Ontario, Manitoba Move To Save World-Renown Environmental Research Area From Harper Government Axe

By Doug Draper

It may have come a couple days late for Earth Day this April 22 but these days, any good news on the green front is a blessing – whenever it comes and however tentative it may be.

Science interns monitoring conditions at the Experimental Lakes Area in Northern Ontario.

This news – and we need to be cautious here until we know the money will come – involves an agreement the provincial governments of Ontario and Manitoba announced this April 24 to keep open the world-renown “Environmental Lakes Area” near the Manitoba border in northwestern Ontario.

You may recall that last year Canada’s Stephen Harper government decided it that it was going cut by the end of this March the roughly $2 million it costs to annually operate the ELA – a cluster of more than 50 pristine lakes that have been used by federal and provincial scientists, and other researchers around the world to generate research on everything from acid rain and phosphorus/algae pollution in rivers and lakes, to the impact of climate change on water bodies like the Great Lakes.

Since then thousands of scientists and environmental activists across Canada and around the world have called on government leaders to keep this unique natural research area open, and it looks like the governments of Ontario and Manitoba have listened.

Although the details remain sketchy, Ontario and Manitoba appear to be prepared to provide some support to the ELA while a longer term funding program is put in place. A Manitoba-based not-for-profit organization, the International Institute for Sustainable Development is also working with the provinces to save the research area.

One might ask why the province of Ontario doesn’t simply say it will pay the annual $2 million cost. It is a mere fraction of the more than $200 million former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty decided to spend to scrap plans more than a year ago to construct new gas-fired energy plants in Oakville and Mississauga to help save a couple of Liberal government seats in the last provincial election. That kind of money could keep this research program alive well past the middle of this century.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said the following of the Experimental Lakes Area this April 24; “I don’t believe that either provincially, regionally, or nationally and internationally we can afford to let it go.”

“My fear would be that if we don’t continue this research, we’re going to have to recreate it at some point down the line,” Wynne added. “The ELA is very important to us as a government that believes in science, that believes in evidence.”

Wynne’s comments seem to answer scientists and others who accused the federal government of withdrawing its financial support because it is not open to any scientific results that might conflict with its desire to support further development of the tar sands in Alberta.

The federal government said it would go looking for some other body, possibly a private one, to continue with the ELA but nothing has materialized to date.

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