report that we produced was back in September of 1990, now over ten years old. This report focused on the lack of progress in developing the RAPs and the LaMPs and concluded that greater effort was needed to address pollution problems affecting the Great Lakes and specifically, we recommended clarifying the role and responsibilities of E.P.A.'s Great Lakes National Program Office, particularly in regards to the development of RAPs and LaMPs.

The title of this report back in September 1990 was “Improved Coordination Needed to Clean Up the Great Lakes”.

We started our work again in September, and this work was work that we started on our own. There is a small segment of work that we initiate independently outside of congressional requests because we felt this work was an issue that needed looking at again.

Also last year, or I should say in this Congress, there has been increased congressional interest into the Great Lakes issues and specifically bills have been introduced in Congress to boost the funding for cleaning up the Great Lakes, bills addressing the drilling of energy supplies under the Great Lakes, invasive species, and also water removals from the Great Lakes.

The approach that we are starting right now is a broad approach, and it will address three questions.

Those questions right now are: What are the strategies for cleaning up the Great Lakes? To what extend have these strategies been effective in cleaning up the Great Lakes? And the last one is: What are the barriers or impediments to cleaning up the Great Lakes and what actions are needed to remove these barriers?

We expect to complete the initial phase of our work in December and, at that time, we will follow on with a more detailed review and also at that time, decide on our reporting time frames.

I should mention that there is another GAO review that is also being started at this time, and that review is focusing specifically on invasive species in the Great Lakes.

I'll be around for a while if you have any questions.

Thank you.

JACK BLANEY:

We should now like to invite anyone who wishes to ask a question or a comment to step up to the microphone. You may address the government representatives or the commissioners or make some comments on statements of others.

We will be recording this discussion. So for the record, we ask you to state your name and to limit your comments to three minutes.

In that regard, we have two moderators and two persons who will help manage the time of presenters: Murray Clamen who is Secretary of the Commission's Canadian section and Gerry Galloway, Secretary of the U.S. section, the two gentlemen here.

MURRAY CLAMEN
(Secretary of the International Joint Commission, Canadian Section):

Thank you very much, Commissioner Blaney.

As was just mentioned, we would like your cooperation. We'd certainly appreciate it if each speaker could try to limit their remarks, whether it's a statement or a question, to about three to five minutes.

When one minute remains according to our time clock, we will hold this sign up. When it's time to finish, we will hold this sign up. And then we will get tougher.

Nous vous demandons de limiter votre commentaire à trois et cinq minutes, s'il vous plaît. Lorsqu'il restera une minute, je vous présenterai cette affiche, pour les personnes francophones. Lorsque votre temps sera écoulé, je vous présenterai cette autre affiche.

Thank you very much for your cooperation in advance.

Merci pour votre coopération.

TOM SPEERS
(Ottawa Citizen Science Reporter):

Thank, Murray. I'll be faster than that. My name is Tom Speers. I'm a Science Reporter at the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.

This is a question, not a statement, for I guess anyone representing the Government of Canada.

I was listening to Mr. Tracy Mehan from the E.P.A. talking about security measures this morning for drinking water supplies and sewage treatment. I'm just wondering if anyone could tell me specifically what is happening on that in Canada.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I can't respond specifically, Tom, but I know that there is a great deal of effort being looked at on the Canadian side of the border around the issue of security and the capacity to respond to and ensure the security – as Tracy was mentioning this morning – of drinking water. So that process is underway. I don't have the details of exactly where that is or the specifics of what has been done. But I understand, I know that it's underway.

TOM SPEERS:

Do you know who is in charge of it, who I could get details from?

UNIDENTIFIED:

It's actually under the Solicitor General.

HY SCHWARTZ
(Sierra Club):

I'm Hy Schwartz with the Sierra Club. I own a house in Toronto and I also pay taxes on it. So this is my introduction.

Every large city has problems with the disposal of garbage and wastewater from sewers. Toronto has a serious problem with sludge. Sludge is the by-product, the residue of water treatment plants, which are basically built to return clean water to Lake Ontario.

In order to dispose of the many tons of sludge, Toronto built a processing factory to convert sludge into bio-solid pellets. This plant cost about 22 million dollars. The product of the factory, bio-solid pellets, was planned to be sold or given away free to be spread on farmland as a fertilizer.

Unfortunately, the pellets do not comply with the laws and rules of fertilizer and farming because the pellets contain heavy metals, toxic chemicals, pathogens, etc., etc.

So my City of Toronto is stuck with tons and tons of pellets. The pellets factory has been shut down, not used for many months. This is a great and costly embarrassing situation for the staff and engineers of Toronto.

Can anyone here help in making or help in designing how to make the bio-solids into a beneficial and useful by-product? Mayday, Mayday!

MURRAY CLAMEN:

Any comments, please?

UNIDENTIFIED:

I certainly don't have the technology or the answer, and I'm not sure that we do have other people in the audience that have some expertise. But I'm not sure that on this specific subject, we have that expertise at this stage.

HY SCHWARTZ:

Okay, thank you.

MANFRED COSHLIN(?)
(Ontario Public Advisory Committee for the Remedial Action Plans):

My name is Manfred Coshlin. I represent the Ontario Public Advisory Committee for the Remedial Action Plans and I'm a member of the Bay of Quinte Remedial Action Plan Public Advisory Committee.

I have been asked by the Ontario Public Advisory Committee to make a short submission and to leave copies of that with most federal and provincial representatives, as well as the IJC, and we hope to receive from both a response to our submission.

Our comments concern the response of the federal government and Ontario, the provincial government, to the recommendations the IJC made to them in regards to the 10th Biennial Report.

The first item, under the heading of Remedial Action Plans, concerns the federal government' response to IJC's recommendations which states that: “Many additional mechanisms can be used to disseminate information to the public and obtain feedback on program priorities and decision-making. These include the following local public advisory committee involvement and other community-based participation on implementation teams.”

Over the past 14 years, public advisory committees have not only fulfilled an important role within their respective RAP teams but have also played a significant role in participating in federal and provincial policy developments respecting the RAP process.

This included the opportunity of public advisory committee representatives to meet once a year to discuss with the parties issues of common concern and to comment on policy initiatives and provide useful input to the COA RAP multi-jurisdictional agency process through the Ontario Public Advisory Committee.

The federal government fails in its response to the IJC to address this important aspect of public consultation by appearing to withdraw its traditional support to public advisory committees.

It seems to have chosen to ignore the hard work and genuine commitment by the public for all the many years that we have collectively and individually supported the RAP process.

We would like to point out that in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978, Annex 2, Paragraph (e) states quite clearly: “The parties shall ensure that the public is consulted in all actions undertaken pursuant to the Annex. Consultations on federal and provincial initiatives and policies which impact on RAPs have always been recognized as part and parcel of RAP consultation.”

We therefore submit that the federal government has an obligation to continue to support the infrastructure necessary to allow the Ontario Public Advisory Committee to continue to function effectively in this consultative role.

We ask the commissioners to support our position and to encourage the federal government to live up to its obligation to continue to provide the financial support required for OPAC to hold its annual conference and to participate in the consultation in the COA process.

The next item I would like to mention is the threat to human health. The federal government states that current sport fish advisories and updates are sufficient and that anglers and their families can safely continue to enjoy fishing and eating their catch if they follow the local fish consumption advisory.

OPAC fully agrees with the recommendations of the IJC that certain fish should be totally avoided in light of the precautionary approach and that the federal government distribute these advisories to women directly.

It is irresponsible for the federal government to make the assumption that they meet their responsibility in protecting the public and certain groups who are at even greater risk by and through the distribution of print material only.

It would seem to us that far more proactive protection programs would have to be put in place to protect the public from the risks they expose themselves to when catching and eating fish within the Great Lakes basin.

Another item we wanted to comment on is Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy. OPAC fully agrees with all recommendations of the IJC to achieve an all-inclusive binational toxic strategy.

The federal government seems to be saying that the Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy is an action-oriented process to share information with stakeholders. Action requires more than sharing of information. Its track record in terms of progress has been ineffective and in addition has failed to address all of the toxic pollution pathways.

The Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy Committee has not seriously addressed…

MURRAY CLAMEN:

One minute.

MANFRED COSHLIN:

… contaminated sediment issues, nor has it included the particular toxic pollution problems existing in the AOCs and its discussion.

Finally, we would like to say OPAC would like to express to both the commissioners and the IJC and to the federal government our ongoing commitment to support the RAP process.

We will continue to comment both positively and in criticism as the RAP process moves slowly but surely towards its ultimate goal to complete the restoration process in all of our areas of concern.

Members of the Public Advisory committees and their representatives at OPAC have become the custodians of the RAP process collectively and individually in our areas of concern.

We look at our RAP teams and federal and provincial agencies and the IJC as being accountable to all our communities and all those who have worked very hard to improve and restore the environmental integrity of our Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

Submitted on behalf of the Ontario Public Advisory Committee. I would like to leave copies for them. Do I leave that with you?

Thank you.

MURRAY CLAMEN:

Could I just ask one of the IJC staff to help put up the overhead projector? I think there is at least one person that would like to use an overhead.

JUDY BOCK
(STOP Montreal):

Judy Bock. I'm with Stop Montreal, an anti-pollution organization that has worked on water issues for many years. Also I'm involved with a number of national environmental organizations, and I'm pleased to be here to catch up on what is going on in the Great Lakes.

This morning, Tracy Mehan referred to the post-September 9th situation in terms of the protection of water quality and the infrastructure.

I think everyone who has been involved in environmental issues over the last number of decades as I have, and maybe even for a much shorter time, is very concerned now about how environmental issues will be addressed in terms of the emphasis being put on security, public health security to combat terrorist threats.

Anthrax, for example, has had an amazing response recently and we think of maybe six or eight people who have been infected, but the response that that has created has just been overwhelming.

Yet, we have hospitals full of people who are sick and dying from the results of toxic waste in our rivers and in our air. We seem not to be able to rouse the interest of either governments or health agencies to the degree required to maybe protect our health systems, health protection systems, as we have known them.

It seems remarkable to me, and I wish Mr. Mehan were here just now – I think he may not be – to reassure us that maybe some of the monitoring and the post-September 9th strategies and programs will in fact help to have us understand and the public understand better what is threatening about our water supplies and so on.

I'm thinking about the longstanding one now. I don't know whether anyone here is willing to respond to that. But I'd like to feel a little bit more encouraged than I do now.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I guess one of the only comment that I would make is I'm certainly not able to respond in total to your comments. I think those are very valid comments, the concern around human health.

One of the things that has happened and, certainly since September the 11th, the focus has been on security, the physical security of people and of institutions quite clearly from terrorist attacks. That's where the focus right now is.

As part of that, however, what I have noted in my work, is a looking at the issues around the security of the supply of water and the adequacy and the availability and the supply of water.

So that brings into play a lot of the issues that we're dealing with in terms of the Great Lakes, a lot of questions around of what we are doing on the Great Lakes and how it helps in that regard. Particularly, the focus right now is on the infrastructure and physical security. But part of that is also looking at the inter-relationship of that with the ecosystem and how it plays out.

Where that leads us? We're in the process of that. We don't have an answer to that at this stage. But it's certainly part of the equation.

JUDY BOCK:

Well, I would urge the Commission, as it goes forward in the next few months, to see what it can do get some positive spin-off for your work on the kinds of resources that are going to be invested basically in this war effort.

A very quick supplementary observation. There is a lot of very interesting information out on the tables and I was looking for pamphlets and things that would be directed to young children.

I'm wondering what the IJC is doing to provide teachers at the elementary level, as well as the secondary level, with materials that will have students come out understanding this fabulous ecosystem and the need to protect it. That could be websites and it could be maps and so on. But I think there may be a need for that.

Thanks very much.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Just on your last point, we do have a kids' website on the Great Lakes.

JUDY BOCK:

Oh, well, then that's nice. I would like to know the name of that.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We can provide you with that URL. JUDY BOCK:

Thank you very much.

UNIDENTIFIED:

And there are also materials available on the United States side, materials for teachers to use as part of lesson plans, and also some CD software that introduces Great Lakes environmental issues to children and others.

SIMON MALONE
(Environment Canada):

Hi. I'm Simon Malone, from Environment Canada.

I just want to make a comment on Manfred Coshlin's submission. Manfred, in his three minutes rule here may not have had an opportunity to express all the concerns that he was representing on behalf of OPAC in that three-minute rule.

I would just like to say that we will receive that submission and respond to all of OPAC's comments and the transparency of our operations, Ken will provide that to the IJC and make those responses available on the web so that people can see how we are responding.

The only comment I make is that our commitment to public involvement is broad. OPAC is only one of the avenues of public involvement on RAPs, and we continue to support various local public implementation teams like the public involvement group in Detroit.

We are still pleased to continue to support BARC – and I notice that Marilyn Baxter is behind me – and various other groups in the local implementation frameworks.

We would like to continue the dialogue with OPAC. We, as John mentioned, we live in a time of shift and change and what we are trying to do is to refocus our activities so that we align all the areas of concern on an individual lake with the LaMPs.

We're interested in exploring how do we get public input on a lake LaMP area of concern basis and we will be very eager to continue that dialogue with OPAC.

Thank you.

MARY MEWTER(?)
(Georgian Bay Association):

I am Mary Mewter and I'm here representing the Georgian Bay Association. This is an umbrella organization. We represent 23 local associations along the eastern and northern shores of Georgian Bay. We have about 5,000 family members.

I'm here to address commissioners with our concerns, but I would also like to do some education. I'm getting tired of attending meetings like this and being asked where is Georgian Bay?

It is a unique part of the Great Lakes system and we feel that it deserves a lot more attention than it has been getting. It's perceived as some pristine part of the Great Lakes. However, our work indicates that there are areas that have been heavily impacted.

So this is a photograph of the part of the shoreline of Georgian Bay. This is part of the 30,000 islands. This is Precambrian shield granite bedrock, but water becomes mixed with influents from the limestone deposits along the western sides of Georgian Bay. So it's a very unique ecosystem. It's probably the most diverse ecosystem anywhere on the Great Lakes.

I won't spend any more time. I'll move on and try to talk about some of the impacts that we're concerned about.

This is from just this last summer's work. For the first time the Ontario Ministry of Environment did from air quality monitoring on Georgian Bay. You can tell from these readings during May and June, there were seven days when the ozone readings at Parry Sound were higher than for the Greater Toronto Area.

The other thing that's interesting down at the bottom, I hope you can see that early in the morning and again until late into the evening, ozone remained suspended over the coastline.

We think that that exposed granite shoreline may be heating up earlier in the day, aiding in ozone formation and remaining heated late into the evening. This, in turn, may be increasing the evaporation rates on Georgian Bay. We think that this deserves some attention and some research.

This is not showing us very well. This is a photograph showing air pollution at actually 9:00 in the evening. I don't know if you can see that haze over what is thought to be a pristine coastline.

