Jet Boats Will Continue To Ply Or Plague The Lower Niagara River – Depending On Your View – Thanks To An Ontario Court Decision

By Doug Draper

A few years back, I descended steps leading down the steep gorge walls of the lower Niagara River with retired Niagara Parks naturalist Robert Ritchie for a tour of one of the few remaining places that can give a person some idea of what this magnificent river must have looked like before the first white settlers showed up in the area.

A Jet Boat, roaring toward the whirlpool rapids of the lower Niagara River early last spring in this file photo by Doug Draper.

That place is on Niagara Parks-owned land and is known as the Niagara Glen – a rich, relatively undisturbed oasis of green along a river corridor that has otherwise been a setting for almost every kind of development imaginable, good, bad and ugly.

As we wound our way down stoney paths, past all of the rare and unique plants, trees  and rock formations the Glen has to offer, Ritchie had just finished telling me there was something almost spiritual about this place when the sound of rushing water below us was masked out by the roar of engines and a voice booming through a bullhorn.

As birds scattered from their nesting places in the trees above us, I looked down on the river and there was another ‘Jet Boat’ loaded with tourists, wide-eyed and grinning as if they were on a giant coaster ride at the Darien Lake amusement park.

You may know by now that Whirlpool Jet Boat Tours won a decision in the Ontario Court of Appeal earlier this March, allowing it to keep zooming up and down the waters of the lower Niagara again this spring and summer. It is a decision that may very well be legally correct from the standpoint of the Ontario courts, but it is a sad one for anyone and everyone on both sides of the binational border interested in protecting and preserving what is left of a Niagara River corridor that is, after all, an international icon.

Environmentalists on New York side of Niagara River greeted Jet Boat passengers with this protest banner six years ago.

The appeal court’s decision concludes, in part, that the Niagara River has “a long history of marine and commercial use.” And of course it does, going back to the days when wooden ships docked in the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario and Youngstown, New York areas to let off passengers and goods for earlier settlers there.

But does that include any consideration of vessels now capable of ploughing their way through the torrid rapids of the lower river closer to Queenston, Ontario and Lewiston, New York, like a bullet from a Magnum pistol can shatter concrete blocks? How does any consideration of the impacts these vessels can have on what is left of the natural Niagara River corridor and an international designated corridor for birds and other wildlife compare with any ‘marine and commercial uses’ in the past?

There seems no consideration of that in the decision the Ontario appeals court delivered, and one cannot help but wonder. Given that this is an international river, where does an Ontario court get off making a ruling on what may be the best uses for it in the first place? Shouldn’t an international body – most obviously the International Joint Commission and its science advisory board, as a Canada/U.S. body on protecting and preserving our boundary waters – be ruling on matters of this nature?

After all the continued operation of these amusement boats – and that is what they are – through a world-renown river corridor should be a matter of international concern.

And finally, where is the mainstream media on raising these concerns. I can tell you, in disgust, that I have worked in newsrooms where reporters that are supposed to be covering the story of jet boats and their place on this river have taken free rides on these boats. I have heard them walking back into the newsroom and saying – ‘wow, that is a cool ride. If you get a chance to go, take it.’

Now how many questions do you think that reporter is going to ask about how the noise from the jacked-up motors of these jet boats is going to have on re-establishing, for the first time in more than half a century, nesting pairs of bald eagles along the Niagara River corridor?  I would suggest they are going to ask practically none. And they won’t ask many questions on any other matters that might interfere with a jet cruise up to the whirlpool waters of the river either.

So the jet boats keep on jetting and I would argue that the only thing that is going to stop them is an international ruling that may have something to do with the IJC and our 101-year old Canada-U.S. Boundary Waters Treaty or just you and I, and the rest of us finally saying ‘no’ to turning some of our last sacred natural places like this into amusement parks.

(click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large for news and commentary on this and related matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara region.)