Daily Archives: February 17, 2010

By Doug Draper

A year ago last June, Hillary Clinton walked halfway across the Rainbow Bridge from the American side of the Niagara River to announce that, at long last, the United States was ready to work with Canada to renegotiate the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Hillary Clinton, America's Secretary of State, on the Rainbow Bridge between Niagara Falls U.S. and Canada last June, announcing plans to renegotiate the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Photo by Doug Draper.

On that 13th day of June – celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Canada-U.S. Boundary Waters Treaty as one of the precedent-setting international agreements for protecting the health of shared natural resources in the world – Canadian and U.S. environmentalists around the Great Lakes applauded. They had been urging their respective governments to update the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (first signed in 1972 and last amended in 1987) for years to better address the kinds of pollutants and their sources, the alien species like zebra mussels and Asian carp, and other threats that could ravage these great reservoirs of fresh water today and for generations to come .

But eight months after America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made the announcement to renegotiate this groundbreaking treaty to protect and preserve the world’s largest resource of fresh water, it looks like the tens-of-millions of U.S. and Canadian residents living around the lakes might be shut out from the talks. Continue reading →

 By John Bacher

One of the great tragedies in the effort to construct an 821-acre ‘Canadian Motorway Speedway’ on agriculturally zoned and designated lands in Fort Erie is that the scheme rips through the heart of one of the most intact areas of Carolinian forest in all of Canada.

It also rips through the heart of the planning laws that seek to protect it. 

Dave and Sandy Mitchell of Fort Erie enjoy some rural peace, while they can, near their home, less than a mile away from the proposed Nascar speedway in Fort Erie.

The area east of the Welland Canal and between the Niagara River in our region has the largest remaining concentration of the most biologically diverse woodlands in Canada – our equivalent of tropical rainforests. This precious mosaic of farmland and forests, repaired from past ecological abuse through the influence of one of Fort Erie’s greatest residents, the pioneer forester Edmund Zavitz, is now threatened by a bizarre “NASCAR-like” motorway complex – a complex that includes an associated mix of shopping centres, and a camp ground for speedway worshippers. Continue reading →