I'll just mention briefly now some of the impacts of the rapidly declining water levels on Georgian Bay. They have declined approximately five feet and remained at close to record low levels now for three to four years. This, in fact, doesn't really concern us, our organization. We feel people have to adapt, but just so you can graphically see what the impact is.

At high water levels, this dock had extensions two feet above that when the dock was actually covered with water.

This is something that we are much more concerned about. This is dredging of a local marina along the shorelines of Georgian Bay.

They are actually with a silt screen in place supposedly to contain the silt, but you can see at the top left-hand corner, that's the color all of that water should be.

This distributed fine sediments silt. This is about two or three miles out into the Bay where there were 400 cottages that were unable to draw water during that two-month period when this remained suspended.

Since no sediment analysis was done, we had no idea what heavy metals or contaminants were suspended along with the fine clay and silt.

This was a similar dredging operation and this was actually excavation into a wetland. And you can see that wetland at the top end that is exposed and dry now, no longer functioning.

Again, down at the bottom here are seasonal and permanent residents whose water supply was heavily impacted by this activity.

That's that same wetland from the shoreline.

Our foundation now has undertaken a wetland study in order to demonstrate impacts on the ecosystem.

This is an aerial photograph of a river and wetland that is now totally exposed. The aquatic life that normally would live in that area has no other similar habitat since once they are forced out of there, they are forced on to steep granite shorelines where they cannot exist.

That is that same wetland at ground level. Virtually, all of the submergent and emergent plant species have died.

I know that if wetlands are dry for a year or two, once they are flooded again, it can increase diversity. But we are now looking at three to four years of this high and dry wetland. The chances of it recovering remain very slim. It will probably be in the range of five to 15 years for it to recover once it is flooded again with water.

This is an island, and you can see on the north side, all of that wetland there is now exposed. Let me just show you that at ground level. People that care about wild rice, that entire shoreline was covered with wild rice and it has been dry like that for three years now.

I have one other issue that I wanted to address. Perhaps I'll just do it very, very quickly. This is the outflow of Lake Huron. We have concern about shoreline alteration at that area. I'll show you the shoreline alteration that we're talking about.

Along the Canadian side, the shoreline has been entirely hardened. Those are bed load traps going out into the water that traps sand. It's removed from the water. You can see it's not in the water there.

Let me show you historical photographs. In 1947, the sand is in the water, flows through down into the river. This slows down the current considerably and affects the outflow.

We would like the IJC to investigate this and to determine what the impact is on the outflow and consider compensating measures for this increase of the outflow.

In light of what we have discussed today, we are asking for two moratoriums from the International Joint Commission:

1. Dredging the Seaway channel beyond the 27.5 feet allowed; and

2. Shoreline alteration at the outflow of Lake Huron that may be increasing outflow until the Upper Lakes plan of study is completed and the impact is assessed.

We are very supportive of the plan of study for the Upper Great Lakes and are looking forward to hear the results from that.

Thank you.

MARILYN BAXTER
(Bay Area Restoration Council Manager):

Hello. I'm Marilyn Baxter. I'm the manager of the Bay Area Restoration Council.

I'd like to summarize a letter that was submitted to the IJC last week. It's from the President of the Bay Area Restoration Council.

BARC is a non-profit organization established ten years ago and has become the primary voice supporting and promoting the cleanup of Hamilton Harbor and its watershed.

The letter lists several actions which have resulted in measurable improvements to Hamilton Harbor that you may be familiar with at the IJC and most people in this room.

To date, 600 million dollars has been spent by industry and government, as well as in-kind contributions, stakeholder commitments and countless volunteer hours have made these successes possible.

To note one outstanding issue is Hamilton's wastewater treatment plan and pollution control plan, a 540 million-dollar plan. And just to let you know most of those dollars will be raised locally through water and sewer rates.

However, there is a major obstacle to success. Hamilton Harbor has a historical problem of contaminated sediments, highly toxic coal tar at Randall Reef.

Although the federal environmental process was started in 1994, seven years later, today, we are still at the pre-EA stage.

These postponements are a disappointment. The project cost is up to 15 million dollars, a small amount compared to the 600 million dollars already spent. BARC calls upon all levels of government to support and fund the remediation of the contaminated sediment in Hamilton Harbor.

We hope that the IJC and governments are listening and will respond in a timely manner.

Thank you.

MARC HUDON
(Stratégies Saint-Laurent):

Good morning. Marc Hudon, Stratégies Saint-Laurent, member of Great Lakes United also.

These things are so serious that last night, I went out and celebrated, got myself a belly-dancing certificate.

All I got to do now is tell my wife when I get back home that I was working like I have said. But there were witnesses.

Three short things. I'm going to repeat myself. I've said it earlier, but they're very important to us.

We are very concerned. I guess I'll start with my third point. The gentleman who mentioned the four priorities, you know, that you were looking forward addressing in the future, following your positive views on the public involvement in the initiatives in the Great Lakes, I would have appreciated very much a projection of what you thought would be the place you are planning to make for this future or ongoing participation of the public on all the important environmental issues in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

So being involved in some of these issues, for example – I'm shaking, but it's because of last night – being involved in these community initiatives, for example, on the public interest advisory group of the five-year study for the revision of the criteria on the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River, we are very much concerned with the U.S. government not pursuing its financial support beyond year two of this five-year study.

We would like to express it clearly to you. If you can address that, it would be nice to reassure us.

The second-last point is it's very important in the lower St. Lawrence – whatever terminology you use – to address the cumulative impacts of whatever is happening on the Great Lakes system. We are part of that system. So it's very much important that whatever goes on – like this is the first time you come to Quebec in 100 years. You have got to come back within the next 25 years and feed us information more regularly.

I will not celebrate by belly dancing the next time you come back.

Thank you.

CHRISTIAN POP
(Environmental Activist):

My name is Christian Pop. I used to be with Environment Canada and now, I am sort of half retired, half the time, I stick my nose into environmental things without any special mandate.

I would like to say how pleased I was that the Commission had its first public forum that extended beyond the transnational boundaries and it was held in Montreal.

I think it's the only way to deal with a watershed. After all, it's one watershed, and I don't know how you can deal with the toxics or invasive species or water levels and flows without looking at the whole watershed.

I would like to ask the commissioners is this going to be a unique event or the St. Lawrence plans, are they going to be part of the coming public forums as well? And is this going to be a tradition?

I would like to ask the government representatives if there are any plans, not to integrate plans in Quebec, in the Quebec part of the St. Lawrence, but to harmonize certain programs such as reporting indicators under SOLEC, such as the RAPs and the ZIPs and possibly even wider strategic plans?

UNIDENTIFIED:

Would you like me to address this?

In terms of the connectivity between the Great Lakes program and the St. Lawrence plans, there has already been and always been some ongoing activity in areas of common interest.

The example I would use is the dredging on Massena where the plain people from the Saint-Laurent have been engaged in that on an ongoing basis.

Another example you have noted was indicators. There has been a member from the Quebec region on our advisory committee for SOLEC on an ongoing basis.

Having said that, what I would say is there is lots of room for improvement in that. As a matter of fact, Mimi Bertrand, the RDG for Quebec and I met on Thursday, was it? Yes, Thursday, to actually chat about how we might move that forward, how we might include some of the things you've already suggested, the lessons learned from the ZIPs and the RAPs which have a different focus, but are very much based at the community level. We see some very great synergies that can be arranged there.

The timing is absolutely perfect for us at this point because we have just created a framework for our Canada-Ontario Agreement and we're about to go into a process of work planning. The next phase of the St. Lawrence is also in that planning phase.

So the opportunity to bring them together, to look at them as, as you say, one ecosystem is there and we have committed to do that.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Let me comment on the cycle for the biennial forums. As many of you are aware, the next one will be in the year 2003 and it will be held in the U.S. Since my time on the Commission, we have been in Duluth, Niagara, Milwaukee and Montreal. So in 2003, we will be some place in the basin on the U.S. side. In 2005, then we will be some place in the basin on the Canadian side. But that's the cycle we follow. So in 2003, we will be some place in the U.S.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Maybe I'll just add to that by saying that the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence study, which is underway – it's in year one of its five-year program – has held meetings here.

In fact, we had one on Thursday evening and we will be continuing through the membership on the study board and on many of the technical working groups to have involvement from a lot of people from this area who are contributing a great deal to the work and will be continuing to hold events through the course of their work.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Could you give any commitment – or maybe that's too early – that at the next public forum, issues of the St. Lawrence beyond the transnational boundary may be considered and may be aired as well? Or is that of no interest?

UNIDENTIFIED:

Well, you pose the parameters. It's always of interest to us. But I can't very well define what the group is going to do in the year 2003. That very often is a result of what individuals like yourself or organizations really ask the Commission to do.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Whenever I can, I would like to encourage that.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Thank you.

STEVE CLARKSON
(Health Canada, Member, Great Lakes Water Quality Board):

A point of relevance, I believe. I'm Steve Clarkson. I work with Health Canada, but I am a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board.

John is new to the Board. So perhaps he hasn't recalled that the Great Lakes Water Quality Board does contain a representative from the Ministry of the Environment from the province of Quebec.

UNIDENTIFIED:

To add to that, the Water Quality Board had one of its recent meetings in Quebec City. It was a real eye-opening experience for many of us from the Great Lakes basin to see what the similarities were in terms of problems that were being faced on that part of the St. Lawrence.

I think it's very, very important for us to be able to build coalitions. Since the problems that we're dealing with are so common and many of the solutions are common ones, I think we can have a much stronger voice with respect to getting some attention to these issues.

MARGARET WOOSTER
(Great Lakes United):

I'm Margaret Wooster. I'm with Great Lakes United.

I want to welcome the new commissioners to the Commission. We're very glad that we have three Canadian commissioners and we're very eager to have the full playing field of commissioners on the U.S. side as soon as possible.

I actually want to just say that at this point – I know you want to break at noon – but we are hoping, a number of people from Great Lakes United and a number of other groups are here who want to talk about a number of things, probably picking up on the Auditor General's Report on the long-term strategies.

We are really hoping that we can work with the IJC, as we used to ten years ago, on clear long-term strategies and short-term strategies for the Great Lakes that are truly related to the kinds of things that are going on in our two countries right now, including the energy policy that we now live under which is going to have tremendous impacts for the Great Lakes.

A number of people here have read through all of the reports, COA, the Great Lakes Action Plan, the two governments' responses to the last Biennial Report from the IJC, the SOLEC document. We have been actually bombarded with a lot of documents to get through and we have gotten through them.

I think we want to come back at 2:00 and really look at these things with you and say, well, what have we got here in terms of the five-year plan, the response to the IJC, the IJC's own priorities for the next biennial cycle?

So I hope you will all be here at 2:00. We're sorry that Tracy Mehan had to leave because we really hope that we can have some good strategic thinking on the basis of what you have put forward to us so far and which we have read and digested and would like to talk with you about.

Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We will be here at 2:00.

ANN BROLADI(?)
(Upper Lakes Environmental Research Network):

I'll try to keep this short. It's a question. By the way, my name is Ann Broladi and I work for the Upper Lakes Environmental Research Network, situated out of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

I believe Gary had mentioned something earlier about the Chicago Wilderness. There are approximately 150 public and private organizations working towards this Chicago Wilderness.

Well, our network, we have about 200 researchers, seven executive members and five associate members. One of the difficulties that we find is people have all these innovative ideas.

I was wondering if the IJC, you know, considering how money always seems to be a driving source of innovation and research, would they provide some sort of a fund that people could compete for that are innovative, that develop these collaborative trans-border partnerships?

And it would just seem like maybe what that could be geared towards is some sort of proactive approach to actually developing research and restoration because you can't just go and restore without research. But if you have that money, if you have deadlines and milestones, perhaps these people would be able to deliver some of these answers that people want to hear today.

So my question would be would there be some sort of fund that the IJC could set aside that would be able to recognize excellence in partnerships, collaboration and getting answers?

TOM BALDINI:

Boy, that would be great! No, we do not have money to do that. We really don't. We have talked about it.

But one of the things that I think many of the groups in the Great Lakes have done is they have gone to foundations. And over the years, on that side, the foundations have been one of the primary sources of funding those projects. And for research, the two governments and the states and provinces have been the people who have funded the research.

But we don't have cash as such to hand out grants, which would be very nice.

GARY GULEZIAN:

Just to draw the analogy to the Chicago Wilderness model, funding has been provided by the U.S. Government to Chicago Wilderness from the Forest Service and my office, Great Lakes National Program Office, has provided some funding.

We have a competitive grant program that funds projects like this and others on the U.S. side. I think it has been one of the really important success factors for Chicago Wilderness. Chicago Wilderness is now seeking funding from foundations as well, as Tom mentioned, and they have really come up with a strategy to broaden the base of funding support, knowing that demonstration, funding money that comes from the governments is not going to last forever and they'll need to find other avenues of support.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Just to note that there are similar funding arrangements on the Canadian side of the border and that we can provide offline some of the details of that to you.

VICKY TEASNER (?)
(Ohio Environmental Council):

Good morning. My name is Vicky Teasner. I'm the Executive Director of the Ohio Environmental Council. We're the leading advocacy organization in the State of Ohio, working on both state technical policy campaigns and providing capacity assistance to local community groups around the States.

We have over 130 community groups that are members and thousands of individual members.

What I would like to share basically are our concerns with the commissioners and with the representatives of the governments. Our concerns are about the LaMPs, the RAPs, you know, where are things going in regards to TMDLs in combination with the LaMPs and really the reality of where is the lead in regard to really moving forward on getting those loadings and allocations done and implementation plans out?

You know, I would share, and I would just quote Section 9.25 from the Canadian Commissioners' Report: “The requirement to develop a lakewide management plan for each of the Great Lakes was an attempt to take a broad look at the key threats facing the Lakes and adjust programming priorities accordingly. As we note, this has been a slow process and ineffective so far.”

That's what we have concerns about.

Our concerns are based on our experience as members of the Lake Erie LaMP, the lead entity in Ohio pushing community-driven TMDLs and providing watershed assistance to groups around the state, our interactions with the RAPs and our experience with agencies on 3-19 grants which is a U.S. E.P.A. basically driven program.

As well intended as we know many members of the Lake Erie LaMP and many of members of the Commission and other folks are in the government, where our concern is is where are we seeing the cooperative leadership to actually you might say get off the hot plate and actually move forward in finishing up the loadings and allocations that has been going on for years in the work in the LaMP and actually coming up with a definitive plan to address point source and non-point sources and actually doing the implementation necessary with the community partnership.

You know, we would point out on the U.S. E.P.A. side, a lot of this is moving forward because of the many lawsuits that have been filed by communities to do TMDLs – total maximum daily load water restoration plans – which is really no different than what the LaMPs were supposed to be the management plans.

Indeed, there was a meeting in Indiana that U.S. E.P.A. Region 5 hosted back in May that, actually, the discussion was brought up about why not consolidate TMDLs with LaMPs? Cost savings on the U.S. side doesn't exactly apply to Canada in the sense that there is no such TMDL animal in Canadian law.

