The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Road Salt Destroying Ontario's Waterways?

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Every winter, Ontarians rely on road salt to keep streets safe - but where does all that salt go when the snow melts? Jeyan Jeganathan explores how excess salt is silently polluting lakes and rivers across the province and talks to the people working to protect our fragile freshwater ecosystems.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He was like a father figure to me. Unfortunately, found myself in a very vulnerable position. This is a story about a psychiatrist in Toronto accused of abusing two of his patients, which he denies. It's also a story about a system that is supposed to protect patients. From TVO Podcasts, I'm Krisha Collier, and this is The Oath. Subscribe today wherever you listen. As the snow melts and the earth wakes up, winter starts to let go. Spring is here, finally.

Runoff flows into rivers and lakes, but these waters that we welcome carry something we can't see. Road salt, chemically known as sodium chloride. It works by lowering the freezing point of water, making it harder for ice to form. And this past winter, a winter full of storms, ice was an issue for communities across Ontario. A winter storm warning is in effect stretching from Windsor to Montreal.

Brutal ice storm left hundreds of thousands of Ontarians in the dark. Up in Muskoka, the same system is bringing even more snow to the air. And it's in Muskoka where environmentalists are sounding the alarm bells on road salt. Well right now we're coming down to Muskoka Bay, Gravenhurst Bay, and there's a creek running into the bay here that I've been sampling for the last two and a half years. Neil Hutchinson has dedicated his life to water quality. After working as an aquatic scientist across Canada, he's now retired and part of the Friends

of the Muskoka Watershed, a group focused on identifying and addressing threats to Muskoka's waterways. Five or six years ago we became quite aware of the problem of road salt and the chloride ion, which is the toxic component of road salt, in our runoff off our roads into our very soft waters. Many Ontarians are familiar with images like this. These photos were captured by the friends of the Muskoka watershed. They highlight the excessive amount of road salt used over the winter. Oh there's a mess that's going to end up in the river. Yeah Oh, there's a mess. That's going to end up in the river. Yeah, wonder how much salt's in that. Holy moly.

The documentation is part of a study Neil and a team of citizen scientists have been conducting to see how much of this road salt is draining into Muskoka's watershed. What we do is collect a very small quantity of water starting when the melt starts, which is right now. We get access to the snow and salt which is coming off of the sidewalks, coming out of the parking lots, coming off at the roads. Ultimately we want to know the concentration of chloride. Chloride is toxic, it's declared toxic as

is road salt, but we measure it quite simply with a little pen that you can stick in the water and it immediately reads the conductivity. So here's the conductivity meter. That's very, very high. 730, it's still going up. Considerably higher than we have in the lake. Conductivity is the ability of the water to carry an electrical current, and the more ions that are dissolved in the water, the higher the conductivity, the better able it is to conduct electricity. Such that distilled water would have no conductivity,

whereas seawater has something like 50,000 units of conductivity. This whole area of the neighborhood has five different drainage areas that come down, and they all go right into Gull Lake so there's no filtration or anything. Over the course of two years citizen scientists like Sandy Cairns and Joanne Smith have conducted over 600 measurements at 27 sites in Gravenhurst, Bracebridge and Huntsville. They tested drains and creeks year-round that flow into large bodies of water like Lake Muskoka, Gull Lake and Jevons Lake. According to the data, the worst salt concentrations came from four storm drains in Bracebridge.

The findings only confirmed what Neal and his team already knew. Salt is silently saturating Muskoka's waters. The Friends of the Muskoka watershed estimate that Lake Muskoka now holds around 30,000 tons of road salt. And it's not just in cottage country. Many Toronto area streams are getting saltier. Across Ontario about 2.2 million tons of road salt are spread on public roads every year. In 2001, Environment Canada declared road salt to be a hazardous substance, and that required the government to set water quality objectives for it and to start paying attention to how it's managed.

Gravener's Bay has increased by about 30 or 35 fold in chloride concentrations over the last 50 years. So that's a direct result of runoff from our activities of spreading road salt around in the watershed. The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment has set guidelines for how much salt freshwater ecosystems can handle before it starts harming aquatic life. But those guidelines might not work everywhere.

The guidelines, which were actually determined near Toronto back in the early 2000s, came in at a level of 120 milligrams per litre. But we are far more sensitive up here because we have a different kind of bedrock, which is granite. And it's very different from the bedrock, which is granite. And it's very different from the bedrock, which is down near Toronto, which is limestone. And the limestone breaks down, so it's kind of buffering the solution.

Whereas up here in Lascauca, we've got the granite, which is rather inert. So the zooplankton are the ones which are very, very fragile, and we're finding that they are dying at a much faster pace than they are down in the GTA, where we've got the hard water. The friends of the Muskoka watershed have gained a new tool in their efforts to combat excessive road salt use. Hi. How are you doing? Hi, I'm Alicia.

Alicia Breckenridge is the project lead for the Salty in Muskoka project. We're starting a new program to help everybody in Muskoka reduce their excess road salt. Thanks to a federal grant from the Canadian Water Agency, they now have boots on the ground. It's estimated that about 20% of road salt used in Muskoka is applied in parking lots, driveways and sidewalks. I'll be able to work with the community in reducing salt use in those sites. So that means talking to people that live here, talking to small businesses and having those conversations with winter maintenance contractors

and also with store owners that can actually bring in some alternatives and collectively just raise the awareness of reducing salt in our community. One of the biggest messages she's trying to spread about road salt is that a little goes a long way. This cup holds 12 ounces of road salt, but I'm just using sand just to demonstrate that this cup will cover this entire space. Road salt is a popular choice because it's cheap and it works. Research has shown its use can

significantly reduce winter related car crashes but it has its limitations. I think we assume that it's going to work in all temperatures, and it actually doesn't. So road salt, the effectiveness starts to wear off after like minus 10, minus 12, and road salt doesn't work on ice anymore. So you have to look at maybe using sand as traction instead. It can cause skin irritation for our furry friends and is highly corrosive to buildings. I heard just the other day that somebody said our sliding doors are so rusty and they're putting it down to road saw.

And it is. It's actually corrosive and so it's damaging a lot of infrastructure around buildings. In 2012, two people died and many more were injured when the rooftop parking deck of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliott Lake caved in. Corrosion caused by years of water and road salt was considered one of the contributing factors. A forensic study found the rusted steel supports looked like they had spent decades in seawater. The Friends of the Muskoka Watershed did get a win earlier this year.

The district of Muskoka passed a resolution to safely reduce its road salt use and push the province to establish a committee to advise cities and towns on how best to protect freshwater ecosystems from salt. But changing policy is just one part of the puzzle. Liability is another major challenge. If I slip and break my hip, then I might sue the store owner who will then have to sue his maintenance person because I slipped because not enough salt was applied.

Well, there are various several jurisdictions, some of the United States, that have got a program where these applicators certify themselves as smart about salt. So if they can demonstrate that they've taken the course and have not overapplied the salt, then they are immune from prosecution for liability. So we'd like to work with other groups and get the government to have a look at the liability clauses and how we might, you know, make sure it's done properly and still insulate people from claims.

According to the Friends of the Muskoka Watershed, the path to reducing road salt use and protecting the freshwater ecosystem so vital to Muskoka and the rest of Canada is clear. It starts with stronger policies, better training and raising awareness. I often get overwhelmed by the amount of environmental issues that face us today. But road salt is one issue that is easily remedied and we can reduce our use. We can take action to get rid of pollutants and be effective and maintain the beautiful world around us. So to me it's a matter of the land that we live in, our obligation not to harm it, to tread lightly, and to enjoy it for all that it offers.