Although phosphorus had been recognized as a major polluter of Lake Winnipeg and one that contributes to frequent and extensive algal blooms, there has been little progress on limiting its discharge into the lake.
The nutrient is the main culprit in the degradation of water quality, but the 10th largest freshwater lake in the world is also being imperilled by a slew of other pollutants.
Several presenters spoke about the degradation of the lake at the Coalition to Save Lake Winnipeg’s public meeting held Sept. 23 at the Gimli Recreation Centre.
The coalition, a grassroots organization formed in 2019 in Silver Harbour, brought in representatives from the Manitoba Eco-Network, the Lake Winnipeg Foundation, The East Interlake Watershed District, the Canada Water Agency, renowned water scientist Dr. Eva Pip, the City of Selkirk’s utilities manager and a commercial fisher to deliver a progress report on the lake and answer residents’ questions.
“Our lake has suffered a lot of abuse over the years,” said Silver Harbour resident and coalition member Fred Veldink. “What we’d like to see happening in future is reliance on traditional knowledge and practices, the experience of fishers and contributions from modern science … that will lead to a healthier Lake Winnipeg.”
Veldink said the coalition encourages residents to take a more active role by lobbying local and higher levels of government to take action on the lake or write letters to newspapers.
Glen Koroluk from the Manitoba Eco-Network said nutrient concentrations in the lake remain elevated. A 2022 report from the province states that between 1994 and 2021 there has been an average of 5,000 tonnes of phosphorus per year entering the lake via four major tributaries.
And part of the solution is to target the known sectors contributing to the pollution, including the agricultural industry.
“Agriculture is Manitoba’s largest resource industry and food producing is Manitoba’s largest manufacturing sector. It’s a huge industry,” said Koroluk. “There’s a lot of money in that system that we should be drawing on to help us fix some of these problems. The reality is agrifood production is Manitoba’s largest polluter of water, largest consumption user of water and the largest polluter of the air through greenhouse gas emissions…. Agriculture is also the largest degrader of land.”
In addition to phosphorus from Manitoba’s agricultural sector, Koroluk said phosphorus enters the province from other provinces and U.S. states. Targets to limit phosphorus entering Canada at the border were established by the Red River Watershed Board under the International Joint Commission, but as yet there is no signed agreement.
“We need to get some sort of agreement and we need to have an action plan developed,” said Koroluk. “We have to reduce our phosphorus by 50 per cent. That has to be somehow enforceable.”
Cheryl Bailey from the Lake Winnipeg Foundation said that based on water research carried out in the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario, algal blooms can be “effectively controlled by reducing phosphorus inputs” into freshwater lakes.
“Researchers showed that reducing nitrogen did not reduce algal blooms as many algae can get the nitrogen they need from the atmosphere,” said Bailey. “This is why our efforts and policies should focus on reducing phosphorus.”
One of the large contributors to phosphorous in Lake Winnipeg is Winnipeg’s North End Water Pollution Control Centre, she said. The wastewater plant must be brought into compliance with phosphorus limits set by the provincial government.
The maximum limit for phosphorus in the plant’s effluent is set at 1.0 mg/L to reduce algal blooms in Lake Winnipeg. But the plant’s phosphorus concentrations are “consistently three to four times higher than that limit,” said Bailey. “Two provincial deadlines for compliance have been missed over the past two decades and still we’ve seen no meaningful progress to meeting the phosphorus requirement.”
Retired University of Winnipeg professor and water scientist Dr. Eva Pip, who has published research on water quality in Lake Winnipeg, said most people see the visible problems on the lake such as algal blooms and zebra mussels. But there’s a smorgasbord of other human-caused sources of pollution damaging the lake and those have to be addressed along with phosphorus.
They include domestic sewage, which contains “every contaminant that there is,” hospital waste, synthetic chemicals, PFOAs [forever chemicals that don’t break down in the environment] Teflon, flame retardants, disinfectants, triclosan, phthalates (used in plastics), pharmaceuticals, WD40, Glyphosate, detergents, copper added to pig feed, animal manure and logging operations, all of which can have deleterious impacts on aquatic organisms.
“Agriculture is an important industry here in terms of crops and intensive animal production, and this is a very large contributor of nutrients as well as other chemicals and toxic pesticides, which are formulations of all sorts of chemicals,” said Dr. Pip. “Hog manure lagoons can leach into rivers and streams and ditches and into Lake Winnipeg. It’s sprayed on fields in the fall after the crops are taken off and there’s no crop to assimilate the manure. In spring it gets flushed off the fields.”
Dr. Pip said it’s a common practice to illegally dump hog manure (which contains phosphorus and other contaminants) into the environment as there’s not enough land to deal with it.
“There is illegal manure dumping. We have so much shit in Manitoba that there’s often not enough land to apply it on. So you’ll often find operators dumping it or leaving it here and there,” said Dr. Pip, who showed attendees photos of illegal dumping. “In the Rivers area, I observed a truck that just left the lagoon after it filled up with manure and it was driving along a municipal road just dumping it off there. In the Interlake area [here’s] a manure dump into a wildlife refuge area. These barns and manure belong to a prominent politician.”
Biodiversity has declined in Lake Winnipeg and a number of freshwater species have already disappeared, said Dr. Pip.
“The government has to recognize and acknowledge the problems in order to address them. We cannot deny these problems and say everything is fine and it will fix itself. No, it won’t. Not without our help. We have to admit our blind spots,” she said. “We have to talk about taboo topics which we are reluctant to talk about.”
East Interlake Watershed District manager Armand Belanger said the federal government is providing funding over the next few years that will be put towards projects targeted at farmers to help slow down the movement of phosphorus from the land to the lake.
The federal government also created a Canada Water Agency and launched a Freshwater Action Plan that aims to improve freshwater management in Canada and address major pollution issues on the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg, Lake of the Woods and the St. Lawrence, Fraser and Mackenzie rivers.
“It’s increasingly apparent that we have extreme events more frequently and more intense. They’ve had an impact on human health, public safety and the environment, and we can’t continue on the same track we’re on. We need to do something about it,” said Ute Holweger, senior advisor with the Canada Water Agency. “That’s exacerbated through the effects of climate change.”
Lake Winnipeg commercial fisher Robert T. Kristjanson, who is 90 years old and has fished since he was a boy, has been sounding the alarm on algal blooms and the lake’s degradation for about 40 years, trying to get more buy-in from people living around the lake in order to compel the provincial government to take action.
“As a fisherman, I was out this morning north of Hecla and I would have liked to have had the mayor of Winnipeg and 10 mayors before him and shoved their heads into the water,” said Kristjanson, referring yet another algal bloom in the tourist region. “When are we going to stand up and say enough is enough? We got only a million and a half people in Manitoba but we’ve managed to pollute the water all the way to the Arctic Circle.”
With residential and cottage developments proceeding apace along the lakeshore from Netley to Balaton Beach (in the Municipality of Bifrost-Riverton), Kristjanson said the pollution in the lake will only get worse.
“You walk down to the water and you can’t go into it. Everyone of you has children and grandchildren like I have. What have we done to them? Can’t we understand what we’re doing to ourselves? We are the ones to blame. Now is the time for us to smarten up and do something,” he said.
During the question and answer portion of the meeting, attendees asked why there were no municipal and provincial politicians / representatives in attendance.
The coalition had sent out invitations to local and provincial politicians, said Veldink, but none apart from one Winnipeg Beach council member, Interlake-Gimli MLA candidate Sarah Pinsent-Bardarson and Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman MP James Bezan showed up.
Express photos by Patricia Barrett