But if you look at the fact that really all that TDML is is a real effort to do a community-driven watershed plan, it really is the same thing. That would be a cost containment issue.

But the idea too of a community-driven TMDL, what isn't quite happening is the true partnerships between the governments, between local and county and state agencies and between communities. And we see that, sadly enough, in some instances regarding the RAPs.

With the work we do in Ohio reaching out and working with communities on watershed assistance and bringing in together regional watershed councils, we have had various RAPs actually go to our funding sources and complain that we may do something like actually empower the citizens and they may show up on the steps of the mayor of the city.

Now, would that be such a bad thing, I would actually ask you, if people actually cared and voiced their opinion? I think that's very sad that you have RAP members taking that position.

Maybe we need to really examine, you know, who is basically you might say the power behind some of the RAPs and you might say the inertia of going forward.

I would also point out in the 3-19 program, we have become very aware that that is supposed to be basically the power house to millions of dollars now to fund TMDL programs in the United States. And yet, in Ohio – and I don't know if this is an example of what is going on around the other states – indeed, it has been a closed process behind closed doors where by law, it is supposed to be open to the public and the public is supposed to be involved.

And most of the monies have been exchanged between agencies for projects that have nothing to do with TMDLs and actually, in many cases, have not even been evaluated, but if they were, there was no improvement in water quality.

I would tell you that door has been opened in Ohio only because of a lawsuit our agency has threatened. And now, I'm on that state's selection committee. You know, I hope to see that things will change.

But I bring these issues forward because I think, you know, there are opportunities and these are some of the challenges that have happened.

I just recently came, just this past week, from the National Association of Environmental Grant Makers. They are meeting in Minnesota. One thing I would point out to you is foundation funding for a lot of projects, because of stock portfolios are down 20 percent, and that's reality.

But government spending everybody's money is down and the real reality is it really should push people to work together and cut costs and consolidate resources.

In fact, as Bill Moyer, in their plenary session, really spoke to, saying, you know, this is the time with what has happened after the 9-11 events to boldly go forward, you know, the old Star Trek motto, and you know, do the best job we ever can to really work together and reach out within the community – within the government, within the granting resources – really work together on moving these issues forward.

Maybe we need to make this pledge because real security in our nations will be because of local sustainability and the protection of our resources.

Lastly, I just want to add I actually did see that belly dancing last night, and it was great.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We are here until 12:30, so if anybody would like to come forward.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I just wanted to I guess make a couple of general comments, and I really do appreciate the comments that were made this morning.

Let me make a point that the Government of Canada has accepted and welcomes the Commissioners' Report and the recommendations that it makes, the recommendations that it does make.

I think it's important to recognize, of course, that over the period that the audit was looked at, there was absolutely no doubt that governments – and I would say governments on both sides of the border – were going through a process of budget reductions.

Therefore, there were reductions in terms of the level of activity, the expectations that we had at the beginning of that and our ability to be able to meet those as we went through.

So there is no doubt that there was some momentum lost, and we accept that.

We also accept that the issues that the Commissioner had identified are the ones that we do need to address, and we intend to do that.

The other thing that is really pointed out, however, those issues of growing population, the economic activity, the interrelationship of those issues and the complexity of that I think is a really important point and we need to understand it.

Another general comment I would make around the issues on where we are today, it took us 300 years to get to the state of 1970. It's not surprising that in an evolution and a continuing evolving ecosystem that we are not where we would like to be after 30 years.

I guess a philosophical point that I have – and this is one that we have to be careful about – is we talk about managing the ecosystem. I philosophically disagree with that. I think the only thing we can manage is our own interventions, and the ecosystem is working on its own. Our understanding of it and our understanding of our interventions with it is something we still don't have a complete picture around.

So the concept that somehow we can make it all change is something we need to be very careful about.

I guess the other comment I would make – and I appreciate very much the energy that has been demonstrated by the representatives of local groups that have come up to the mike – your energy is absolutely essential and you have certainly the Government of Canada's commitment to engage with you in the most effective way possible to maintain that energy and maintain that commitment.

BOB OLSGARD
(Lake Superior Alliance):

Thank you. I couldn't agree more. I'm Bob Olsgard. I'm the Coordinator of the Lake Superior Alliance.

We have a non-profit organization that has 40 member-organizations and about 3,000 individual members in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ontario and Michigan around the shores of Lake Superior. We hold regular meetings to get together with our citizen-members. We go out and talk to other communities. We participate in local stakeholder groups.

We're really very, very concerned about the state of the Lake Superior Binational Program. It's a model that we hear about a lot from the excellent offices of the E.P.A. and Environment Canada and the other government stakeholders.

But in our recent ten-year review of the Lake Superior Binational Program, we compared what the citizens asked for in 1989 through 1991, what the governments promised in the 1991 Binational Program and what in ten years of the program we have actually been able to accomplish.

Sadly, most of what we have been able to accomplish is a lot of information. We have amassed a great deal of information about what is wrong with various processes, with various places, with various intergovernmental relationships.

But we have done very little to really address those problems, to take action on the landscape or in the integrative processes that we've all talked about so many times today to bring local governments, state governments, federal government, provincial governments all together to work together to make more efficient use of resources and of their citizen partners' time to really fix the problems on the landscape.

What really brought this to mind yesterday were two things in the LaMP workshop, and I'll try to be brief.

First, Dr. Carpenter's presentation about health impacts of living near contaminated places. We have two places on Lake Superior where we know there is mercury in the water, where there were chloralkalide plants operating. One of them, Thunder Bay, Ontario, you actually have Health Canada statistics showing elevated numbers of incidences of cerebral palsy, which is one of the markers looked at in that study. We don't know for sure if there is this relationship, but Dr. Carpenter seems to be fairly convinced.

Are we taking the precautionary approach? Are we saying, you know, it's time to do something or are we saying it's time for more study?

Yesterday, what I heard over and over again was it's time for more study, more detailed study, more exhaustive study. What we really need to do is clean places up so that people who we know to be at risk aren't at risk anymore.

I heard a lot about developing indicators, more about monitoring. Well, we also had Dr. Bowerman's excellent presentation on indicators that were already developed for the Lake Ontario LaMP. He had a pretty good short list of indicators. The Lake Superior LaMP is still sort of battling over monitoring and indicators.

I will credit the IJC for commenting on this in your review about the Stage Two Lakewide Management Plan – is one thing. Coming up with a LaMP that doesn't meet the Annex 2 requirements – two – is just plain nonsense.

We should simplify the list, look at what's happening in the waters and look at how to fix it.

Lastly, I want to thank the IJC for being very stringent in their review of the Lakewide Management Plan process on Lake Superior.

Another thing that Dr. Bowerman said yesterday was that when you take the Lake Superior Binational Program, with its broad landscape effect, and then you say that the Lakewide Management Plan, with its narrow mission to correct problems in open waters, is going to be the vehicle for its implementation, you have set up intergovernmental gridlock.

You have also set up kind of a feeding frenzy for research projects that have nothing whatsoever to do with fixing water pollution problems.

We have an excellent opportunity on Lake Superior to do it right. We have an excellent opportunity, through our organization and our ability, to go to the people and really get input through public consultation which we did when the E.P.A. in Wisconsin, in Minnesota, in Michigan said they didn't have time to do a consultation in 1999. We did it.

We have a lot of people really involved in the communities. But there is no concrete direction and there is very little action.

So I would urge you, as you look at going forward in your recommendations, that you really stress action and meaningful action that can have measurable results for the people in our communities on Lake Superior, which is still the cleanest of the Great Lakes.

And that may be a barrier because you go there, from a place like Hamilton, Ontario, or even Montreal, and you see beautiful rugged landscape, untouched apparently by the hand of man. But when you get down to the micro-organic level, you find there are problems.

Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED:

That will conclude this morning's session. We invite you back at 2:00 p.m. Anybody who wants to make a statement, anybody who wants to ask a question, the commissioners, government representatives will be here.

Merci.

Thank you very much.

(BREAK)

TOM BALDINI:

…state your name and limit your comments to three minutes. I have to tell you that some of the U.S. Government representatives have to leave at 3:00 pm to catch a plane, but there will be remaining other U.S. Government representatives to answer questions should they arise.

Our moderators for this afternoon session are, as this morning, Murray Clamen, Gerry Galloway, and they will moderate the discussion and manage the time of the discussions. So we are ready for your questions and comments.

GORDON EDWARDS
(President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility):

Could I just ask for clarification with regard to the time limit? Three minutes, does that mean that you can also line up again and make another comment or not?

TOM BALDINI:

Yes, and the other comment is that Secretary Clamen actually fudged a bit on that this morning and said three to five.

GORDON EDWARDS:

Uh-huh.

TOM BALDINI:

Okay?

UNIDENTIFIED:

Okay, because the topic that I wanted to comment on does extend over a fairly wide territory. It's the subject of radioactive contamination and possible further radioactive contamination of the Great Lakes. At the moment…

GERRY GALLOWAY:

Could you identify…

TOM BALDINI:

Excuse me, what is your name?

GORDON EDWARDS:

Oh, I'm sorry. My name is Gordon Edwards; I am the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, which is based here in Montreal and which deals with nuclear issues across Canada.

As the people are, I am sure, aware, there are many sites, there are 11 nuclear sites for nuclear reactors in the United States situated on the Great Lakes, and there are four in Canada.

However, the number of reactors in Canada exceeds the number of reactors in the United States on the Great Lakes; there's 21, one of which is shut down…more than one of which is shut down in Canada, and there's 18 in the United States.

Many of the reactors that have been shut down in Canada as of 1977 are just on the verge of being restarted again. Consequently, there will be a greater influx of radioactive emissions into the Great Lakes as a result of the restart of these reactors.

And I do believe that the International Joint Commission should make it its business to ask and to insist upon good answers as to what has been done before restarting these reactors to see to it that radioactive emissions are eliminated or reduced to an absolute minimum.

The CANDU reactor is particularly productive of radioactive hydrogen, tritium, and the tritium levels in the Great Lakes have been measurably increasing over recent decades, and it's almost entirely due to the release of tritium from CANDU facilities in Canada.

There is of course tritium released from American reactors, but it's much, much less. Another material of concerns is carbon 14, which is released from CANDU reactors also in larger amounts than from American reactors.

These materials, the carbon and the tritium, in terms of their chemistry, are the basic building blocks of life. Carbohydrates, all organic molecules have carbon and hydrogen as their base.

And as a result of this, the long-term radioactive effects of carbon and tritium, radioactive carbon and tritium build-up, may be quite severe and may not be limited to the usual cancer concern, which of course is a concern, but also to genetic and reproductive concerns, which have been well documented by, for example, the United Nations Scientific Commission on the Effects of Atomic Radiation as far back as 1977.

Many, many…in fact, there have been more studies done on the genetic and mutagenic effects of tritium and plutonium than all other radioactive substances, and those reports are not reassuring.

Now another problem is with the recent horrible events of September the 11th, we have to be more concerned with the possibility of catastrophic events not just due to accidents, industrial accidents, but due to acts of malice.

And of course, as we all know, well, crashing a plane or dropping a bomb onto a nuclear reactor can have devastating consequences because of the huge inventory of radioactive poisons inside the reactor.

The fact that the reactor may be shut down offers little in the way of protection unless it was shut down long before the attack because when a reactor is shut down, the residual radioactive heat from the decay products, the radioactive decay products, is quite sufficient to melt the core of the reactor.

For hours and days after the reactor has been shut down, that heat has to be removed or the core will spontaneously melt. Consequently, you can have like a Chernobyl or worse than Chernobyl-type accident brought about by malice.

This, to my knowledge, was first pointed out, in any reference that I saw, in the 1976 Royal report from Britain called the Flowers Report, called Nuclear Power and the Environment, in which Dr. Flowers, who himself is a nuclear physicist, commented that had nuclear reactors been built in Europe before World War II and deployed for the production of electricity, then simply as a result of the conventional warfare of World War II, large parts of Europe would undoubtedly be radioactively uninhabitable today.

And one has to bear that “uninhabitable” in mind. The thing is it's one thing to have a catastrophe, it's another thing to have a catastrophe where the land surrounding the catastrophe remains uninhabitable for a very considerable period of time.

So I think that this is something that the International Joint Commission…granted, it's not a routine operation by any means, but it is something that has to be taken very seriously, particularly when the radioactive poisons in question, that is the high-level radioactive waste, are now being moved outside the reactor walls and being stored in the open outdoors in dry storage.

Now these are the same materials which are known to be among the most toxic materials ever produced by any human industry. The U.S. Geological Survey, as long ago as 1978, pointed out that if you looked at the high-level radioactive waste – that's the spent nuclear fuel – from the American reactors and asked yourself how much water would you need to dilute that radioactivity down to the maximum permissible pollution levels for drinking water, the answer was it would take more than twice all of the fresh water in the Earth.

And then they went on to say, in that same report, that even after one million years of storage, there would be still be sufficient radioactive poisons in the stored spent fuel to contaminate the entire Great Lakes basin over the drinking level standard.

So we're talking here about an enormous toxic potential. And right now, there are plans underway for building the largest dry storage of high-level radioactive waste of the world on the shores of Lake Huron, up on the Bruce peninsula, as an adjunct to the Bruce nuclear power station in Canada.

I believe that this is, if you pardon my saying so, a sitting duck and very irresponsible considering that they really have no permanent plan as to where this material is ultimately going to be stored permanently. We just don't have a location for that.

Consequently, this could become a de facto permanent situation. The reason it's so large is because it's storing the waste from eight nuclear reactors, and eventually, in the future, perhaps even more.

I think my time for this round is up. Thank you very much. I do have some other radioactive concerns I'd like to bring to your attention later, but I'll see if other people are finished their chances. Thank you.

ANDRÉ STÉNIER:

Je m'appelle André Sténier; je suis le président du groupe Les amis de la Vallée du Saint-Laurent. Je suis également le secrétaire de la commission environnementale de Stratégies Saint-Laurent.

J'aurais plusieurs demandes à faire à la Commission, mais je voudrais tout d'abord remercier M. John Mills d'avoir donné une place importante dans son rapport au plan d'action Saint-Laurent Vision 2000 et en particulier au programme ZIP, au programmes des zones d'intervention prioritaires, parce qu'à mon avis, le programme ZIP est une réussite, est un success story au Québec et une réussite durable, une prise en charge durable du Saint-Laurent par les communautés.

Mes demandes à la Commission. La première tournerait peut-être un peu autour de la priorité sur l'urbanisation qu'on nous a présentée. L'accord…la question de la qualité de l'eau du fleuve devrait aussi être considérée sous l'aspect qualité de l'accès à l'eau.

L'eau, elle est pour les populations principalement, et c'est par l'accès à l'eau. Or, l'accès à l'eau est très limité, en tout cas sur le Saint-Laurent, mais je crois aussi sur les Grands lacs, de par la privatisation des rives, d'une part.

