TORONTO, December 17, 2001 -- A new report on water quality assessment in Ontario shows a drastic decline in both levels of testing and monitoring of lakes and rivers, while the amount of reported pollutants released into surface waters has more than doubled.

The report, Liquid Assets: Monitoring Water Quality in Ontario, produced by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy (CIELAP) and members of the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) at York University, concludes that the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) is not sufficiently funded to enable it to determine whether water quality in the province’s surface and ground waters meets safety guidelines for environmental health. It says the MOE does not adequately inform the private sector and the public about environmental quality.

The study provides hard evidence in support of the January 2001 Gibbons report commissioned by Premier Mike Harris, that the MOE has not invested adequately in a modern monitoring program for watercourses draining into the Great Lakes relative to other comparable jurisdictions in the United States. The study excluded drinking water because of the current Walkerton Inquiry into the safety of Ontario’s drinking water.

Among the report’s findings:

• pollutant discharges to Ontario surface waters either directly or through spills and leaks were reported at about 5,000 tonnes in 1995, rising to just under 12,000 tonnes in 1999. Those pollutants do not include human and animal fecal waste and pesticides in agricultural runoff.
• almost 50 per cent of the sites for sampling water quality have been eliminated since 1995.
• funding allocated to wages and salaries at the MOE dropped 27 per cent between 1995/96 and 1999/00, indicating a large drop in the number of professional and technical staff at the Ministry.
• Ministry investigations of environmental law violations were relatively constant between 1991 and 1995, averaging 1,500 annually. They dropped by 39 per cent between 1996 and 1998. Charges laid during the earlier period were also constant, then dropped by 50 per cent in the period 1996 to 1998. A decline in staff contributed to the erosion in enforcement activity.

• the provincial government discontinued publication of data reports gathered by its Provincial Water Quality Monitoring Network (PWQMN) in 1990. To see this data the public must file a request under the Freedom of Information Act, a costly and time consuming process providing data in raw form that can only be analyzed by experts.
• there is no systematic chemical monitoring of organic contaminants in the Grand River watershed, even though aquatic contamination is widespread there. The situation is likely similar for other watersheds.

The report is available on the CIELAP website at www.cielap.org and on York’s FES website at www.yorku.ca/fes. The research was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Community University Research Alliance (CURA) - Sustainable Toronto program and with support from the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation.

-30-

For further information, please contact:

Anne Mitchell	Prof. Lewis Molot
Executive Director	Faculty of Environmental Studies
Canadian Institute for Environmental Law & Policy	York University
416-923-3529, ext. 24	416-736-2100, ext. 22613
anne@cielap.org	lmolot@yorku.ca

YU/137/01