Georgian Bay water: Disappearing down the drain hole in the St. Clair River

By Penny Pepperell Toronto Star July 7 2012

The Great Lakes are a world treasure, and the jewel in their crown is Georgian Bay. (I’m going to break with convention and refer to Georgian Bay as a Great Lake because it is almost as big as Lake Ontario.) Biologists describe it as the most complex fresh water ecosystem in the world, one reason it has been designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

But Georgian Bay is under serious threat from more than the usual things hitting the Great Lakes: climate change and invasive species. It is also contending with a man-made problem that could be fixed, not easily or inexpensively, but fixed well enough to save it from significant ecological degradation.

Georgian Bay is losing water. 

Since the 1960s it has lost 23 centimetres (nine inches), due to dredging of the shipping channels in the St. Clair River. It’s losing water as a result of a geological phenomenon called glacial isostatic adjustment, which is tilting its water southward into Lake Michigan-Huron at about 17 centimetres (seven inches) a century. (This has to do with the Earth’s crust rebounding from being compressed by the weight of kilometres of ice during the Ice Age.) And then there’s climate change, the biggest source of water loss since 1996.

This could be fixed if we could stop this precious resource from spilling out the St. Clair River where the residents of lower Michigan emphatically don’t want it.

Controlling the water flow so as not to let Georgian Bay dry out and south Michigan to flood would entail a complex engineering and regulatory regime called multi-lake regulation. Right now there are only two places on the Great Lakes where the in-and-out flow of water is controlled: at the outflow of Lake Superior and in the upper St. Lawrence River. This isn’t enough. Multi-lake regulation would introduce one or two more control points, on the Niagara and St. Clair Rivers to compensate for the extreme water level fluctuations expected from climate change.

So what chance does multi-lake regulation have of being implemented? Not great.

Great Lakes water levels have recently been the subject of a $17-million report by the Upper Great Lakes Study Board, the scientific and engineering arm of the International Joint Commission, the binational body that oversees the boundary waters of the U.S. and Canada. That report gave multi-lake regulation a thumbs down because of high costs, environmental concerns and, most importantly, uncertainty about what the climate will do and the engineering necessary to address it. And, just in case there was any question that its knife didn’t go deep enough, the study board recommended against any further study of this issue.

But the study board did recommend establishing an advisory board to help administer a management strategy for the entire Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River system, entailing better modelling of hydro-climatic conditions, better sharing of information, and more collaboration between the various regions of the Great Lakes to address water level extremes.

This would seem to leave a window open after the study board closed the door on multi-lake regulation, because only multi-lake regulation holds out the possibility of mitigating for climate change extremes and addressing the often-conflicting interests of Great Lakes users. The obvious interim solution is to keep studying it. That’s the position of Georgian Bay Forever, a charity that has been doggedly following this issue for more than a decade.

Georgian Bay is the only Great Lake that does not border the U.S. It is the only Great Lake that stands to lose its water as a function of glacial isostatic adjustment. It is the most pristine and species-diverse Great Lake, and home to more threatened, at-risk and endangered land and water critters than all the others. And helping Georgian Bay would not hurt the other interests in the system if the control points could prevent both high- and low-water level extremes.

The political climate here and in the U.S. is not well disposed to big engineering projects right now, except maybe pipelines. And multi-lake regulation wouldn’t deliver the kind of flashy cash-infusion that a big public-private venture like a casino-hotel complex might, but here’s why we should care:

The GTA is predicted to grow from six million to 9.2 million by 2036. We hold our environment, especially the best and brightest parts of it, in trust for all those people. Georgian Bay carries a cultural importance that archeological masterpieces do in other countries; it is the signature landscape for one of most important artistic movements in this country, the Group of Seven.

We can’t and we shouldn’t stand by while Georgian Bay washes away.

-Penny Pepperell is a member of the board of directors of Georgian Bay Forever. www.georgianbayforever.org