Il n'y a presque plus d'accès public au fleuve, en tout cas au Québec, et également de par l'industrialisation des rives, que ce soit par les aménagements portuaires ou par les grandes industries qui s'installent au bord du fleuve, très légitimement d'ailleurs.

Mais dans une politique d'ensemble, il faudrait plus considérer, me semble-t-il, le développement de l'accès du public à l'eau du fleuve et donc aux rives du fleuve.

Et la deuxième demande serait reliée à la priorité sur la pollution atmosphérique. Il me semble que la Commission mixte est bien placée pour suggérer ou recommander des solutions permettant de résoudre le problème du transport atmosphérique des polluants depuis le Middle West américain jusque principalement, pour nous, le Québec.

Le Québec, et le Saint-Laurent en particulier, souffrent de retombées atmosphériques importantes venant de l'industrie qui se situe ailleurs. La Commission mixte, de par son caractère binational en particulier, devrait pouvoir être une des instances où on fait valoir que le Middle West doit se préoccuper du Québec.

Ma troisième demande, c'est du côté de la communauté. Je crois que c'est plutôt Madame la présidente qui a fait allusion à l'importance des communautés dans la prise en charge du Saint-Laurent et des Grands lacs.

Et moi, je demanderais à la Commission mixte internationale de suggérer à nos gouvernements comment aider les communautés à continuer leur prise en charge du Saint-Laurent et des Grands lacs. Et je suggère notamment qu'on demande aux gouvernements d'inscrire le soutien aux communautés dans les politiques de régionalisation.

Je crois qu'au Canada, et en tout cas au Québec, on a une très grande préoccupation maintenant du développement régional, et je pense que dans la politique de développement régional, on devrait inscrire un soutien organisé et constant aux communautés et à leurs organismes.

Et ma quatrième demande, c'est au sujet des changements climatiques. Les changements climatiques, on prévoit, sans être sûr, qu'ils vont avoir des impacts importants sur le fleuve, et ces impacts vont nous obliger à nous adapter à ces nouvelles situations. C'est donc tout le thème des adaptations aux impacts des changements climatiques.

Bien sûr, on ne peut pas aujourd'hui décider quelles adaptations on va promouvoir ou réaliser, mais on devrait dès maintenant dégager les principes auxquels les adaptations devront répondre. Sinon, on risque, si on attend de devoir décider d'urgence des adaptations, de le faire sans plan d'ensemble et notamment sans considération suffisante des intérêts de l'écosystème.

Il me semble que la Commission mixte, qui se préoccupe des effets des changements climatiques, devrait se préoccuper bien sûr d'atténuer les changements climatiques, mais aussi – parce que s'ils ont lieu, on ne pourra rien y faire que de les supporter – de dégager dès maintenant les principes que devront respecter les adaptations que nous prendrons à cette nouvelle situation du fleuve et des Grands lacs.

Par exemple, le fait que les eaux vont baisser et dégager de nouveaux territoires, le fait qu'on va vouloir réorganiser la navigation, qu'on va devoir protéger autrement les milieux humides, qu'on va devoir compte du tourisme et des adaptations que le tourisme devra se donner, qu'on dégage dès maintenant les grands principes de ces adaptations.

Je vous remercie.

MARGARET WOOSTER:

Excuse me, my name is Margaret Wooster. Again, I'm executive director of Great Lakes United; we are a binational coalition of environmental, conservation, labor, First Nations, and tribal groups, 170 groups around the Great Lakes basin and the St. Lawrence River dedicated to the restoration and protection of this ecosystem.

I wanted to go back to the IJC priorities as they are for the next biannual cycle and to talk about them in the context of what's on in our nations since September 11th, which has been referred to several times today.

I just want to go back first to the Auditor General points for anyone who wasn't here this morning because they are basically the points that we agree with. The Auditor General of Canada pointed out, made four essential points, critiquing where we are, where the government has gotten so far with the cleanup agenda for the Great Lakes.

The points were that resources are out of sync with the need – we all know that – that the commitments under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement have not been met, that monitoring has been impaired and that we have no long-term strategies.

In terms of the trends that we're looking at now in the Great Lakes, especially since September 11th, well, first, I just want to talk about the trends we're looking at in the Great Lakes and then the world we live in now.

The trends are things like mercury, a rise in mercury in the inland lakes and in the St. Lawrence River, again from coal-fired power plants mainly, but also other combustion sources.

We have nuclear reactors, seven proposed to come back online in Canada. These are 20 to 25 year-old reactors that we thought were going to be phased out that are proposed to come back online. We have accelerated proposals for oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes.

And we have a situation in the U.S. and Canada right now where we have a new energy policy, and the new energy policy is to become more homegrown, to exploit more resources, and we are going to see tremendous impacts in the Great Lakes in terms of what we're seeing now, in terms of nuke plants coming back online and more mercury and more oil and gas drilling.

And the question is do we have a plan for this? Are we prepared for this? Do we have the policies in place to protect the Great Lakes from the new onslaught of the new world that we inhabit now, in which the pressures are going to make the last 30 years look like a reprieve?

Because we have to be honest, the last 30 years of – what did somebody call it this morning? – the last 30 years of advances that we have had in the Great Lakes are in large part due to the deindustrialization in the Great Lakes, not necessarily due to new policies that we have in place to curtail the way in which we develop our energy or the way in which we consume energy or indeed the way in which we deal with our wastes.

We have had a reprieve, we have had some great success stories with pollution reduction loadings into the Great Lakes, but much of that we owe to the fact that industry has cycled down in the Great Lakes and many of these industries have gone to other places, where they are causing pollution elsewhere in the world.

So the question for the IJC and for the governments is what are the priorities, what are the strategies, what are the strategies that we have to deal with a world in which the onslaught, the accelerated onslaught on energy particularly, but also in terms of manufacturing and consumption, where we do not have any kind of real policies in place to curtail those demands, and we have a population growing.

We need a strategy that deals with getting the states involved. We do not have good state involvement in the Great Lakes Action Plan. We need strategies that really allow all of the back and forth conversation that we have been having for the last many years with the IJC for there to be real timelines and progress and working through the obstacles in terms of funding that we have encountered.

These are not in the IJC priorities and they are not in either COAA or the five-year plan of EPA. We do not have strategies for getting ourselves where we need to go in terms of being sustainable, changing our production and our consumption and our treatment of waste.

Just one last point on that, and that is…we talked about MACTS, maximum achievable control technology standards, this morning as something that was going to help us with mercury and so forth, something that is supposedly going to help us with our garbage problem.

Again, these are end of the pipe controls. They are not dealing with the root of the problem, which is our consumption and our generation of waste. So these are the kind of strategies we need the International Joint Commission to ask the governments to really deal with. Thank you.

REG GILBERT
(Great Lakes United):

Hi, my name is Reg Gilbert, I also work for Great Lakes United. What Margaret was just saying about September 11th has just made me think that we're very lucky to have the International Joint Commission in the basin.

It's an organization that basically attempts to promote understanding between peoples, and I know the Commission requests its members to set aside national advocacy in considering what's best for the Lakes, and so thank you for taking on this work.

I wanted to talk today about the process that the states and provinces are going through to form their water use, at least in part to recreate the legal regime in the basin to better protect us from large-scale export and diversion proposals that may eventually come our way in the coming decades.

As you probably know, the states and provinces signed an agreement in principle about what they're going to do. Quite visionary, it proposes a complete transformation in the way water use is assessed, putting it almost completely on the basis of its ecological impacts.

And if that wasn't enough, they also committed to having the agreement be binding on all the parties, which would be quite a trick even within a single country, but it's especially challenging considering that it was two provinces and eight states, and therefore they're talking about a binding agreement not only across the border, but across the border on the level of the states and provinces, not on the federal level.

So I guess I have a question, and perhaps it can't be answered today, but I'd like to hear something, if you have any thoughts. It seems like the IJC is very well positioned to suggest to the federal governments means by which they could promote the binding cooperation of the states and provinces.

They're not inclined in the direction of allowing that. They just natively aren't particularly interested in non-federal binding bilateral relationships. They have shown the history of Great Lakes organizations a couple of times that they don't like that.

And if they were to get beyond that, what exactly the mechanism would be - I think anyone who has ever thought about - is a challenge. So it seems like the IJC would be a perfect body to think about that.

I know that the governments have given the Commission a reference, I guess a more or less standing reference, one to take place in the next couple of years, dealing with water use in the basin, and then they are after, I guess, on a regular basis, and the next one would be 2003.

I think that's a little bit late. The governors and premiers are looking at having something binding just about in that timeframe. I think the federal governments would need something sooner to start thinking about how they could promote this cooperation.

And I was just wondering if the IJC would consider taking this on an expedited basis, proposing means by which the federal governments could allow state and provincial cooperation in the area of water use reform.

GERRY GALLOWAY:

I think, Reg, you have touched on some of the points. We have a standing reference from the two federal governments to review it, I believe you are right, 2003, and then every ten years thereafter. And the Commission has not really dealt with how are we going to engage that.

I think the point you make to get us involved earlier, it may be that governments want to come back to us with another reference and ask us to review that. This is my own personal observation, on bias, but in the U.S., states cannot join into binding agreement with one another without the authority of the federal government.

And that's been one of those gray areas with regard to WRDA. The government has given the eight states on the U.S. side the authority to veto any diversion of water, and so that may have some legal standing.

But I have often wondered, and I've followed your comments and the governors and the provincial premiers as to their comments regarding a binding agreement, and my position has always been that I think to really give whatever they come up with some legal standing that people would not challenge, I really thought they should go to the federal government.

But that's my bias. But that's not been with a real heavy analysis, in-depth analysis. But from what knowledge I have of the U.S. Constitution and legal references, the states cannot make binding agreements. They can make informal agreements, which have worked, with the provinces; we've seen that here in the Great Lakes basin.

But the question is does that sustain a legal challenge? And so I've said, to protect us all, I thought when they come to an agreement, they would probably be well served to go to both governments, federal governments, and ask them to codify that somehow and some way to really give it legal standing.

But that's my personal opinion. But we have not, as a Commission, sat down and thought about where we're going to go with this. We know we have a standing reference for 2003 and we were going to look at it then. Maybe we will be too late by then.

But if the governments wanted to come back to us earlier, they could very easily just come back to us and say will you, the IJC, review this work? And governments are sitting here right now, so if they wanted to do that…and also, organizations like yours could very easily petition the governments and say will Washington and Ottawa go to the IJC and review this?

And we have been very responsive in a very timely fashion in reviewing that type of work, but that's just my own personal observation on it.

REG GILBERT:

Can I follow up just very briefly? Sorry, I think the question of how this agreement could be made binding within the countries is also a challenging one, but a separate one. The assumption is almost that they are able to do that some way; it's easier to conceive that there's precedents.

So I really was focusing just on the federal enablement of cross-border…and I guess I would ask, would the Commission consider recommending that the governments give them that reference in the next biannual report?

GERRY GALLOWAY:

I think, Reg, you put an issue on the record, and that's why we ask you to do that, and I'm quite sure we'll talk about it.

REG GILBERT:

Thank you very much.

ROBIN MACLELLAN
(Great Lakes United):

Good afternoon. My name is Robin MacLellan, and for most of my life I have been part of the Great Lakes biota. In more conventional terms, I live in the basin, I am on the board of Great Lakes United, and I served time on the Massena RAP.

So I'm going to limit most of my comments to the Science Advisory Board report, specifically the section on methodologies for community health assessment, measuring injury to health, and I'm going to commit an unnatural act and try and keep my comments brief.

But I did want to mention one thing in the Science Advisory Board that I was rather surprised to see. I live in Albion now, between Buffalo and Rochester, and I'm no longer in the north country and I'm no longer on the Massena RAP.

But I saw that the Science Advisory Board had gone to Massena and found great progress in Massena and not much progress in Cornwall. And I think it should be noted that when the stage 2 RAPs were done, the Cornwall RAP came out with a 200-page document and outlined a significant amount of work to be done that apparently hasn't been done.

The New York side came out with a RAP that basically said have a nice day, and the work that was done in Massena, at Alcoa and Reynolds and General Motors, was done despite the RAP and not involved at all in the RAP process.

Now this is not to say that the RAP didn't play some behind the scenes role in getting this work done, nor is it to say that there isn't progress in the basin. But it's interesting to note that as the community advisory group to the RAP, we were almost not able to comment, and we took it our initiative to make a comment.

And in many ways, it was a good thing that our comments weren't taken because at that time, the community said we wanted a less stringent cleanup in the General Motors site.

So it's kind of interesting. It's an interesting case study to look at this over a period of 14 years and to see these conclusions being drawn by the Science Advisory Board. So I just had to make that quick comment.

There are several recommendations in the Science Advisory Board that pertain to collection and registries of data, one being the neurological deficits registry that's been proposed and the other two being facilitating the access of researchers to data and privacy issues, and I have to say we support those. Having that data available is a good thing. We need to continue to monitor, but we need to continue to push for cleanup and monitoring as a secondary part of that.

There's another recommendation that I think is also very important here, and that recommends the establishment of institutional health structures at the local and regional level that can effectively investigate and respond to community health concerns that may be caused by chemical pollutants.

And I support this recommendation with the following caveat. Most of us at the grassroots level have nightmare stories to tell of government health agencies descending on a community only to end up offering empty assurances either that there is no demonstrable link between the contaminants in your community and the health effects you are experiencing or, hmm, I think we need to study this some more.

We are tired to be treated as guinea pigs to be studied instead of citizens to be protected, and I beg you to be rigorous in your review of these health structures. They have the possibility to do a lot, but they also have the possibility to serve as an excuse for not doing things.

So please, make sure, review them and give them positive feedback. Make sure they become real structures for protection and not for excuses.

I'm also particularly interested in the Science Advisory Board's recommendation to link human epidemiology to exposure data on air, water, sediments, biota and the preparation of future reports on RAPs and lake-wide management plans.

The failure of epidemiology to find a causative link between pollution near the community of Akwesasne and health impacts there left me with a feeling that epidemiologists are absolutely the lasts to know that there is a health problem in an area, that current epidemiological methods are not sufficient to do the job.

And as you note in the report, epidemiology has been undergoing a period of intellectual crisis and reassessment, which is a good thing. Just as we have moved from strict statistical significance to adopting a weight of evidence approach, the practice of epidemiology must evolve beyond that to one that is more protective of community health.

Dr. Marvin S. Legater, the director of the division of environmental toxicology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, has developed and promoted a community health analysis tool called a symptoms survey. Through interviews conducted in the community, the tool does not look for specific outcomes, but looks at the total health of the community.

It's a tool that's inexpensive to implement. Interviewers require very little training, the data can be collected into the analysis program on a portable computer, and correlations between contaminants in the community and the reported symptoms can be drawn almost immediately. It is also effective and has held up as evidence in court several times, as I understand it.

