The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Lake Ontario the Neglected Great Lake?

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

In his latest book, author Daniel Macfarlane argues that Lake Ontario has been neglected both environmentally and in spirit. The book is called "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History." He's also an associate professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and he joins Jeyan Jeganathan to discuss. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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at Western Michigan University and he joins us now in studio. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, before we begin our conversation, let's start off with some quick facts about Lake Ontario. It is nearly 19,000 square kilometers in surface area, which makes it the smallest in surface area of the Great Lakes.

It is 311 kilometers across, 85 kilometers in width, and as it stands, was established about 11,000 years ago. It is also home to more than 55% of Ontario's population. This lake is huge when we look at those numbers, but not nearly as large as the other great lakes. And there are other lakes that are much grander in size that are not great lakes, but are bigger, like Great Slave Lake, Great

Bear Lake, Lake Winnipeg, for example. Is Lake Ontario truly as great as the others? Does it stack up? It is a Great Lake, all on its own, I mean, by a number of measurements. I mean, I argue in the book it's the most important Great Lake from a political, cultural, economic perspective, right? As you mentioned, it's majority of the Ontario population is there. Great Lake from a political, cultural, economic perspectives. As you mentioned, it's majority of the Ontario population is there. Something like a quarter of all Canadians live close to Lake Ontario.

So this is by many measurements the most important of the Great Lakes. And then, yeah, it's also pretty great in terms of its beauty. Help me understand this. You live in America, you live in the States, you are Canadian, but you didn't grow up, you weren't born in Ontario. Tell me, how did the fascination of Lake Ontario come about for you? Right, well, my parents almost had me in Kingston,

but then they moved to Saskatchewan right before I was born. And then my dad's from Eastern Ontario, so he would come out in the summer. So coming from a fairly dry province, I was always intrigued as a kid by all the water bodies out in Ontario, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence, the Rideau, and the Trent canals, and that sort of thing.

And then when I went to Ottawa for grad school, that's when I first really started studying the history of the waters out here. All right. Before we get into the history of Lake Ontario, you sent us a couple of photos. Let's have a look here. So this first photo here, these were taken from Chimney Bluffs State Park.

This for our Ontario viewers is I would say directly across from Sandbanks Provincial Park on the other side of Lake Ontario. What are we looking at here? Because this looks quite sharp, but quite fascinating. What are we looking at? Right, so this is a state park east of Rochester. So it's on the New York side. So Ontario folks may not be as familiar with it.

But these are just sand formations that have been there for a long time. And it's protected as a state park. So where the picture is taken from, you can get that close. But you're not supposed to walk onto them, actually, because they can be a little vulnerable to people traipsing all over them. We have a second photo that, again,

shows these fascinations. How did this form? Well, it's a combination of wind and erosion and maybe some glacial past as well that sort of sculpts them in this way. And how long, I mean, they're looking quite old. How long do we have an idea? And is this somewhere, can we see something like that elsewhere in Lake Ontario? Is that specific to that area? Those types of formations are very specific to Lake Ontario. In terms of age, perhaps as old as when the last glaciers left, which is some 11,000 years ago.

Alright, you talk about glaciers. I want to talk about something that you mentioned in your book, the Little Ice Age. Would you explain how that moment in time affected how Europeans settled here in Lake Ontario? Right, so we're familiar with climate change today in terms of the climate getting warmer, but climate change has happened of course in the past that human societies had adjusted. So the Little Ice Age is a period roughly from the 1400s into the mid 19th century where the climate gets a little bit cooler. And so I argue that was sort of a turnoff for European settlers to a

certain extent, right? So that colder climate, it's good for thicker furs for the fur trade and things like that, but it requires adjusting. So perhaps that helped stave off sort of the settler invasion of indigenous lands for a long time. But then when that Ice Age is starting to thaw into the 19th century and things are getting warmer, that sort of goes hand in glove with European expansion. Now there were settlements there at that time as well. Right, so there's already been well before the Little Ice Age is over, we have some of the first settlements at York and what's before York,

which becomes Toronto as well as at the Kingston end of the lake, where the Niagara River goes into the lake as well. So there's forts, European forts, and of course there's many indigenous communities that predated all of that. Well, let's all of that. Well let's talk about that. You also mentioned that what happened when Europeans met indigenous peoples and the effect they had on the population. How in turn has that affected the environment around the lake? Because that was something that you talk about in your book when we talk about the forests and sort of the agriculture there.

