THE CITY: A healthy Lake Ontario may be a casualty of a Trump budget
The existential political crisis that the United States is undergoing under President Donald Trump cannot help but impact the life of Canadians on the other side of the border.
The existential political crisis that the United States is undergoing under President Donald Trump cannot help but impact the life of Canadians on the other side of the border.
Travel for Canadian citizens and permanent residents of certain national origins will be impeded, thanks to the Trump travel ban. The arrival of refugees, fleeing home countries and the United States both, on foot across our undefended border, will swell. The flow of goods and services across the border … well, we’ll see about that.
Something else we’ll see about will be the quality of the water that is lapping up against Toronto’s shoreline. Leaked documents last week indicated that the Trump White House is intending to make drastic cuts to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and its concentrated $300 million Great Lakes Restoration efforts. By 2018, it will be down to just $10 million.
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How much will this cut impact Canada? Much of the U.S. funding is, understandably, focused on the American shores of the Great Lakes — cleaning up old problems and restoring and strengthening wetlands. Our work will proceed apace.
But of course there are interconnections. Tony Maas, Manager of Strategies at the advocacy group Freshwater Future, says that cut — combined with other cuts to the EPA, impacting the extensive amount of research the agency produces — will have a rippling impact.
There are agencies that rely on EPA research, and on co-operative projects. Big, shared problems such as the algae blooms choking out Lake Erie rely on EPA research.
And the cuts highlight problems in quantifying Canada’s own contribution. While government does do work on the Great Lakes, it is difficult to track. The federal government did, in its last budget, allocate $3.1 million for dealing with those algae blooms.
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Toronto can’t be faulted, putting tens of millions of dollars into mitigating its major impact on Lake Ontario’s health — the stormwater run-off that has historically sent raw human sewage into Lake Ontario. Good for us.
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