And I endorse this recommendation and encourage the commissioners to promote this kind of low-cost research that's done with the community, not just to it. And that's an important point. So many times epidemiology and scientists descend on a community and do their work as if the community isn't part of it.

The last two recommendations of the Science Advisory Board attempt to identify more correlations between toxicological impacts on wildlife and humans, to identify more canaries in the mine, as it were, and collect more data on impacts.

In native communities particularly, this might be viewed as looking for more evidence that the earth revolves around the sun. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in a society that still believes the Earth and human beings are the center of the universe.

So like Galileo, the IJC must continue to promote such research so that our science can catch up to the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous people and just plain common sense.

And I thank you for this opportunity to offer comments and I look forward to working with you and to once again review the progress of the Commission and their staff in two years' time. Thank you.

JIM MANN
(Canadian Auto Workers):

My name is Jim Mann, and I'm with Canadian Auto Workers. I live in London, Ontario, in the Lake Erie watershed basin.

I have a number of comments. First of all, I'd like to start with the sheet on priorities. A number of previous speakers have talked about studies. Coming from a person that has a background of, first, environmentalism, and then union health and safety and that of a union environment rep, I recognize that unions working with industrial companies often have a different type of relationship, and sometimes, it's referred to as the hammer.

But when I look at this priority list, I mean, what it talks about is studies and it talks about studies on studies. And it seems to me that perhaps there reaches a point when the time for studies is over and it becomes a time for action.

And it seems to me that this is not my first meeting of the IJC, I have heard people speak passionately about health problems; it seems to me that what we need is action.

We're in an interesting time. Energy is looked at both by Canada and the U.S. as an upcoming need. We're looking at such things as gas well drilling, the millennium pipeline, both ridiculous things in my own mind.

But we're looking towards energy needs of the future. It seems to me and an awful lot of other people that the Great Lakes basin offers fantastic opportunities for solar and wind power, and there are a number of such projects on the horizon, both in Canada and the U.S.

It seems to me that the IJC should be encouraging this. I mean, not only is water within your jurisdiction, but also that of air quality and the impact on water and so on, and there is certainly a relationship.

A number of the other meetings of the IJC that I have looked at, we have had representatives from unions talk about the need to consider industrial workers. Margaret Wooster made a reference to the deindustrialization of the Great Lakes basin. I come from the auto industry. The statistics that we talk about is eight spin-off jobs for every job within the plant.

Well, I'm about to retire after 33 years in the auto industry, but I've got grave concerns with what's about to happen. I think we need to look at what we need to do to protect our workers.

There is a fantastic opportunity, looking at the goal of just transition, which has, you know, been adopted by unions, it's been recognized and talked about in many circles, including that of government. I think we need to look at restructuring our industries and perhaps the potential of solar and wind power is an industry that they could be encouraged to look at.

When I look overseas, to Europe and some of the models that I see looked at there, I see extensive producer responsibility being legislated, where producers are being told that they have to take the products at the end of their life. And if there isn't something that has an impact on air quality and that of water quality, I don't know what there is.

I mean, certainly, these are directions that we have to be looking at, and yet I'm told by our legislators here in Canada, well, they can legislate overseas, but the same people that are being required to, the same industries, the same manufacturers that are being required to have extensive producer responsibility in Europe are being told here in Canada, we'll do it through voluntary compliance.

North America seems to be very much stuck on the need to have industry voluntarily comply. Well, I'm here to tell you that I've sat at the table with industry for years, good working relationship, a lot of respect for them, but in reality, what happens is just before the legislation comes in, they come to the table and say, well boys, it looks like we've got to get our act together because we're being told the legislation is coming down the pipe, we're being told we have to get serious.

So I'm here to encourage you to make some decisions about where you want countries to go, because the Great Lakes basin needs that direction. A number of previous speakers have mentioned September 11th, and there's a lot of impact on industry.

We need to keep the borders flowing. Security is important, but I work for Ford; when our line goes down, we talk $5,000 a minute. We need transportation of parts across the border. I don't know how we're going to accomplish that and still keep security, but we need to do it.

The (inaudible) about anthrax, the night before, I worked night shift health and safety before I came to the IJC meeting, we had two anthrax scares in our plant, and I can find white dust anywhere in my plant, but people are seeing white dust everywhere, and our plant ended up being closed, a supplier had an anthrax problem.

So I encourage you to look at today's realities, I encourage you to stop studying, I encourage you to take action for the sake of the Great Lakes basin. Thank you.

ELAINE MARSH:

Hello, my name is Elaine Marsh, and I am from Akron, Ohio. I wear a number of hats related to these issues. I am on the advisory committee to the Akron Wastewater Sewage Facilities Plan, which by the way does not have an approved long-term control strategy for its combined sewer overflow problem.

I am president of Friends of the Crooked River, crooked river being the Cuyahoga River, the infamous once-burned Cuyahoga River, the now greatly-restored but full of impairment Cuyahoga River. I am also on the board of Great Lakes United. And I am the project director of Ohio Greenways.

Being a relatively old lady and definitely a hyperactive overachiever, I have some accomplishments, but on my resume, the first thing that I say is that I am a life-long lover of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River.

And I guess I would like, in that frame, to look somewhat at the government response to the last two years. There is nothing wrong with the response, I mean, it is perfectly adequate. It talks about what happened, what didn't happen, but there is no passion, there is no statement of priority.

And if people were not interested, like myself, in what that report said, it would do more than put them to sleep. It would cause them to put the report down and not pay attention. That is where we are with these issues. Only those of us who are involved in these issues actively are listening. And there are, I believe, a number of reasons for that.

I want to talk about one of the great effects, however, and that is the demise of the RAPs. I believe that the RAPs are more than floundering. I have been involved in our RAP nearly since its inception - a year after it was born, I became a part of it – and I have flowed, have been on a roller-coaster ride, but it is more than struggling right now. And it is more than struggling not just for funding, but for direction.

And the big problem with this is not that it's the Cuyahoga RAP, but the RAPs are the mechanism of your process! That's the problem. That we can't get beyond a particular point, that there are issues that we can't deal with in the RAPs is not important.

What is important is that's the mechanism, that's the vehicle! And if they're struggling and near death, so are we! So is this process, so are these priorities. That's the problem.

So I had some other things to say, and I think what I will choose to do is write those important things down and send them to you.

Because what I believe is that the passion is out of this process, that the poetry is waning, that the lovers in us have left the bedroom, and that we have turned to scientists to carry our water and we have not given them what they need to translate that science into action. We are still looking for the drop of blood that will link these problems to our future health. We need to incorporate the weight of evidence.

You know, we talk about ecosystem, and when you talk about ecosystem, well, you know, let's look at the Serengeti plain, it's very difficult to understand the relationship between all these organisms and all these different creatures. But you know what? The rhinoceroses stand out. Even if you can't prove that they're the biggest problems, they stand out. Let's pick some of those rhinoceroses.

Coal-fired power plants? We know that. Do we need any more study? Do we?!?

So I think we need more passion. I think we need to stop using science as a filter, not a way of hiding. I don't believe anybody is hiding. I believe all of us in this room are dedicated to these principles. We are all frustrated that we can't make progress, and so we use science to sort of filter our message.

But the thing is, when we do that, when we allow those filters to drive our message, the message to the population is it's okay out there! It's all right! Yeah, you might see an advisory that you can't eat the fish. Yeah, we have some good signs that it's not good to eat the fish. Yeah, we say you have to have long-term control strategies. But ultimately, if we're not doing about it and we're still studying it, it can't be that important.

There is a clear and present danger here, a clear and present danger, as clear and present as are the threats from terrorism. And as Margaret Wooster said, when the governments come to us and say it is an issue of national security that we increase power production, what are you going to say to them? What are we going to say to them about this critical problem mercury and the coal-fired power plants that we haven't yet begun to deal with?

I hope you will say, I hope that we can all find a way to help you say there is a clear and present danger here, clear and present. Thank you.

JENNIFER NELBONE
(Coordinator, habitat and biodiversity, Great Lakes United):

Thank you. Thank you, Elaine. I think senses of urgency aren't written, they are felt.

Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity to speak. My name is Jennifer Nelbone; I am the habitat and biodiversity coordinator for Great Lakes United, and I am here to make recommendations to the International Joint Commission on behalf of Great Lakes United on issues seriously impacting the biodiversity and integrity of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River.

Specifically, I'd like to address the constant influx of aquatic new species, exotic species, from the ballast water of foreign ships.

The direction and approach that the Great Lakes regulatory agencies have taken to address exotic species has not been the immediately 100 per cent effective solution, which would be to prohibit foreign ships from deballasting at any time.

As you know, the Great Lakes regulatory agencies have been working for almost ten years on policy, treatment, technologies that could be used to remove exotic species from ballast water before discharge.

Great Lakes United has been working as the only environmental representative on the federally-mandated Great Lakes Aquatic Nuisance Species Panel to ensure that this direction, the policy and technology development, proves effective, environmentally sound, and progresses rapidly.

I would like to state to the International Joint Commission that we have that proven, effective, environmentally benign technology and we desperately need that technology onboard ships.

Currently, we have Optimar technology, which is the combination of UV radiation and filtration that has proven to be effective in removing the vast majority of organisms from water in large-scale barge tests and is being validated onboard cruise ships.

The technology does not compromise the chemical integrity of a receiving water body due to a biocide treatment residual or byproduct. This technology must be tested and placed onboard ships if we are going to make critical progress towards the goal of prevention of new introductions. It may not be perfect, but we must take that first step.

What we are seriously lacking and what is holding up the investment of large amounts of money from the private technology industries and the commitment of the shipping industry is the lack of a standard. We were lacking a standard two years ago in Minneapolis at the last IJC biannual, where the need for a standard was a primary recommendation from the IJC-sponsored workshop on exotic species policy. Today, there is still no standard.

The recommendation on behalf of Great Lakes United to the International Joint Commission is that a ballast water treatment discharge standard be set that is at least as effective as the proven UV filtration technology and no less benign and chemical-free.

We have the benchmark. We must move forward. Set the standard to this benchmark. Different technology will come that exceeds the effectiveness of UV filtration system, and at that point, we can improve our standard and improve our ability to protect the integrity of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River.

But today, we can and must move forward, set the standard to this benchmark, at least as effective as UV filtration and no less benign and chemical-free.

I would also like to make some comments on fish populations. Native Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence fish populations are in flux, being negatively, seriously negatively impacted by exotics, the purposeful stocking of non-native fish, water quality, land use, resource extraction on land and in the water, intensive fishing, dredging, pipeline trenching, and they're going to continue to be seriously impacted in the next few decades by climate change.

Fish managers have a daunting task in light of all of these threats, but fish management must improve efforts to protect, maintain, and rehabilitate native fish populations in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River, the species that are best suited to adapt to a dramatically changing aquatic ecosystem.

I would like to provide to the Commission a scientific proceedings on the impacts of non-native fish stocking on the biological and genetic integrity of the lakes and recommend that fish management aggressively protect and rehabilitate native fish populations and strive to phase out the extensive stocking of non-native fish into the basin.

Please let me conclude by saying that more and more scientific, economic, community and spiritual leaders are alerting us that we are in the beginning or in the middle of massive environmental change due to our society's inability to harmoniously exist within the environment.

We must take aggressive action now. Our society only has two choices. We can choose to fight environmental change. We can try to force the lakes to produce a certain quantity and species of fish, or we can try to force the accessibility to the lakes through extensive dredging and channel modification.

We can try to force the environment to meet our expectations, which will only further accelerate environmental decline. Or we can choose to take a new approach and develop and manage sustainably, responding to and living within a changing environment.

It is gravely necessary that we take the latter approach and it is never a better time than now. I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to comment and I have the Taking Stock proceedings for your information.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Jennifer, just one comment. I'd invite you to submit your comments to EPA in addition to submitting them to the Commission. Tracy Meehan this morning mentioned the federal register notice in terms of EPA's proposal for invasive species, and I think that your comments would be very valuable to be considered as well.

JENNIFER NELBONE:

I will directly correspond. Thank you.

GORDON EDWARDS:

Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Although my Ph.D. is in mathematics, I have worked as a nuclear consultant to both governmental and non-governmental organizations in Canada for a period of about 25 years.

I would like to comment, in the light of what some of the earlier speakers said, that anybody who has looked into this knows that there are more salutary ways to proceed in terms of energy policy.

Now I realize that this is not the role of the International Joint Commission, but nevertheless, I think it's important that we not be easy on the utilities industry or the nuclear industry or the coal-fired industry or whatever on the grounds of urgent energy needs.

It's well known that energy efficiency, if it were properly administered, can have tremendous impacts and very quickly, much more quickly than new energy generation.

For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists some years ago, in one of many, many studies, showed that just by energy efficiency alone, electricity demand could be reduced by 44 per cent, simply through efficiency improvements in motors, lighting, etc., etc., thereby contributing more surplus displaced electricity than you could possibly get by building new facilities in the same period of time.

In British Columbia, there was a famous study some years ago where they wanted to build a dam and they had to through an environmental process to justify it. In the process of doing that, they were challenged to prove that they couldn't get just as much electricity through energy efficiency.

They discovered in fact that they could get just as much electricity through energy efficiency, that it would half as much and create twice as many jobs, and in fact that's what they did.

So I think that really, cracking the whip on the problems associated with these things is very important because it steers us toward what ultimately are much saner and more sustainable policies overall.

As we all know, there are certain, you know, corporations which yield a lot of power, there's a certain inertia in bureaucracies, a certain sense of momentum that has to be sometimes just simply stood up to, and you have to say no.

Now with the restart of these reactors in Canada, for example, I would dearly love it that the International Joint Commission would have declared radioactive materials unquestionably to be persistent toxic materials, and just like persistent toxic chemicals of all kinds, that the goal should be zero emissions.

And the question is what has been done to achieve zero emissions into the Great Lakes? If nothing has been done, those plants should not be restarted.

Similarly, the idea of putting…the reactors, of course, pose a problem themselves, but to put the dry storage of high-level radioactive waste, to perch these repositories all around the Great Lakes seems highly irresponsible. If they're going to put it into dry storage, why does it have to be right on the shores of the Great Lakes?

And of course, the only reason dry storage is even necessary is because the industry, in its arrogance, when they built these plants, only provided ten years of internal storage space for their radioactive waste.

Why? Because they had absolutely no doubt that they would have a permanent solution to the waste problem, which they don't have. So it was never envisaged that this highly toxic material would ever be placed outside the containment walls of reactors, and yet that's what's happening.

So I think that we really have to look seriously at what's going on and realize that somebody has to sound the alarm bell on these things.

Now I would like to raise one additional subject. I could go on of course about the tritium, but that's something that we don't have time for perhaps now. Tritium, by the way, has a 13-year half-life, and carbon 14 has a 6,000-year half-life, and so if these aren't persistent toxins, I don't know what is.

Up in the north channel of Georgian Bay, we have in Canada a nuclear sacrifice area which is the Elliott Lake region, where a great deal of uranium mining went on.