When shifts happen the lake gets impacted as well. So how does that look? Right. So indigenous users of the lake or of the area around it certainly predate Europeans. They had agriculture, would cut down some forests, but their impact is fairly benign or done in a sustainable way. When Europeans start arriving, well first diseases often move ahead of the Europeans, so decimating some estimates

of maybe 90% of indigenous peoples may have been exposed to death from diseases like that. So that clears the land to some extent, helping foster the misconception that this is land open for taking. And so when Europeans are coming along, at certain points they do encounter a lake shore that isn't that populated. That also has to do with, especially on the south side of the lake, with the Haudenosaunee groups that live there often didn't keep their permanent camps right out the lake.

The kid would come there seasonally. So there was a bit of a misconception that this was land free for the taking. And of course, that's sustained by European ideologies as well. I think for most Canadians and people who live in Ontario, the lakes almost serve as a functional purpose. I think we forget how far our history goes with this lake. How politically, I think that's an interesting one, how important is this lake when it comes to being Ontario or Canadian?

Right, well I mean, I suggest in the book Canada might not be a country if it wasn't for Lake Ontario. So when you take the St. Lawrence River together with Lake Ontario, that forms the heartland of Canada from a historic perspective, right? Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, all the historical capitals of Canada that preceded Ottawa, a lot of the first French and English settlers. And then that waterway provides a lifeline back to Britain as well, and then is a bridge and also a

barrier between the US. So in many ways Lake Ontario helps Canada become a separate country from the United States. How about current day? Present day? Well, I mean this is the most, the North Shore of Lake Ontario is the most important part of Canada from a population, financial, industrial perspective. So it's still in many ways the heartland of Canada and the centre from a population perspective. Alright we have a couple of paintings that I want to show.

Now these paintings, the first one, are of locals who are hanging out at the waterfront. This is a painting of the steamship Chief Justice Robinson landing and passengers are actually getting off the ice. This is in 1852 and you can also see sort of in in the foreground there ice boats and horse-drawn sleighs on ice. I want to pull up another photo here. This is what many people would be familiar with the Toronto Island. This is, you can see people out skating, having a good time there. What was the relationship like between early settlers and the lake? Right, so both these paintings are of Toronto harbour. So a lot of what that is showing is what's before it gets too polluted

in a way we might not recognise today, but communities faced the lake, right? They were centred on the lake. That was also the main means of transportation, so obviously by ships. But even in winter, in some ways, winter, and this is where having a little ice age actually could help in some ways, now it becomes easier to travel by ice. So you see ice boating going on there,

sleds, skating, all those different things, as well as ice cutting for underground refrigeration in the summertime. So the communities like what would become Toronto are focused on the lake, whereas they turn their back on the lake in more contemporary periods. Well let's talk about that. You know, I think people in Toronto kind of forget about the lake. You talk about that a little bit, you know, when we think about cottage season, you know,

people aren't hanging out in Lake Ontario. For example, I was driving up Lake Superior, and every stop you can kind of pull up and have, you know, you can camp right down Lake Superior. But in Ontario, in Lake Ontario, we'd rather drive up to, you know, the Muskokas or Georgian Bay and hang out there. We kind of ignore it. What do you think that says about how the lake is used in the provincial capital now?

Right. Lake Ontario compared to the other Great Lakes was in many ways turned into a working lake that we use for industrial purposes that we put our pollution into. So in the minds of a lot of people, that's the lake that you use for those purposes. And then you leave Lake Ontario to go to a different Great Lake

or to the Muskokas for your vacation. So it's partly reflecting the fact, yes, it arguably is the most degraded Great Lake because of what we've done to it. But at the same time, it's a perception of it's not a wilderness lake in the same way Lake Superior is or those other lakes. There are probably people who are going to be watching this

who are proud Lake Ontario supporters and are probably sad to hear that. What kind of impact does it being a functional lake, a working lake, have on how it's being used? Well, I think it led to the way Toronto organizes infrastructure, for example. It actually turned its back, both literally and metaphorically, I think, on Lake Ontario in terms of building what's built at the waterfront, railways and then freeways and that sort of thing, actually blocking people from the lake, although we have seen people turning back towards the lake in recent times,

and the greening of more of the lakefront as well. Alright. Before we talk about the ecological impact, let's have a look at the expanse of Lake Ontario and its surrounding area. Here is Lake Ontario, and you should be able to see the major Canadian cities from the US border moving along the shore up then toward the east. And so that's Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Toronto, and towards Kingston.

