Ottawa promises $18M for Lake Winnipeg cleanup

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This article was published 03/08/2012 (5053 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GIMLI — Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with an entourage of MPs, cabinet ministers and senators in tow, pledged $18 million to clean up Lake Winnipeg but wouldn’t throw the Experimental Lakes Area a lifeline.

“We are leaving our bit of the world a better place,” Harper said at a press conference at a hotel on the shore of Lake Winnipeg.

Outside, demonstrators carrying signs — some wearing bikinis — protested his government’s decision to pull the plug on funding for the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario.

“The ELA is pivotal to the health of Lake Winnipeg,” the leader of the Coalition to Save the ELA, Diane Orihel, said outside the hotel after the prime minister’s announcement.

The experimental lakes were set up in the 1960s to study algae blooms on Lake Erie, she said. ELA staff were responsible for surveys of Lake Winnipeg in the 1960s and were instrumental in discovering the major changes in Lake Winnipeg following the 1997 Red River flood.

Massive blooms of blue-green algae plague Lake Winnipeg every summer, Orihel said. Algal blooms kill fish, increase the cost of water treatment, devalue shoreline properties and pose health risks to children, pets and livestock, said the University of Alberta doctoral student.

She and Manitoba Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard applauded funds for researching and cleaning up Lake Winnipeg but want Ottawa to save and support the experimental lakes research as well.

“It’s positive support for Lake Winnipeg but we also need support for the Experimental Lakes Area,” Gerrard said next to the beach at Gimli.

The ELA’s 58 northwestern Ontario lakes are a world-class institution at the forefront of understanding algal blooms and the Conservative government is shutting it down, Orihel said.

In Gimli Thursday, Harper was only promising money for Lake Winnipeg to “turn science into action.”

The funding is for the second phase of the Lake Winnipeg cleanup initiative that began in 2006, when it looked like “it was the beginning of the end for Lake Winnipeg,” Harper said.

With half of the algae-blooming nutrients in the lake coming from outside of Manitoba, co-ordinating the cleanup has been a major undertaking involving four provinces and four U.S. states, he said.

For every dollar Ottawa spends, the province and other partners in the cleanup pitch in $2, he said.

The “national treasure” supports $100 million in tourism and a $50-million commercial fishery that produces one-quarter of Canada’s freshwater fish.

The press conference on the eve of Gimli’s Icelandic festival was attended by cabinet ministers Lisa Raitt and Vic Toews and several Manitoba MPs, including Conservative MP James Bezan (Selkirk-Interlake).

Save the ELA coalition leader Orihel took Bezan to task for comments he reportedly made last week that “research is best served by working on exactly where the problem lies.”

Orihel said Bezan is incorrect. Restoring Lake Winnipeg will require a combination of monitoring the state of the lake and performing controlled experiments in model systems to test hypotheses concerning the causes and solutions to the lake’s poor health. The coalition says the Conservatives are creating a false dichotomy, pitting funding for Lake Winnipeg against funding for ELA.

“Much of the fundamental understanding of nutrient management in lakes so critical to the recovery of Lake Winnipeg has and is being developed at the ELA,” Ray Hesslein, Lake Winnipeg Foundation Science Advisory Board, said in a prepared statement.

The one-of-a-kind ELA field research station is run by federal government scientists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg.

» Winnipeg Free Press