Lake Winnipeg must be saved
Re: Laws needed to protect Great Lakes from farm runoff, joint commission reports. (CBC story – Jan. 19, 2017)
“Voluntary measures to protect the Great Lakes from farm manure have proven inefficient and governments should now turn their minds to legislation, a binational report concludes.”
Does that sound familiar? It should, for it also applies to our “great lake” waters of Winnipeg. Manitobans and scientists have been expressing these same views for years about the polluted situation of those waters.
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Kicking the can down the road won’t solve the problem, and governments’ “sunny ways” won’t solve it, either. Manitobans and Lake Winnipeg waters deserve better.
The only way to fix this situation is through political honesty, hard work and making tough choices and sticking to them. Our future and the future of all our waters depend on this action.
The lake is not polluting itself. As long as four decades ago and more, scientists Eve Pip, David Schindler and John Vallentyne openly expressed their concerns about what they could visualize taking place.
Nobody paid attention. It would never happen. But it has happened. Now, Lake Winnipeg has won the Threatened Lake of the Year Award (2013), a testament to bad, short-sighted and ill-informed decisions taken by our governments over the years.
It will take a lot more than just money to save our lake.
However, it seems none of our governments, at whatever level they represent, want to know that, for they skirt around the issues that are responsible for the pollution problems.
They hope for a miracle cure and allow destruction simultaneously, all in the name of advancement and economic development.
In fact, the brand name of Manitoba sustainable development minister Cathy Cox is counterproductive. The government’s interpretation of sustainable development is more destructive than constructive.
Lake Winnipeg has been declared as the most polluted fresh water lake in the world. What a shameful example and cost we bear to conduct ourselves in the name of opportunist development that pollutes our most vital and life resource — water.
On Feb. 18, 2003, Steve Ashton, as conservation mnister, announced a commitment to reduce the contribution of nitrogen and phosphorus and to restore nutrient conditions to those that existed prior to the 1970s. Hollow words.
Nineteen years later, has there been any improvement? I say no, as I believe the conditions have worsened and steadily escalated. Yes, this same merry-go-round has been spinning for more than 50 years.
There has to be action with a determined will of the people and governments to save Lake Winnipeg and our water sources. The continual rhetorical propaganda that we have been subjected to has the effect of a placebo, and the lake has literally been studied to death.
I, along with many Manitobans, have been voicing grave concerns about Lake Winnipeg and how the algae situation has amassed in the past years.
Scientific studies have determined that the measured outflow of nutrients is only a third of the measured input. A 66 percent retention is a disastrous overload.
This and other studies ultimately led to the 2011 Save the Lake Winnipeg Act. It was an act of good intentions, but seemingly dormant, ignored and downplayed since its inception, over 11 years ago.
It will not be possible for Lake Winnipeg or any of our water sources to survive as long as politics keeps playing the deceitful role of paddy-caking the needed efforts of recovery. Wherever possible, nutrient pollution must be eliminated.
John Fefchak,
Virden, Man.