Now, here's the drainage basin, the area that feeds or empties into Lake Ontario, including Niagara Falls and the river that is at the tail end of Lake Erie and downstream in the Great Lakes system, the Trent Severn Waterway and rivers and streams coming from the area. And then here are the areas of concern or the AOCs in Canada that hover around the major cities along the lake. All right. What about Lake Ontario's geographic position is concerning for you in terms of what's happening

to the lake environmentally? Well, there's a few factors. One, it's downstream of the other Great Lakes, so a lot of that pollution gets passed along. It's also, of course, directly downstream from the Niagara River, which is a very heavily used industrial and electrochemical centre, so a lot of bad pollution is coming in from that river. And then, of course, we've already talked about the heavy population and industrial uses in the GTA and around the lake.

So all of that is just, you know, pouring toxics and pollutions into Lake Ontario. One of the things that when we think about the Great Lakes for a very long time, Lake Erie was kind of given, considered a dead lake. You know, we'd talk about sort of fires happening on the lakes themselves. How did Lake Ontario keep living, as you mentioned, geographically, we're downstream, we're the last ones, keep living, so to speak, because it's at the tail end of it? Right.

So in the 1960s, Lake Ontario, or sorry, Lake Erie was often being declared dead because of pollution and eutrophication, which is the overgrowth of algae, which then befoules the water, uses up oxygen. A lot of the same thing was going on in Lake Ontario in this period, but because Lake Erie is shallower, it shows the effects more. So it was more noticeable, but that led to, pollution led to the first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which only applied to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, as well as in the St.

Lawrence. How toxic did it get? Well, that stage, toxics, when we're talking 1960s, 1970s, aren't the big worry yet. We're not using as many of them, although we certainly were a lot then. Nowadays, toxics are the bigger worry at that. In the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement,

didn't apply to toxics. But the 1978 agreement, which came obviously a few years later, did. All right, well, you mentioned a very important day when we talk about Great Lakes. April 1972, Richard Nixon, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, talk to me a little bit about the significance here for Ontario. You talked about the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Right, so what we have is the President and the Prime Minister signing this agreement which is the culmination of in many ways decades of negotiations between the US and Canada to try to come up with some agreement to address pollution within the Great Lakes and in the 1972 agreement, it's the lower lakes or Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. So that's working through what's called the International Joint Commission, which oversees bilateral water bodies. So this is an agreement to try to limit especially things like phosphorus and nitrogen. This is the baby boom period. People have all these new wonder machines.

They're using detergents in their dishwashers and their washing machines. That's causing problems in the lake. That causes that eutrophication that I mentioned earlier. So this first water quality agreement is very much about doing that. And it is fairly successful in cleaning up Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, at least visually,

in terms of a lot of algae. Part of that is because both countries spend a lot on building water treatment plants as well. I am curious, you know, we celebrated 50 years only two years ago. Looking back now, how important was that agreement to the lifeline of Lake Ontario? It's quite agreement in that it's very much

a groundbreaking international environmental agreement that has been seen as a model, I think, globally. So it probably kept things from getting a lot worse. We still never really lived up to it, but that's largely because both nations haven't kept up that funding past the 1970s or actually tried to bring industry to heel a little bit to stop the worst of that pollution. Do you think we've done a good job on that? I want to push back a little bit on that.

No, I don't think we've done a good job on that? I want to push back a little bit on that. No, I don't think we've done a good job. That 72 agreement was very important. 78 agreement as well. I mean, that's one of the first applications of the ecosystem principle. Comes out of that agreement, but we absolutely have not lived up to it. And that's mostly Ontario as well as the New York State and the governments of Canada, the US, not putting the money in to actually do what we need to be doing. So those are the...