And we have approximately 125,000,000 tonnes of dangerous radioactive sand left over from uranium mining, it's uranium tailings, of course it also has the same heavy metals that other types of mine tailings may have.

But the toxic radioactivity in these tailings is quite stunning. All of the radium, all of the thorium, all of the polonium isotopes, the radioactive lead isotopes, the radioactive bismuth, etc., is all left in these tailings.

And this is in the form of a very finely pulverized sand that actually drifts like snow, you can actually see it blowing in the wind, and the solution is to cover it with water. The solution that the government of Canada is reaching with mine companies is to cover this with water for the next…how long?

Well, the effective half-life is 80,000 years, because of the presence of thorium 230. Thorium 230 has a half-life of 76,000 years, and being at the top of the chain, it continuously replenishes the supply of all of the other radioactive substances lower down on the decay chain, including radium 226, which by itself “only” has a half-life of 1,600 years.

But even though it has a half-life of 1,600 years, 10,000 years from now it will not be significantly reduced in quantity because it's being replenished by the thorium 230.

Well, this is again a biological and ecological time bomb. And the question is to have this vast material sitting there and just waiting for nature to do its job, which is to recycle things, how long is it going to take before this material gets widely dispersed in the environment, whether suddenly or gradually?

So we have problems of this sort, too. And I'd just like to mention that radium 226, as you probably are all aware, was once one of the most highly valued commodities on Earth. Back on the 1920s, it sold for $70,000 a gram, and it is now a waste product and it is thrown away. Why is it a waste product? Because it killed too many people. It is a superb carcinogen. Thank you.

TOM BALDINI:

I want to take this moment to advise you and inform you that Mario del Vaccario has taken the stage to represent the U.S. Government.

CHARLOTTE CAULVILLE
(Member, Bear Clan of Manamne Nation in Wisconsin):

(First speaks native language)

My name is Charlotte Caulville, and I'm a member of the Bear Clan of the Manamne Nation in Wisconsin. I work for the Indigenous Environmental Network in Bemidji, Minnesota.

I grew up in a time in the Great Lakes when we still practiced the subsistence economy and the traditional way of life. We grew big gardens, we hunted, we fished, and we gathered. Those were the times when the elders would teach us about respect for and our responsibilities to Mother Earth.

We learned the family ties to the land, the history of the land that we lived on, and how to live in harmony with all of our relatives: the animals, the fish, the plants, and the water spirits. We lived on the land and with the land.

Whether as Native Americans or First Nations, we are indigenous to these lands of the Great Lakes. We are peoples that have collective rights within the hundreds of tribes that still exist today. We are indigenous peoples who have indigenous rights to our traditional lands and sacred waters, and we still maintain our culture and our spiritual beliefs.

These territories sustain us, and when they are contaminated with chemical pollutants, our communities often suffer the most, because when the environment is polluted, indigenous peoples are polluted, too.

Indigenous knowledge teaches us how to walk upon our Mother Earth and to respect the sacredness of her creation. We use every part of our Mother Earth to sustain us in ceremony and in everyday life. We use our water for a ceremony to purify and to nourish our spirits and our bodies. We depend on traditional foods and plants for ceremony and to nourish our communities.

But when our water, soil, and air are poisoned with toxic chemicals, our rights to practice our traditional lifestyles and our heritage and to live in a clean and safe environment are violated. In many areas of our indigenous territories, our communities are being told not to eat the contaminated fish and animals. Advisories are being posted everywhere.

According to a report by Health Canada, Great Lakes residents who consume larger amounts of certain species in contaminated fish and wildlife than the general population are at an increase risk of exposure to toxic pollutants. The report names affected subpopulations that include anglers, their families, and indigenous peoples.

To indigenous peoples, fishing and hunting are not sport or recreation, but part of a spiritual, cultural, social, and economic lifestyle that has sustained for time immemorial. In some areas, fishing and hunting rights are treaty rights.

When we can no longer eat the fish and wild meat, high protein food is often replaced with junk food. In addition, the active social part of harvesting our traditional foods is replaced by a less active lifestyle. The junk food diet is less healthy and has contributed to problems with obesity, high blood pressure and chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer.

Cutting off traditional food supplies from indigenous people is a form of cultural genocide. For the Oneida Nation of the For River, the site of the botched superfund clean-up, their children no longer remember when fishing was a way of life for the Oneida people.

Indigenous peoples have always warned about the dangers of chemicals to the animal, fish, and bird nations. In recent years, scientists agreed that POPs are the main cause of damage to several types of animals and birds.

The continued local extinction of the Lake Ontario results from exposure to PCBs and from other POPs. The beluga whale of the St. Lawrence estuary are highly contaminated by a range of POPs and suffer from a high incidence of tumors and reproductive problems.

Reproductive problems, deformities, and behavioral abnormalities in several species of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles in the Great Lakes basin have been linked to persistent organic pollutants.

Our indigenous people of the Great Lakes basin are being disproportionately harmed from bioaccumulative toxic substances. Environmental racism exists in the national and international policies that allow these persistent chemicals to pollute the developing fetus and breast milk of indigenous women and to potentially affect the sperm count of indigenous men.

The International Joint Commission has the responsibility to care for these Great Lakes and to enact legislation that will end the discharge of toxic chemicals into our great waters.

The International Joint Commission has the responsibility to protect the rights of all people and all living beings in the basin to pure, clean drinking water and a healthy environment.

The International Joint Commission has the responsibility to ensure that the health of the Great Lakes comes before corporate profit. Our future generations depend on the policies and the decisions that the International Joint Commission will make now.

Indigenous peoples have a basic principle to guide all of our decision-making. For everything that we say and do, we must look at the impacts to our seventh generation.

It is in the hands of policy-makers such as the International Joint Commission, Health Canada, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that legislation and policies are enacted to ensure the continued survival, the very survival of the fish, the animals, the plant nations, and even our future generations.

Water is life, and life is water. Our Anishanabe (?) people have a saying: as the waters flow through the veins of our mother, so the responsibility to be keepers of the water flow from generation to generation.

As a mother and as a grandmother, I ask you all to ensure the continued survival of our children, of all children in the Great Lakes.

JENNIFER FIREHOME
(Great Lakes program, Sierra Club):

Hi, my name is Jennifer Firehome (?), and I grew up right next to Lake Michigan, so I'm very tied to these lakes, and I'm with the Sierra Club Great Lakes program.

And I was happy to see listed on possible priorities new, unmonitored chemicals of concern. We've been working with chemicals that we have known for years to be problematic, and we saw yesterday in some of the presentations that the more we even look – we already knew they were problematic – and the more we look at them, we find a myriad of ways that they affect our health negatively and wreak havoc in our bodies.

But the problem is that there are more than 100,000 chemicals in use in industry today. And it's interesting, since I've started working with community and regional programs, the number has jumped by tens of thousands, and I see it's up to over 100,000 now.

We don't know anything about most of those chemicals, and we need to keep looking forward and look at those chemicals and try to figure out what they are doing. The ones we are looking at now are merely a tiny set of what we're releasing and using in industry.

We carry a whole lot of other chemicals in our bodies. We find (inaudible)...chemicals that we find and we don't even know what they're doing in our bodies.

It disturbs me that – we've heard this actually many times today – we're talking about monitoring chemicals, looking for new chemicals of concern, and yet again we don't need to just be monitoring.

If we base our action on just monitoring, we're not going to start doing anything about other chemicals until we find them in our bodies, we find them in the bodies of our children and in our breast milk, we find them throughout the environment, and we won't start doing anything until we see the health problems that they are causing.

We know how hard it is to clean up persistent chemicals once they get into the environment. We've spent days, years, talking about what we're going to do about the legacies in our sediments, at the bottom of our rivers.

If we just keep monitoring and looking and not doing anything until we see the problems, we're going to be faced with clean-ups ad infinitum. We need to start working on zero emissions and keeping these chemicals out of our environment and out of our bodies.

We need to turn it around and look at industrial chemicals before they are admitted and before we allow industries to use them. We need both governments to find ways to put the burden of proof on the private sector that uses the chemicals.

We can't make these decisions. We can't even make these decisions as informed consumers, as the market system would have us do, because we're not informed and industries are not telling us about the chemicals that they're using, and industries don't even know the effects that those chemicals can have on the environment and on our bodies.

We need the International Joint Commission to help us convince the governments that we need to find better ways, and we need to be looking at these chemicals before they come out, or all of the monitoring is going to be for nothing and we'll be stuck doing clean-ups. Thank you.

MANFRED KOERSCHLIN
(Great Lakes United):

My name is Manfred Koerschlin, and this time I want to make a few short remarks on behalf of Great Lakes United.

First of all, I would like to say that being on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes, I am very, very happy that we finally have a draft of the Canada-Ontario agreement before us to look at and to comment on. And although we're just at the beginning of that process, I was asked to convey to the government as well as to the IJC a couple of what we feel are important concerns or comments.

The first one would be on the annexes. We had really hoped that the annexes would have more specific action-oriented objectives rather than comments, comments on more studies, providing support, and sort of somewhat vague, hard to interpret kind of objectives.

And we had been looking as a public for more specific action-oriented things that one can more, better assess in terms of progress, and we wanted to convey that and hope that - we know that in the core agreement, there is provision for amendments to the annexes or to have new annexes inserted – that we will end up with annexes that are more action-oriented.

The second item, something that we would like to express and to convey particularly to the federal and provincial government, is that we hope as a public to be invited to sit on the COA management committee.

We have in the previous agreement, under the COA steering committee, the public played a very active role in providing input and comment to the deliberations that were taking place until a time that COA expired and we went through a long breathing (?) period and we see this draft before us now.

However, missing in the draft is any kind of reference to that effect. As a matter of fact, the references in the agreement, the initial agreement, that refer to public and stakeholder consultation and participation is extremely vague.

And again, we the public would like to have better articulated and confirmed that we will be part and parcel of the consultative process, and we would like to see that more definitely expressed. We'll certainly be including that in our formal response as the COA draft is listed on the EBR (?).

And we wanted to convey to both the Commission and to the federal government here that these are sort of very early and initial observations. Thank you very much.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Maybe I can just respond briefly to your comments, and thank you very much for those, and we look forward to having your further comments as you go through a more detailed review.

In terms of looking for more specific actions, one of the commitments on in COA is to create and develop for each of the annexes, for each of the suite of actions, a specific action plan within a 12-month period.

So while what we have now is a framework of societal objectives, five-year objectives and commitments by the government, there will be then, following that, specific action plans to meet those five-year commitments that are in there.

In terms of public participation, there is…one of the principles of the agreement is continued public participation. So you can take it from me that the public will be engaged in the process, as we continue to move forward on COA.

SUE MAHALEY
(Great Lakes United):

Good afternoon, my name is Sue Mahaley and I'm with Great Lakes United. And like many of the other people that have spoken today, I have many years of involvement with Great Lakes issues and the programs under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement behind me.

I would like to thank the commissioners for the opportunity to share some of my concerns. My comments today relate to the SOLEC indicators program.

Ten years ago, I was on the stewardship indicators committee for the Lake Ontario LaMP, ten years. I was stunned to walk into the SOLEC workshop on stewardship indicators yesterday to hear the assertion that we had an opportunity to get in at the beginning level of development of these indicators. I was expecting to hear an overview of progress. Needless to say, I was disappointed.

So what I am given to understand is that there has been work on indicators in one form or another for many years, I am concerned that an indicator development process is the desired product rather than having a set of tools to help drive an ecosystem restoration process forward. So far, it has not driven anything anywhere, except perhaps our level of frustration up.

Indicators are meant to merely indicate. They are, or should be, broad-brush tools to quickly show general movement toward or away from the desired end state. They answer the simple question, are we getting closer, yes or no?

As broad-brush tools, indicators should be simple and easy to track and easy for the general public to understand. They should be based on real data and science, but don't need to encompass entire bodies of research. They should show not just movement, but movement or not toward the desired end state.

This seems to be the major flaw in the high proportion of indicators that were thrown out in the session yesterday. Some just had no discernable relation to any desired end state. Some were flawed because the underlying assumptions had not been clear enough to ensure that the thing being measured would clearly show positive or negative movement.

The desired end state should be describable and should include desired human behaviors as well as desired ecosystem state and function. So what happens if an indicator indicates negative movement?

The best use of indicators should be as a driver of the process. If we are not making progress, we are either not doing enough or we are not doing the right things. We need to have a built-in mechanism that triggers change, either of intensity or strategy.

How long have we known that contamination levels in fish have not been declining? How long have we known that health effects are on the increase? We should be doing more by now?

This trigger should have priority waiting associated with it. The longer a negative movement continues, the higher the priority that should be associated to the associated program work.

You know, the old definition of insanity is doing something that's not working, knowing that it is not working but continuing to do it anyway.

The indicators program could provide us with the tools for making profound changes in the way we conduct our work on the Great Lakes and how we conduct ourselves within that context. Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Just I guess one brief comment that I would make. Sue, we do agree on one thing: you get action on what you measure.

SUE MAHALEY:

Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED:

And the key, of course, is to measure the right things.

SUE MAHALEY:

Indeed.

HEATHER MOORE
(St. Lawrence River Institute of Environmental Sciences):

Hi, I'm Heather Moore, from Cornwall, Ontario. I work at the St. Lawrence River Institute of Environmental Sciences, and I'm also part of the Cornwall Chamber of Commerce Air Quality Committee.

In Cornwall, it seems fairly obvious to me, although there is a bit of a debate – although I can't believe it, but anyway – air quality seems to be a rather important, obvious issue, not only in Cornwall, but I'm sure in other cities in the Great Lakes area and along the St. Lawrence River because there's so many people that live here, it's fairly heavily industrialized, so I think air quality is a pretty serious issue.

In the last few months, there has been a number of letters to the editor in our local newspaper, so it's an issue that the public seems to be kind of concerned about, too.

I work with a lot of scientists, and there seems to be one major way of identifying an environmental problem, and that's if there's some kind of negative toxicological effect. If we can prove that there's some negative impact on the environment, then it's a problem and we need to deal with it.

But with a lot of air quality issues, it takes a long time to do this toxicological research. And I think there's another way that we can discern whether or not there's a problem, and that's just esthetics. Is there an esthetic problem? And I think there is, because the air pollution smells bad.

So just based on that, like, forget about the science, just because it smells bad, I think we should do something about it, and we don't have to wait to do a scientific assessment, but I guess that's up for debate as well.

So the IJC is concerned with water, obviously, and not only water, but what lives in the water. Birds, they can be used as bioindicators. We're also concerned with sediments, what's under the water. I'm concerned about what's above the water, the air.

The RAP talks about restoring beneficial uses and, you know, can we swim in the water? Well, you know, can we boat on the water if it smells really bad? I think that that's an impaired use if we can't really enjoy the water because the air smells so bad.

So there has been work done to try to improve air quality, and I'd like to acknowledge that. In Ontario, we have the Drive Clean program that started a couple of years ago. The government of Canada has a clean air action plan. And in Cornwall's remedial action plan, there is one recommendation that deals with air quality.

