August 06, 2009

 On August 6, 2009 the Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of the Environment, announced new regulations for managing municipal wastewater. We emailed MP Joe Preston to find out what this means in terms of St. Thomas wastewater discharge into Kettle Creek.

Joe's office staff sent us two documents to review on this matter while they arranged for us to have an interview with Joe on the subject.


Excerpts from Document 1

In August 1999, the second National Sewage Report Card issued by the an environmental organization and two labour unions reported that over one trillion litres of untreated or only partially treated sewage is dumped into Canada's rivers, lakes and oceans each year by some of the 21 cities surveyed.

This massive amount of waste "would cover the entire 7,800 kilometer (4,846 mile) length of the Trans-Canada highway to a depth of nearly 20 meters - six stories high," says the report.

"Collectively, this flow of untreated sewage - a foul mix of water, human excrement, grease, motor oil, paint thinner, antifreeze and other substances containing toxic synthetic chemicals - would fill the main chamber of the House of Commons every three-and-a-half minutes," the report states.

At that time over 90 Canadian municipalities were still discharging raw, untreated sewage, the OECD reports, including three provincial capitals - Victoria; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and St. John's, Newfoundland (all dumping straight into the ocean) - and only 33 percent of the Canadian population was served by tertiary treatment, while 19 percent had access to only crude primary treatment. Primary, secondary and tertiary are the three levels of progressively more effective sewage treatment.

In April 2004 these three organizations complained to the then-Liberal federal government that the minister of environment was allowing municipalities to illegally discharge contaminated sewage.
The complaining groups were calling on the federal government, which had already adopted national standards and strategies which all purported to prohibit this kind of pollution, to enforce its existing laws.


Excerpts from Document 2

Fast forward to 2009 and quotes from the now-Conservative federal government press release: The proposed new regulations announced by Minister Prentice will set national performance standards, timelines and monitoring and reporting requirements, and are expected to be published in the Canada Gazette, Part I, in December 2009.

The new regulations deliver on the Government's commitment to implementing the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment Municipal Wastewater Strategy. They will be developed under the Fisheries Act for more than 4,000 wastewater treatment facilities.

"The proposed regulations will ensure that, across the country, the release of wastewater effluents does not pose unacceptable risks to human and environmental health and fishery resources," said Minister Prentice. "We recognize the key role that provinces, territories and municipalities play in the management of the wastewater sector and we are working in partnership with these jurisdictions and other stakeholders through the Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment to improve wastewater effluent quality. We have put in place a strong, comprehensive approach to ensure that our water resources are used wisely, both economically and ecologically. Through this approach, we are making investments in regulating and enforcing laws, monitoring, science, and cleaning up of problem areas, as well as building partnerships to protect our fresh water."

Under the Action Plan for Clean Water, the Government of Canada committed $96 million to restore Lake Winnipeg, Lake Simcoe and several areas of concern in the Great Lakes. The Action Plan complements a number of other initiatives, such as the St. Lawrence Plan, which has allowed the Government to invest $323 million over the past 20 years on priorities such as water conservation and protection.

Further commitments to protect Canada's water resources include:

• Accelerating First Nations' infrastructure projects, focusing on schools and water through $515 million under Canada's Economic Action Plan;
• Investing in infrastructure through the $33-billion Building Canada Fund to help municipalities and First Nations communities across Canada upgrade their wastewater treatment facilities;
• Regulating specific industries like metal mines and pulp and paper to reduce the toxicity of their effluents; [Editor's note: yet the Canadian courts continue to allow mining companies to dump toxic mine waste into fresh water Canadian lakes] and
• Investing $2.5 million over five years to support the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Global Environment Monitoring System GEMS/Water.

Telephone Interview with Joe Preston (he called from Ottawa on August 17, 2009)

"So what does all this mean in terms of the overflow untreated sewage that St. Thomas discharges into Kettle Creek?" we asked Joe Preston. "Will these new regulations actually force them to clean up their act and stop that from happening?"

Joe said the new regulations would specifically target municipalities that still have combined storm and sanitary sewers. Combined sewers of this type continue to be a problem right across the country.

"So if a municipality is in violation of the new regulations, will there be funding available for them to make the infrastructure changes to come into compliance?" we asked.

"There has already been tons of infrastructure money available," Joe said, "and there will be more. Waste water treatment has been the number one thing we've been granting money for. All municipalities have had to do is ask for it, but not all municipalities have made waste water treatment a priority."

St. Thomas recently received close to $4 million for a new waste water treatment facility. To the best of our knowledge St. Thomas still has about 24% combined storm/sanitary sewers. We had 582 mm of rain in 2006. The Ministry of the Environment audit of the St. Thomas sewage treatment plant found that between June and September of 2006 there was 240,584 cubic meters of untreated sewage overflow discharged from that plant into Kettle Creek . That translates into a sewage highway from edge to edge to a depth of 6 feet for the 17 kilometres along Hwy 4 between Port Stanley and St. Thomas. The MOE report said that 22 overflows had occurred in 2006 during periods of heavy rainfall, 8 of which were reported to Central Elgin. We also had 41 days of beach postings in that year. In 2007 we had 122 mm of rain and no overflows from that sewage treatment plant.

In 2008 we again had periods of heavy concentrated rainfall and few beach postings, and in 2009 we have recently had three straight months of heavy concentrated rainfall but no beach postings. We told Joe Preston that we asked Central Elgin how many overflows have been reported to them this year and were informed 8 overflows have been reported. We also told him we asked for the 2008 MOE inspection report on the St. Thomas sewage treatment facility only to be told that the most recent MOE inspection report St. Thomas has is the one we have already mentioned above. Apparently no MOE inspection for 2008 has been done, so we are unable to determine if St. Thomas is accurately reporting the incidences of overflow to Central Elgin. We talked about all this with Joe Preston.

"Is it a case of not being reported to the public or not being reported to Central Elgin?" Joe asked.
"We think it's a case of not being reported to Central Elgin," we answered. "In the past, three days of heavy rainfall equalled an overflow."

"And we've had three months of steady rain," Joe interjected.

"But only 8 overflows reported to Central Elgin and no beach postings at all," we finished. "We find that a little strange."

"I've been wondering about that myself," Joe said. "There's been no postings of any beaches anywhere."

"We know it's two bad results in a row to post a beach and only one good one to take the posting down, but we're wondering if the testing results are being manipulated for the benefit of the tourism industry," we said.

"I certainly hope not!" Joe exclaimed.

Joe said he had a meeting coming up later in the day with local and provincial officials regarding the new waste water treatment regulations and would ask questions and look into the situation and get back to us with some answers.

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