What do we need to be doing? Well, we've got the architecture in place to do what we need to do with those agreements. But I mean, there's a lot of direct and indirect things we need to be doing. So the amount of plastics and toxics that we're putting into the lake now are overwhelming and egregious, but we refuse to put sufficient limits on anything industrial that would hinder economic growth in any way. So a lot of it's wider societal things, but not prioritizing environmental health.

I don't want you to point fingers here, but is there industries that we should be looking at that should have some stricter rules put in place when we're looking at possible solutions here? Yeah, certainly anything to do with fossil fuels, plastics, and then in the Niagara region, a lot of the chemical companies and things like that. It's also the cumulative impact. A lot of it comes from agriculture and fertilizer and runoff.

It's much easier to deal with point source pollution, which was what that first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement did. But non-point source is much harder to deal with. And so we're not doing effective jobs of policing that. I am curious in terms of when you mentioned policing, how does one enforce something like this when we have this vast body of water that is shared between two nations? We do have bodies that are there, but how hard is it to kind of enforce these rules? Well, it's very difficult. We actually do have some decent regulations, so a lot of the time

it's not actually enforcing them is the problem. But beyond that, we certainly have stronger regulations. I mean, if we look at what is being done to human health, as well as ecosystem health, even if you want to measure it by economic impacts instead of just health impacts, often those impacts are more negative than the benefits that come from economic activity but because we prioritize industrial and economic uses and sort of the magic formula of economic growth and GDP above all else that comes before ecological and human health. I feel like if we're to grade all of the Great Lakes, you probably are going to grade Lake Ontario right at the bottom there.

I'm just curious, how is the lake now? What are some of the issues that you think should be brought to focus? Because I know in your book you talk a lot about microplastics as well and some other issues. But what is kind of the main concerns for you? Yeah, we have improved in terms of some of the conventional pollutants.

There's less of some heavy metals, such as mercury. Things like that have been, or DDT, some of those things were outlawed. You still see legacy contaminants in the sediments. But now we have a lot of new things. So a lot of researchers in the last 10, 20 years have been uncovering just how big of an impact plastics are in terms of not only being in sediments,

but they get inside living things that bioaccumulate to move their way up. Toxics are, those are often, plastic is often toxic as well. PFAS is sort of that new forever chemical that's come onto our radar screens only in the last decade or so because it lasts so long and can bio accumulate as well. So those are sort of some of the tip of the iceberg or really outstanding or really apparent types of pollutants that we're now dealing with.

I do have to ask, you know, just talking with some of our colleagues, just how we have a little bit of a battle here when it comes to which is our favorite lakes we have some a few people who love Lake Spirits and who are die-hard Lake Ontarians but I don't hear a lot of people going into Lake Ontario I love going into Lake Ontario if I can I will I'm in at Coburg Beach it's one of my favorite places to go when's the last time you did your toes into Lake Ontario is this something that you encourage and do I absolutely encourage last year or actually this past summer was the last time I was in Lake Ontario.

Down near Niagara on the lake as well as at Sandbank. So we tried to. As I was writing this book, we tried to explore a lot of the different parts of Lake Ontario. And you're right, a lot of people sort of turn their noses historically at going into Lake Ontario, but there's always been a diehard community that would do that.

And I think during the pandemic, that really increased a lot too. So now you see people using the Toronto Islands a lot more and there's a push to make that more available to the public and create more beaches. We have about a minute left and I have to ask this question because do you now live on the other side of the border? So with Trump as president-elect, he has openly stated that the administration is going to tap Canada's water. Should Ontarians and Canadians be worried about the future of Lake Ontario?

I don't know how feasible that statement is, but should we be worried about one of our Great Lakes? Yeah. Well, I mean, we need to be worried about everything environmental with the Trump presidency. There is something called the 2008 Great Lakes Compact, which theoretically put some legal limits on other states from the US being able to divert water. But Trump's of course, a wild card on a lot of these issues. So I don't know how feasible it would be within the next four years for him to do that,

but it's certainly something to stay worried about and stay vigilant about. Fair enough. Daniel, I wanna thank you so much for coming into the studio. Really great, Brooke, and really great dive into the history of Lake Ontario. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.