A longtime rural resident, I use my 60 plus years of life learning to opinionate here and elsewhere on the “interweb” on everything from politics to environmental issues. A believer in reasonable discourse rather than unhelpful attacks I try to give positive input to the blogesphere, so feel free to comment upon rural issues or anything else posted here. But don’t be surprised if you comments get zapped if you are not polite in your replys.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Thousands of Lakes and Rivers left unprotected.

This from the Sixth Estate which deserves to be re-posted in full
As I noted previously, the Navigable Waters Act is being renamed the Navigation Protection Act and the environmental protection which the federal government once extended, basically, to any body of water you could paddle a canoe on is now being restricted to a special shortlist of 62 rivers and 97 lakes (plus the three oceans). In a country that has tens of thousands of rivers and lakes, obviously this is going to involve a great deal of environmental and legislative carnage. Last post, I noted that this removed the majority of Canada’s longest rivers from protection under the navigable waters law.
Today I’d like to do the same thing for lakes. According to Wikipedia, Canada has about 32,000 lakes “larger than three square kilometres” and 561 lakes “larger than 100″ square kilometres. The first list is obviously too long to go into here: it goes without saying that 97 out of 32,000 is not very impressive. (Plus there are some that are not that large yet still are protected: for instance, the Conservatives took special care to protect a small puddle in the middle of Ottawa called Dow’s Lake, which I can’t imagine is that large, though I could be wrong.) There’s not even any point working with the list of 561 lakes, since I can already tell you without looking that more than 85% of them can’t be on the list, mathematically speaking.
What we can do, though, is look at Natural Resources Canada’s list of lakes over 400 square kilometres — that is, the very largest lakes in Canada. From there, we can see that the federal government has failed to include three of B.C.’s five largest lakes (Babine, Atlin, and Ootsa); all of Alberta’s largest lakes; and, as with the rivers, has all but written off the northern territories as free and ungoverned.
For strict comparison purposes, I decided to shorten the list even further, to just those lakes over 1000 square kilometres. Only 15 of Canada’s 43 largest lakes — lakes over 1000 square kilometres — are now protected as navigable waters. Those that didnt’ make the cut include lakes Aberdeen, Bras D’Or, Lesser Slave, Lac la Ronge, Cree Lake, the Gouin Reservoir, Lac Seul, Lac Mistassini, and the Smallwood Reservoir, Lac Manicouagan, and the Robert Bourassa reservoir.

What more can be said the attack upon the environmental protection of our Natural Heritage by the Harper Regimen continues without pause.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Protected from what?

Rural said...

Anonymous said...

Protected from what?
If you have to ask then obviously you are living is some kind of dream world where your drinking water comes out of the tap by some kind of miraculous alchemy and industry (and ships and boaters) never allows chemicals to flow into our streams and rivers. I do hope when you wake up Canada remains one of the world largest sources of DRINKABLE fresh water and our diverse bounty of wildlife are still here for our grandchildren!

Anonymous said...

They are no longer protected for transportation
purposes.thats all.
no effect to the environmental
protection act,
no effect to the species at risk act,
no effect to the fisheries act. everything is still protected. since the act was established in 1882 and since then there is a
couple of us have switched from canoes to cars it probably wont impact you. it certainly wont impact your drinking water.

Rural said...

Anon. You are correct in that the NWPA did not DIRECTLY protect these things, however any project affecting navigable water was subject to automatic public consultation and or notifications that streams and rivers now removed from that designation will not be. Such construction (which of course includes pipelines) can and usually does effect the water quality in the waters concerned and may have in the past triggered an EPA but now will not!