A Brief History of Lake Ontario and Lake Ontario Waterkeeper

In May 2000, seven people died after drinking tap water contaminated with animal waste in the town of Walkerton, Ontario. The water source was a well located in an agricultural field that received cattle manure. During a period of heavy, prolonged rainfall, some of that manure seeped into the well. The well head had not been properly maintained. Furthermore, the water destined for the town was not regularly tested for bacteria by municipal staff and disinfected as needed, due to negligence on the part of the responsible officials. This caused public outrage; there was an inquiry with far-reaching recommendations on protecting Ontario’s waters. One could say that the Walkerton tragedy and subsequent inquiry served as a wake-up call to educate the public at large about the importance of protecting our water sources. In 2001, with the support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his global Waterkeeper network, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper was created as an independent charity dedicated to a swimmable, drinkable, fishable Lake Ontario.

Lake Ontario Waterkeeper is a Canadian charity that believes a healthier Lake Ontario is possible. What is needed is the right mix of sound environmental policy, transparent and informed decision-making, public education, and community-building programs. Their advocacy on the water health front also covers a myriad of broader concerns for the Great Lakes, including microplastic pollution, pipeline and nuclear plant regulation, waste management, and attention to endangered species such as the American Eel.

The necessity of an organization like Lake Ontario Waterkeeper testifies to the fact that, despite being one of the largest lakes in the world, Lake Ontario has felt severe effects within a scant 350 years of human development and industrialization. These have affected the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Lake, with major impacts on the many species that rely on the Lake.

Twelve thousand years ago, there was no Lake Ontario, just a two-kilometre-thick sheet of ice over top of everything that we now consider familiar. The climate warmed rapidly around 10,000–11,000 years ago, and the Laurentide Ice Sheet started to retreat. Lake Ontario began to form as meltwater filled in a large depression in the Earth’s surface. The Lake changed shape many times over the intervening millennia, until it assumed its present shape around 4,000 years ago. As the ice sheet melted, plants and animals moved northward into a barren landscape uncovered by the retreating ice. Human settlement followed as Indigenous peoples followed wildlife and settled in areas to farm.

The human impact on Lake Ontario and its watershed was minimal, as Indigenous farmers practiced an early form of sustainable, nomadic agriculture, allowing the land to return to forest as villages moved on. Thus, consumption of fish and game always remained at healthy, subsistence levels.

In the mid-1600s, European settlers began to clear the land for permanent farms. As a result, streams became blocked with sediment from cleared lands; stream bank and shoreline erosion occurred on a large scale around the watershed. Fish migration up the numerous streams emptying into Lake Ontario was impeded because they had been dammed for the production of water power.

By the 1800s, Toronto, Hamilton, and Rochester had become important commercial centres because of the abundance of clean, free water and cheap land available to settlers. Soon enough, Lake Ontario began to see uncontrolled pollution from domestic and industrial sewage discharge. Typhoid and cholera outbreaks occurred, attributable to untreated sewage. The fishery in Lake Ontario collapsed because of overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, and invasion by the sea lamprey.

Responding to growing concerns about water management and health, in 1909 the British and US governments signed the Boundary Waters Treaty to regulate disputes about the management of the shared waters from coast to coast, including the Great Lakes (with the British acting on behalf of Canada). Over the first half of the twentieth century, sewage treatment plants were built, drinking water was disinfected, and some industrial discharges were regulated. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s, pollution from nutrients in domestic sewage and agricultural runoff had turned Lake Ontario into an algae soup. Dead fish washed ashore every spring and summer, and beaches were unusable most of the summer. This untenable situation led the US and Canadian governments, in 1972, to sign the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the purpose of which was to restore the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem (including, of course, Lake Ontario). Since then, there have been three subsequent agreements, each designed to improve upon the previous one to address more complex issues. The 2012 Agreement is the most recent and comprehensive, dealing with habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change, newer pollutants such as hormone-mimicking chemicals, personal care products, and microplastics, as well as other issues that need to be managed to restore Lake Ontario to health.

“Fixing” Lake Ontario is neither simple nor a short-term project. It is a complex, multi-generational series of actions that requires the engagement of all citizens of the Lake Ontario watershed. While the two federal governments and their state, provincial, municipal, and First Nations partners have done much to reverse 350 years of damage, there is still much more to be done—some of which through not-for-profit organizations such as

Lake Ontario Waterkeeper. Their role in public education is vital in addressing the challenges facing Lake Ontario, since citizen action is such an important adjunct to government action. The Clean Water Workshop, one of Waterkeepers’ longest running and most successful initiatives, mentors university students with a passion for environmental law and watershed protection. This is an important initiative to engage young people in learning how to adopt practical solutions to complex problems that threaten the Lake. Another valuable project is the reporting of water pollution to Lake Ontario Waterkeeper directly. Citizens can play an active role in assisting governments in reducing and eliminating pollution through such projects. One thing that we have learned since the signing of the first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972 is that engaging citizens is essential for the success of any restoration or protection project. Waterkeepers has provided a solid platform for citizens to learn about problems, develop ideas about how to deal with those problems, apply those solutions, recommend to governments that they be applied, and follow the response of the Lake to those solutions.