The only river in the country with a heritage designation that’s accessible by public transit, this torrent collects water from 750 creeks and tributaries and is part of the historic Toronto Carrying-Place Trail used by First Nations before European settlement.
One would imagine that this vital waterway touching the lives of thousands of city people would warrant a supreme level of eco-protection. Once it did, but not any more.
There’s been a lot of fuss around the sweeping changes made to the Navigable Waters Protection Act in Bill C-45 and its effective deregulation of contamination in resource country, but there’s been little focus on the bill’s implications for urban rivers.
Enter the Respect Our Rivers campaign. On Saturday morning, June 8, in Etienne Brulé Park, NDP MP Peggy Nash, Parkdale-High Park councillor Sarah Doucette, artist/ecologist Madeleine McDowell and Toronto and Region Conservation Authority board member Mike Mattos gathered to promote private member’s Bill C-502 seeking the reinstatement of Humber protection in the act, and to launch a matching petition.
The legislative bid, introduced by MP Mike Sullivan in April, proposes amendments to the Conservatives’ Navigation Protection Act (which replaces the Navigable Waters Protection Act of 1882), a rejigged law that, according to enviros, excludes 99 per cent of Canada’s waters from environmental regulation.
“There was no consultation. No one was asked about the pros and cons of taking this river out of the act,” says Nash. “We’ll be going door to door to raise the profile of this issue.”
As part of its connection to Lake Ontario, the Humber from its mouth to Bloor is still protected under the new act; it’s the river from there north to Dufferin County that will have no federal oversight.
What this means is that if a company wants to build on or near the river outside the protected section, it no longer needs an environmental assessment – part of the Conservatives’ program to streamline industrial development. Then there’s Enbridge’s plan to reverse the flow of Line 9 to send oil sands crude east from Sarnia to Montreal, a pipeline that crosses the Humber.
Under the old act, projects such as this would trigger an approval study in accordance with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
According to ecologist McDowell, the river is “very precious, absolutely drop-dead beautiful.” A few minutes ago, she said, “we saw a white-tailed deer crossing. There was a Great Egret standing on the other side fishing. This is the largest watershed in the GTA.”
At Transport Canada, which administers the Navigation Protection Act, a spokesperson says the changes were necessary to update the act’s role in protecting navigation. According to media rep Kelly Jones, the purpose was to protect bodies that were then deemed navigable, and many of the water bodies protected under the old act are not seen as such any longer.
“The waterways listed in the schedule of the act were chosen based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Canadian Hydrographic Service data, Canada’s nautical charts, Statistics Canada data on freight movement and historical data tracking which waterways are most actively used,” she says.
The upshot of the change, though, is that most lakes, rivers and streams will no longer be safeguarded by enviro assessment processes. But while no federal laws will watch over the Humber north of Bloor, Nash points out that citizens can still take action by going to court and filing a case in common law.
Bill C-502 is now making its way through the House, but it’s unlikely to pass – unless, of course, there’s lots of noise. “I don’t think the Conservatives are going to wake up one morning and suddenly decide, ‘We made a mistake. We’re going to protect the Humber River,’” says Nash. “I do believe that with enough citizen pressure they might see they acted too quickly.”
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Chris Riddell
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