So there has been some work done to address this air quality issue, but I think we should take this air quality issue more to the forefront. And there has been some work done on how air quality affects water, but I think we should just look at air quality itself.

I'm sure that Cornwall isn't the only city that, as I said before, has industries, so I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to exchange information between the various communities that have the same problem.

So I was thinking that maybe there could be a concerted effort at putting similar laws in place in all of the jurisdictions to keep a level playing field. Because one of the issues in Cornwall, we don't want to be too, I don't know, impolite, I guess, to the industries and say, hey, you'd better clean up your act, because we don't want to scare them away, we like the jobs that they provide for the citizens.

But if everybody has the same tough environmental laws, it's not like we're being any worse than anywhere else, so they won't move away to another jurisdiction. So I think that's important, that we all have pretty similar air quality laws.

We could also…like, that's kind of the stick method. The carrot method would be to get together and try to find some ideas to give these industries incentives, like economic incentives to not pollute as much, and also share some technology, because I'm sure that there must be better ways of producing a lot of the stuff that they do.

Maybe if they changed their industrial process, they wouldn't pollute as much. And if they learned from other industries in other areas how they limit the stuff that they throw into the atmosphere, I think that would be really helpful.

So I guess those are kind of my comments, but my question is would it be possible for the International Joint Committee…or Joint Commission on water quality to step up on air quality issues or is this beyond the scope of the IJC? Should we come up with an international joint commission on air quality as a separate group or can air quality just get tacked onto the existing IJC? I don't know who's best to answer that.

TOM BALDINI:

We did, I can't remember the exact years, but we did get a reference from the governments on the Detroit-Windsor air corridor. We do have an air quality committee and they do advise us, and we do issue an annual report, which I think is on the website annually. And so we do look at air because we do consider it important.

As a matter of fact, we're finding now – I think there are people here from Lake Superior, I know there are people here from the Lake Superior Binational Forum – that the amount of pollutants coming into Lake Superior, for example, from the air has grown rather substantially.

And so it is a concern of ours, and that's a scientific one. I think your comment is if it smells bad, you know you've got a problem, you don't have to research it. It's true, but some of it we need to research because there is no smell to it, but we know, our science tells us it is there.

HEATHER MOORE:

Yeah, there's, I guess, different types of air pollutants…

TOM BALDINI:

Right.

HEATHER MOORE:

…and we have to treat each problem differently, I agree.

TOM BALDINI:

Yeah.

HEATHER MOORE:

So the air quality committee that exists now, is that just in the areas that you mentioned…

TOM BALDINI:

No…

HEATHER MOORE:

…go all the way up to the St. Lawrence River (inaudible)...

TOM BALDINI:

It's the entire border. It's transboundary, it's for the entire U.S.-Canada border.

HEATHER MOORE:

Okay, thanks.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Just an additional comment. I guess one of the annexes of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement refers to air, and is the reason why we have the National Air Deposition Network.

And I might note that that network was really the basis of research that led to the positions that Canada and the U.S. took in the POPs negotiations, with the international negotiations on persistent organic pollutants. And so there is a great relationship between air pollution and water quality.

LOUIS SALCONY:

Hello, my name is Louis Salcony. Je suis président-fondateur du comité Parc-des-Rapides à La Salle. Je suis aussi porteur d'un chapeau, je suis un administrateur au comité ZIP Ville-Marie. Je porte un autre chapeau, notre comité est administrateur à Stratégies Saint-Laurent. On porte un autre chapeau, on est membre à Great Lakes United.

On aimerait porter tous les chapeaux de tout le monde qui travaille pour le bien de notre patrimoine naturel. Je n'ai peut-être pas une grosse tête, mais j'ai des bonnes épaules pour pouvoir prendre tout le poids de tous ces chapeaux-là.

J'ai pris plusieurs photos depuis jeudi soir, pour la tournure des événements. J'ai demandé à M. Clements (?) s'il voudrait bien prendre une photo de moi en train de parler au nom de mon père, de ma mère qui est décédée il y a trois ans, de mes enfants, de mes futurs petits-enfants – thank you so much – au nom de mes voisins, au nom de leurs enfants, leurs petits-enfants, au nom de mes oncles qui sont morts à la guerre pour protéger mon patrimoine naturel et le vôtre.

Je suis résident de Ville La Salle. Ville La Salle se situe entre le fleuve Saint-Laurent…si vous imaginez l'île de Montréal, c'est fait comme un pied; le talon, c'est Ville La Salle. Dans Ville La Salle, vous avez les rapides de Lachine. Derrière Ville La Salle, vous avez l'aqueduc qui passe à travers Ville La Salle, et vous avez aussi la limite nord de Ville La Salle, qui est le canal Lachine.

La Salle, c'est une île à l'intérieur d'une île à l'intérieur d'une île, mais on regarde le fleuve. Et on l'écoute déferler la nuit lorsqu'on dort, on écoute déferler les rapides de Lachine. J'adore Ville La Salle. Venez faire un tour, venez voir comment c'est beau.

Extra, extra, read all about it. Our good neighbors, the United States, federal and states, along with Canada and the provincial government, are working together to make sure that we have good…

(BREAK IN TAPE)

Merci beaucoup. Soon here in Quebec, we'll be reassured on quality of life issues such as les besoins en eau potable, les lieux de baignade, les écosystèmes et habitats fluviaux, la navigation de plaisance et la navigation commerciale, qui, déjà, eux autres, jouissent au moins d'un critère minimum vous permettant de laisser sortir de l'eau du lac Ontario.

Merci pour ça. Au moins, on a un critère. Entendu que maintenant qu'on l'a annoncé et qu'on va l'annoncer dans les journaux, on va avoir tous ces autres critères-là. Merci beaucoup.

Il y a trois ans, on était invité à faire un tour à Cornwall par un très gentil monsieur qui travaille pour Environnement Canada, M. Peter Yee. Lui, c'est la dernière personne qui a la main sur la fameuse champlure, the proverbial tap on Lake Ontario.

Okay, Mr. Yee has that, his hand is there. He works for you people, but he's the man that has his hand on the tap. So he says come on over, come visit Iroquois Dam, come visit Moses Saunders Dam, see how it works.

Là, j'ai appris que les grands rapides du réseau fluvial des Grands lacs, Sault Ste. Marie, Sault St. Louis, c'était des mètres et des mètres en dessous de l'eau à cause du développement du pouvoir hydroélectrique.

Les rapides de Lachine chez nous, à La Salle, c'est le dernier grand rapide. On l'entend ronfler la nuit quand on dort, même quand on dort. À La Salle, à 200 pieds des berges, à La Salle, à 200 pieds des berges, il y a qu'est-ce qu'on appelle la prise d'eau de l'eau potable de la Ville de Montréal. Ça s'adonne que cette prise-là est quelque part dans les rapides. L'eau sent bon, goûte bon, est claire, tout, tout, tout.

On se demande à un moment donné si l'eau sera assez basse que lorsque vous prenez une bouteille de liqueur avec une paille et vous arrivez à la dernière goutte au fond de la bouteille et ça fait (bruit de succion), le slurp, O.K., on s'inquiète si un jour, on n'entendra pas le ronflement des rapides de Lachine, mais plutôt le (bruit de succion) de la prise d'eau.

La question que M. Yee me demandait à Cornwall, Louis, three years ago, Louis, how much water do you need? J'ai répondu il y a trois ans, enough. Là, j'ai répondu enough, even if it was proved impossible. On vous demande de faire l'impossible. Merci beaucoup.

MARC HUDON:

I was ready to seize him, but I didn't have to. Mon commentaire s'adresse à nos représentants canadiens, mais du Québec en particulier.

Quand on entend les témoignages ce matin, toute la journée, par rapport à la condition des Grands lacs-Saint-Laurent, pour nous qui ne sommes plus habitués de travailler dans le circuit et de le comprendre un peu, c'est tellement évident de voir comment les Grands lacs prennent la place de par l'importance des problématiques, par la diversité des problématiques.

Et pour les gens dans la salle, pour la première fois que vous nous rendez visite ici, ça doit être terriblement difficile de mettre un contrepoids à qu'est-ce que nos représentants du Québec peuvent faire pour aider justement la situation du Saint-Laurent au sein de la Commission mixte.

Et moi, je veux vous féliciter du travail que vous avez fait à date pour l'avoir vu et je vous encourage à le poursuivre. Et les gens qui connectent avec nous régulièrement, comme Fabien Lengellé ou d'autres personnes dont j'oublie les noms, c'est des personnes importantes pour nous, qui tiennent les contacts avec vous.

Et c'est là où…comme par exemple, si j'avais un souhait, que le Québec signe la Charte, l'Accord sur la qualité de l'eau des Grands lacs, pour vous donner encore plus de poids, à mieux travailler ensemble à résoudre les problèmes ici qu'on a.

Parce que pour le simple citoyen qui est dans la salle, probablement qu'il doit se dire, sacrifice, avec tout ce que j'entends aujourd'hui, mes problèmes semblent bien petits, mais pourtant, chez nous, ils revêtent une importance au quotidien qui est parfois bien dramatique.

Que ce soit du côté économique ou du côté social ou du côté environnemental, ça nous touche beaucoup dans notre vie au quotidien. Donc, c'est important qu'on ait des relations fréquentes sur ce qui se passe et qu'on échange régulièrement, et on compte beaucoup sur vous.

Et si vous pouvez…parce que vous n'avez pas beaucoup répondu aujourd'hui à tout ce qui a été dit. Probablement que le temps manque, mais si vous pouvez nous répondre un peu là-dessus, à nous du Québec ici aujourd'hui, en cette glorieuse visite, on va l'apprécier beaucoup, parce que c'est grâce à ça qu'on peut mieux travailler et poursuivre notre démarche au quotidien, en cours d'année.

ROBERT GOURD
(Commissaire, Section canadienne, Commission mixte internationale):

Alors, merci Marc. J'apprécie énormément tes commentaires. Je suis très heureux qu'on soit venu à Montréal; ça t'aura permis à danser une nouvelle danse, comme tu nous a parlé ce matin.

Mais je suis aussi très satisfait du travail que toi, tu fais, et que toute ton équipe fait. C'est très important. Ça nous a aidé à venir ici, à Montréal, la Commission mixte. C'est la première, mais ce ne sera certainement pas la dernière.

Tu est quelqu'un qui participe à la plupart de nos réunions. On a eu plusieurs réunions qui se sont tenues et qui se tiennent au Québec, par nos différentes commissions. La Commission de l'Ontario et des Grands lacs a tenu son assemblée publique lundi…pas lundi, mais jeudi.

Alors, c'est un travail continuel, et je suis d'accord avec toi que si le Québec signait l'entente, ce serait encore plus facile. Merci beaucoup, Marc.

BOB OLSGAARD:

I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I'm Bob Olsgaard. I spoke to you previously in my capacity as coordinator for the Lake Superior Alliance. I'm also here on behalf of the Great Lakes United board of directors to talk to you about something that's getting to sound a bit like a broken record.

You heard previously from Manfred Koeschlin, also of our board, about the Canada-Ontario agreement. We also have had the opportunity to take a look at the Great Lakes strategy in the past few months, and we have the same problem with the Great Lakes strategy. There really is no strategy. It's a nice shopping list. It lists a lot of interesting things, but there is no specific accountable steps in it.

But maybe even more important than that, it's the way that we deal with our partners. There is a mention that the tribes, for instance, are partners in the Great Lakes strategy, but the document - and if this is true, I think this is wonderful – but the document reads as though it was authored solely by the Environmental Protection Agency.

That's a problem. Is this really as inclusive as it needs to be to work as a strategy to go forward? We don't think so. What we need is a commitment by the states and the tribes to implement and enforce the U.S. Clean Water Act as amended by the Great Lakes initiative and commitment to the establishment of total maximum daily loads. If the states and tribes aren't committed to the strategy with specific steps, then we need those specific steps to ensure that commitment.

We wrote a letter to the Great Lakes national program office over a year ago, April of 2000, stating these same points, that what's needed is an effective plan which will clearly establish and support the role of state, federal, and tribal governments in implementing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement through clear timelines and strategies.

And in that letter, we made some specific points. Strategies for developing and activating consistent water quality standards. Targeting elimination as the ultimate goal for level 1 toxic substances. Funding big-ticket items in areas of concern, such as remedial dredging and sewer system upgrades. Identifying and briefing point people or offices for implementation and holding them accountable.

What we don't see in the strategy is commitments. We don't see that in the draft plan. And that we don't see as any assurance that these things are going to get done. From both the public hearings and from the document itself, it seems like the governments are depending on remedial action plans and lake-wide management plans as the implementation vehicles.

Now wait a minute. We've been hearing for at least a day and a half now that the RAPs are stalled and that the LaMPs are just not making a lot of progress in a lot of areas. So if we're looking at a strategy and we're depending on systems that are already proven to be ineffective to implement that strategy, we think we have a problem, and we urge you to take a serious look at that and make some recommendations.

These plans are stalled, and the plans to show how the governments will help Great Lakes communities to get past obstacles with new ideas, resources, commitments, and with specificity and accountability.

This is what the plan ought to be, a way to get past these obstacles, not a way to institutionalize them. That's what we need in any good work plan, whether you're in an organization, a company, anywhere, and it just doesn't meet the test.

Along with many other groups, Great Lakes United has worked hard to try and help define what's needed here, and we'll be happy to help you work further to define and improve the strategy so we really have a Great Lakes strategy. Thank you.

GERRY GALLOWAY:

We have two more speakers standing to speak at the microphone. Are there other speakers who are planning to make a presentation, because we'll make a judgment? Any more than one, two? Just four of you then? Okay, thank you very much.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I'd like to, if it's okay, just to do a quick response on the Great Lakes strategy. I wish Gary was still here because he's probably better able to respond to some of the concerns that you stated. I know that the strategy, we went out to the public with a strategy plan, asked for some comments, and have re-worked it.

And one of the things that was done, for instance on the issue…it was an EPA-written document. Well, it had originally been an EPA-written document because, generally, we used to write these things. But what happened was the states came to the table and the other agencies on the U.S. side and offered text and suggestions to be put in, more specificity.

There are things in there…it may not go as far as you would like it to go, but I think it's going in the direction of some of the comments that you raised. So I guess when the latest version is usable and approvable for us, I think you will see that some of that has been addressed.

JOHN JACKSON
(Past president, Great Lakes United):

I'm John Jackson, past president, Great Lakes United, and I live in Kitchener, Ontario. And what I want to address is one of the potential issues for consideration for IJC priorities, and one of them which we clearly think is extremely important is the category of community health in areas of concern, and of course beyond areas of concern, regardless of where you are in the Great Lakes basin and the St. Lawrence River basin.

