When push comes to shove

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2024 (862 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s dreadful sewage debacle has reached a point at which the status quo won’t cut it.

Too much tainted water has flowed under the bridge in the last few years and the inevitable has occurred in the form of a legal challenge.

Year after year, the city has received a pass on what should be ironclad environmental regulations from both the provincial and federal governments. The master plan formulated in 2019 by the Texas firm Jacob’s engineering, has met its Water(loo).

The plan itself has merit and there are several aspects that should definitely continue but the timeline, implementation of green infrastructure and order of operations must be rejigged and supplemented to immediately address disastrous releases of sewage.

Ultimately Lake Winnipeg, considered one of the most threatened lakes in Canada, and those that depend on clean water from it, are paying the price for shoddy and incompetent planning.

The $4-billion lawsuit initiated by eight First Nations is a shove that should bring about change.

Governments that have made the laws and neglected to enforce them will now have an expensive legal battle using tax dollars that should have gone into preventing these discharges. Treaties that promised the protection of the lake have been violated and justice will need to be done.

This challenge will make officials stand up and take notice after decades of quiescence.

Tracy Schmidt, our new environment minister who proclaimed that we need to protect the health of our rivers and lakes because “water is life,” has kept a low profile on this file since February’s filthy fecal disaster.

If water is indeed life, what we are doing to our waterways is tantamount to murder. As a member of the kayaking community, she will find that she is now paddling upstream against those bands that she referred to as “protectors and the stewards of our land and waters.”

This legal shove may spur the minister into action. Call in the best minds from the University’s engineering department, compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with this problem, convene a meeting of Manitoba’s finest engineers and then bring in all the stakeholders in a co-operative problem solving effort.

Only then can we change the dialogue from adversarial to collaborative.

Over the last 20 years, there have been 356 unplanned spills, resulting in billions of litres of untreated waste water being released into our waterways. These frequencies and quantities are not simple accidents that are a result of bad luck. No, this is “the” accepted contingency for a system that is broken, too expensive to fix and will take too long to repair.

A lack of money and no reasonable timeline are the tenets around which the master plan is based, the upshot of which is a completion objective of 2095. Since the big spill at the Fort Garry bridge, there have been additional spills on a monthly basis due to power failures and blockages which are now documented and announced in “untreated sewage report notifications.” (https://communications.winnipeg.ca/subscribe-untreated-sewage-reports).

It is no wonder that Coun. Brian Mayes, chair of the water and waste committee, has asked for a report on wastewater retention.

His idea is to increase capacity using storage tunnels that can improve the system’s ability to handle unplanned events and eventually treat all water before release to the rivers. This can be done in the near future with a reasonable cost that can be shared by all three levels of government. There are many other concepts that address the drainage of water from our concrete urban environment and which desperately need to be implemented, post haste.

Municipalities across this country have been provided federal funds for housing with strings attached, yet the most fundamental condition of any building has to be an adequate infrastructure.

Sewers are the elephant in the room. Development in communities with inadequate infrastructure is not sustainable, yet we continue to build. Building permits must include every available means to reduce runoff and conserve water as a requirement.

The push by those who have called for change in the way we treat our waterways has now turned into a $4-billion shove that cannot be ignored.

Let’s hope the minister has brought along her paddle and a kayak full of ideas for manoeuvring this file upstream.

Dave Taylor has drawn attention to the pollution of rivers in Manitoba for several decades and is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press. Please see his blog at https://wpgsewage.wordpress.com