Canada faces freshwater nightmare

This century will bring damage to Canada's lakes and rivers and the fish that live in them beyond Canadians' worst nightmares, the country's best known water scientist will tell a conference today.

"Considering its importance to all life on Earth, it is strange that fresh water has been our most mistreated and ignored natural resource," says David Schindler of the University of Alberta.

"Canadians have a rather cavalier attitude" toward lakes, swamps and rivers, probably because we have so many of them.

Mr. Schindler says the many problems in our fresh waters may not seem too bad, individually. But the problems interact to make each other's effects worse, he says. For instance, global warming makes lakes more vulnerable to acid rain, and acidic water makes fish more vulnerable to UV light coming through a thinned ozone layer. He calls the three together "a triple whammy."

"The overall effect will be the degradation of Canadian fresh water on a scale that was not comprehensible to the average Canadian at the end of the 20th century," he writes in this month's Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

His keynote speech today at an environmental conference in Toronto will based on this article, and the journal itself is sponsoring the environmental conference on lakes, rivers and fisheries.

As a new century starts, he sees many dangers coming together, With global warming underlying all of them.

"Increased research and a national water strategy offer the only hope for preventing a fresh water crisis in Canada," his article concludes.

Mr. Schindler is a former researcher with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Last month he was one of three finalists for the $1-million Gerhard Herzberg Canada gold medal, given to Canad's top science researcher, and he has won two blobal prizes given to water scientists for life-time research.

Among the threats he sees: The ice and snow of Canada's Rockies are melting, and glaciers that feed rivers in Alberta and Saskatchewan are receding. "Further recessuibs of mountain glaciers may jeopardize Prairie water supplies."
Canada should receive almost as much rain and snow in future as the climate warms, but we shouldn't feel too secure. warmer weather will make much of it evaporate. That means a region will need more and snow to obtain today's Level of water supplies. The Great Lakes are likely to fall to levels that make shipping difficult, and "only areas that have greatly increased precipitation will escape the effects of drought.
As we have less water to work with, we're trying to squeeze more pollutants into it. Many factory farms today put out levels of pollution including germs such as E. coli -- "that would equal those of a moderate to large city," he says.
The lesson of Walkerton isn't simply to chlorinate water, he argues, as chloring byproducts can cause cancer and chlorine doesn't kill all the germs anyway.
"At best, the cost of (clean) drinking water will increase rapidly. At worst, there will be increasing health problems associated with pathogenic bactenia and toxic algal blooms."
Mid-sized lakes that have cold-water fish species today (such as lake trout) will become warmer, and these fish will be less plentiful.
Federal and provincial spending cuts have vastly reduced the number of people working to preserve water, while the state of research on major northern lakes , is "a national disgrace."
Great Slave Lake hasn't been studied in detail since 1956, but is now having to cope with mining pollution, fisheries and industrial pollutants. Great Bear Lake "has never been comprehensively studied." Both are in the Northwest Territories.

The Ottawa Citizen
January 5, 2001
By Tom Spears