But we're not sure that…we don't think that the need has been identified properly in terms of the role that the IJC needs to play. And the need is defined here as to assess how these databases – and that's referring to things such as the data that Health Canada pulled together about hospitalization statistics, etc., and similar things happening in New York State, for example – to assess how these databases can be used in concert with other databases to identify gaps and set research priorities on community health in the Great Lakes basin.

I think to look back in terms of redefining that need, we need to look back at what is the special thing that the IJC has brought to us over the past decade in helping us to address community health concerns, both health concerns of wildlife and of people.

And we are really blessed in the Great Lakes basin in terms of the amazing set of scientists that we have who are bringing us incredibly valuable information, who are incredibly passionate as a result of the findings that they have come to in terms of our need to get really strong, powerful solutions to address these problems, seeing them not simply as problems to be studied, but scientists who also really care that we solve these problems and get them fixed.

So what we really need to have focused on…I think the Health Canada studies are a prime example. The Health Canada studies of each RAP area came out two years ago.

First of all, the federal government stopped funding for that particular program - sadly, because it was doing some very valuable work – but the implications of those studies in terms of the data about the health impacts in each community were never brought out.

The medical officers of health in our RAP areas never really looked at those document, and if they did, it was simply to toss them aside and say, oh, this really doesn't tell us anything, and so what.

What we need the IJC to bring us is to look at what are the implications of these data, what are the implications of the science that is coming forward in terms of the actions that we have to take now in the Great Lakes basin.

And to give you a couple of examples in the last ten years of the incredibly valuable role that the IJC has done in translating the science into action, and I'll just give you a couple of examples.

One is your very strong and powerful endorsement of the precautionary approach, that we don't need the final data before we act. All we need to have is enough evidence to show us that a reasonable person would look at this and say there is a reason to be concerned, there is a reason to be alarmed, and that it isn't reasonable to wait and wait and wait until more harm is there before we take action to stop harm and to correct harm.

Another incredibly powerful example of what's happened from IJC recommendations in the past ten years was the recommendations that you made around dealing with chlorinated substances, and saying because of the science that has come forward, the health studies of impacts that we're seeing in wildlife and in people, we need to phase out the use of chlorinated substances.

We need you to continue to look in terms of the health issue, not simply in terms of getting more science done. I mean, encouraging that is wonderful, we want it and we need it because it has helped us as activists, that science, in terms of us understanding where we need to put our focuses and our work.

So we're delighted with that science, but what you have to add as the IJC is to look at the implications of the data that you see there, and from that make recommendations to us about what the governments, about what industry, about what polluters and the public needs to do to really address the health issue of humans and wildlife.

To me, when I start looking at the Health Canada data, and I'm a non-scientist, but I start seeing some of the connections between various areas of concern in terms of a particular type of health impacts, it tells me things like mercury, as an appearing item, let's get those contaminated sediments that have mercury in them out of the basin, let's get them cleaned up.

But what I call upon you, what we call upon you to do in the next two years in your work is to really focus on the implications of the data that you have, the implications of the science that you have, using a strong precautionary approach, to say what does it mean for the actions that we have to do for clean-up, what does it means for the actions that we have to do for protection measures, not what does it mean in terms of what additional studies do we need to have done. Thank you.

AMBER LOTTI
(Upper Lakes Environmental Research Network):

Hello, my name again is Amber Lotti, and I am representing the Upper Lakes Environmental Research Network, or ULERN, out of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

I have sat through this, I would have to admit this is my first IJC forum, I am very young and new to this process, but I would like to just give you a bit of a summary of what I have observed over the past couple of days.

And first, I wanted to thank the fellow who just came before me on identifying some of the successes that IJC has given to date. I can't imagine what it's like sitting up there all day and having people bombard you with, well, they sound like negativities, but I'm sure you can turn them into positives.

I'm not sure, also, what you take from what we're saying today and how you apply it to whatever you are working on, but hey, if it means anything, here is what I have to say.

In first response, there is a woman who had come up – and unfortunately, I didn't write down anybody's names – regarding SOLEC and the workshop that we had on Friday morning.

Fortunately, I was in that workshop and I just wanted to clarify something, that SOLEC had only had five societal responsibilities before that were filling in gaps. They were providing us with the opportunity to try and narrow down the 53 that they brought forward to us.

I think that we had expanded that to something like about 1,000, but nonetheless, we were there to try and help focus on societal responsibilities, and I think that that was a bonus, that we were allowed that opportunity.

So even though in 1991, you may have attended that other forum, a lot of those had to do with ecology and science. Here, we were actually allowed to comment on societal responsibility, which I think is the most important part of everything that we're talking about right now.

The second comment was another woman had come up, I think she was from Cornwall, and she was commenting on alien invasive species in the Great Lakes, which I think is very important.

But perhaps when we're starting to look at developing partnerships and looking at societal roles, that maybe when we can see how the native species are being pushed out by non-native species, we can look at that in our own society, too, and how native has been overlooked and now, all of a sudden, we're noticing that there's small pockets of whatever and they're being inundated with non-native species. Maybe that's something we should keep in mind ourselves.

Another woman had come up here very passionate, very emotional, and she said something along the lines of disregard science. I ask you please to not disregard science. Science is very important. We have learned a number of things.

I have sat in on a couple of other forums where they were presenting research that was done on fish habitat. Now we all thought let's go throw a bunch of wood and the fish are going to just magically appear. They do, but that's not everything.

We covered up that habitat at one point, the fish were able to survive, they adapted, they coped. What we did is we opened the access to that area. What happened, what killed the fish off? We did, the people. We need science to let us know that, that it's our fault, that we must stop that.

Please don't disregard science. But on the other hand, please don't disregard emotion and passion also. That's what's brought us here today.

So what I would like to finish my comments on are that I think this is wonderful, that Canada and the United States has pulled together the IJC. I think that your role in the future would be to put pressure on both America and Canada and say we need more innovative and collaborative partnerships, we need to develop efficiencies, we need to be more effective.

The people are speaking. We need to take action now. Don't disregard science, but let's do something about it now, and in order to do that, we need to all work together, every one of us. Thank you.

HENRY BOSS:

Hi, my name is Henry Boss. Thank you very much for having the opportunity to speak. This is my first time, so… I am from North Bay, in northern Ontario.

I have been working together with some individuals and groups to prevent negative effects of sunken log retrieval from within the basin and inland lakes. This issue comes under the International Joint Commission jurisdiction of the Boundary Waters Treaty and also the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

And what we feel is lacking is studies on the long-term effects associated with our fisheries and our water quality. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has one study published – I'll give that to you after – it's “The effects of log salvage to our aquatic ecosystems and predicting the change in oxygen regimes (?)”.

This is the only study done within the basin, and the researchers stated that preventing log salvage operation is a precautionary option in the face of uncertainty.

I partook in the removal of some logs on a small inland lake in northern Ontario five years ago without realizing how important they were. A once very healthy fishing spot for walleye was eliminated in the last four springs since we have gone out to that area. Other areas that still harbor logs are continuing to produce healthy fish stocks throughout the season.

I have been actively working with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for the past 15 years to try and sustain our future fisheries for years to come. And if we remove the vital habitat, the outcome without proper studies could be devastating.

In the United States, removal operations are taking place in some states with caution. Minnesota has just banned all sunken log retrieval due to environmental concerns on inland lakes. In Michigan, three permits have been issued to companies, intensive studies are being done during these operations to track changes in water quality and habitat.

In Ontario, with no oversight by government agencies, operations are taking place on Georgian Bay, and according to bassmasters groups in Midland Bay, the drop in productivity to the areas in question was so severe, these groups are worried that the loss of habitat was the main factor involved in the depletion of fish stocks.

We must realize that these stocks have sat idle…I'm sorry, we must realize that these logs have sat idle for centuries in our Great Lakes from the logging days. This critical habitat is a non-renewable resource, and through continual human development around our lakes, natural replenishment is becoming more and more scarce.

Sunken log retrieval is a young and rapidly growing industry, and without before, during, and after studies, the outcome is unknown. We ask the Commission to identify log salvage operations as an emerging issue that needs to be prevented until appropriate studies have been completed on its impact to physical and chemical integrity on fish habitat and water quality.

I thank you very much for having the opportunity to speak, and I'd like to give the books to the (inaudible)...

MARIA MABE:

Good afternoon, my name is Maria Mabe. I also work with Great Lakes United and I am on a biodiversity and habitat task force. And I manage several programs for Great Lakes United in that matter, and one of the programs I manage is providing fish advisory information to citizens that live in the Lake Erie basin, along with other groups along the entire basin.

The recommendation that the Science Advisory Board made to have a uniform fish advisory across the entire basin is long overdue. It is very necessary. If the states and provinces cannot agree, I implore the federal governments to come up with one of their own, and citizens such as myself will distribute them, groups will distribute them.

We need something to make it uniform. People are getting mixed messages. They are encouraged to buy fishing licenses but yet they can't eat the fish, and to most of us, that makes no sense.

I am also Hudinassone and people of the Long House and I'm of the Seneca nation, born into the Heron clan. I thoroughly enjoy fish. Lake Erie is where I have traditionally gotten my fish, also, as well as the Cattarogas Creek.

I grew up fishing. That's what we did. We spent our summers, our extra time enjoying life. I can't eat it anymore. I can no longer take my nieces and nephews and teach them how to fish. I can no longer trust that task, I have to do it, they have to remember that. That's part of my responsibility as an auntie, is to make sure that they know those things, but it's a struggle.

I have nieces and nephews born with neurological and development disabilities. I have brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles who are, on one side of my family, every one of my aunts and uncles suffers from diabetes and thyroid disease.

I have neighbors that live very close to me that are suffering very severely from lupus. I have neighbors that live in a small community down from me that suffer from several bouts from leukemia, a husband who suffers from leukemia, a wife who buries her husband, within months discovers she has breast cancer.

I live downstream from the West Valley nuclear facility. There is no mention of radionuclides in any fish advisory I can find for New York State. It is a real issue, and it's not just my reservation.

I have neighbors that live in the Sunset Bay area suffering the same health impacts. I have neighbors upstream a little bit, that live near a superfund site that also leaks into this body of water.

The fish advisories, to me, is one of the tools that can provide the adequate information on all impacts. It's not as simple as the top 12 POPs anymore. It's not as simple as don't eat it. It's just not that simple.

And I guess I really ask that our federal governments, as well as my own nation's governments, take a very strong and active role and remember that you, too, are parents of children and you, too, are aunties and uncles, and that you, too, may be holding children like I do that are born with spina bifida, that will never be able to be employed.

I ask you to remember that very strongly and to seriously think about that. Do you want your great-great-great-great-grandchildren to suffer those implications that my community is? Because I may be the first indicator, but I think that my neighbors are next and their neighbors are next, and I think we are all neighbors.

It's simple to me. Just clean it up and stop discharging. Allow native species to exist. Allow native peoples as well as yourselves to exist. And thank you.

GERRY GALLOWAY:

We expected that to be the last presentation. Will you be brief, Sir?

ED MICHAEL:

Yes, I will. But I did have my hand raised.

GERRY GALLOWAY:

Oh, I didn't see that, sorry.

ED MICHAEL
(Board president, Great Lakes United):

My name is Ed Michael, I come from just north of Chicago, and I am the current board president of Great Lakes United.

And I wanted to tell you that I thought I was going to come here and orchestrate some comments and go home. I didn't know that I was going to be standing at this microphone.

But halfway through the morning, I think about the time Tracy Mehan said that the fishable, drinkable, swimmable, promises made to me in the 1960s and 1970s might stand a chance of getting implemented for my grandchildren, my stomach started churning and I knew I was probably going to stand here.

But fortunately, I went out and had some of that good smoked meat, for which Montreal is so famous, and got calmed down a little bit. And I just wanted to say that I want to remind you that the relationship that Great Lakes United has had with this commission in guarding (?) our progress under the international agreements, and I wanted to invite the commissioners to work with us, and I hope we will serve you well in that capacity, and I hope you will convey that sentiment to our new commissioners, when they are here. Thank you.

GERRY GALLOWAY:

Thank you, and thank you all. And some conclusions, first from Chair Gusella, then Commissioner Gourd.

MARY GUSELLA:

Thank you. Avant de passer la parole à mon collègue le commissaire Gourd pour le message de clôture, j'aimerais dire merci. Je vais prendre l'occasion, en effet, de remercier tous ceux et celles qui ont travaillé si fort pour que ce forum soit un succès.

So before the official words of closure by my colleague Commissioner Gourd, I do want to express on behalf of the Commission and I hope on behalf of all of you the enormous thanks to all of the staff of the IJC and the three offices for the amount of work that they have put into preparing this forum, doing the planning, doing the organizing, and of course delivering on the thousands of different actions that have to be taken in order for a forum like this to take place.

Now, of course, the participants have played a very strong role in that, and I want to recognize that and acknowledge that as well. But I did want to say a special thank you, and I hope you will join me in a round of applause for all of the staff of the IJC who not only planned this forum once, but planned it twice, and thanks to the availability that all of you and all the participants showed, were able to work with you in order to bring it about on a second occasion. So thank you to all of the staff.

ROBERT GOURD:

Le point final de n'importe quel événement vient toujours trop vite, et c'est particulièrement le cas aujourd'hui. J'aimerais vous remercier d'avoir pris le temps de venir à Montréal pour nous rencontrer et nous faire part de vos commentaires sur la qualité de l'eau, les réseaux des Grands lacs et du Saint-Laurent.

Vos questions et vos observations ont été très éclairantes et nous permettront de mieux vous servir et de mieux servir les gouvernements de toutes les juridictions qui bordent les Grands lacs et le Saint-Laurent.

Comme le disait la présidente, le succès de notre forum cette année est attribuable à un grand nombre de gens. Si je ne veux pas vous garder ici jusqu'à l'heure du hockey, je les remercierai selon les principales tâches qu'ils ont effectuées pour nous.

J'aimerais tout d'abord remercier les élus, les dignitaires et les fonctionnaires qui ont, hier et aujourd'hui, participé aux différentes activités de la Commission. Que ce soit à titre de conférencier, d'organisateur ou encore d'observateur, votre aide nous a été très utile et nous vous en remercions.

Il va sans dire que je ne pourrai passer sous silence la très précieuse collaboration de la Ville de Montréal. J'aimerais enfin remercier tout particulièrement les gens des ONG qui ont gracieusement offert leur temps et leurs idées pour développer ou consolider le contenu des ateliers, aider à la promotion du forum ou qui nous ont tout simplement encouragé dans nos démarches.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our 2001 Water Quality Forum. To say the least, we are overwhelmed by your interest, your concern, your passion and your dedication to the Great Lakes. We are grateful for all of the information and views brought to our attention over the past two years.

We have heard you, and we will take everything you have said into consideration as we now begin to write our 11th biannual report to governments. To say the least, we have our work cut out for us.

Comme le veut la tradition, notre prochain forum biennal se tiendra aux États-Unis en 2003. Je profite de ces derniers moments que nous avons avec vous pour vous y inviter.

Again, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and please enjoy Montreal. Thank you.

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