I ended my last piece about President Trump’s decision to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” while standing on Wolfe Island, looking across the St. Lawrence River toward Cape Vincent, New York. From Horne’s Point, the distance between Canada and the United States is small. Freighters sail up and down the river to and from the lake, while anglers fish for bass and birds fly over the water feeling the weather change. Regardless of politics, the sun rises in Canada and the United States at this spot at the exact same time. We are connected by our place in the world.

Lately, though, the distance feels wider than the river that separates our countries. Rhetoric has devolved into arguments about trade imbalances, resulting in tariffs and a political scorecard. A relationship built over hundreds of years has been reduced to calling winners and losers based on a trade balance. Looking across the river, it is getting harder to see our neighbour.

According to the President, Canada is “ripping off” Americans. The evidence cited is a trade imbalance showing that Canada sells more to the U.S. than it buys, with a gap of sixty billion dollars a year. That figure is used to prove the U.S. is being taken advantage of. Framed like a sports score, it gives the impression Canada is winning.

But a trading relationship between two countries that share resources, water, power grids, pipelines, telecommunications and a border with hundreds of communities was never meant to be scored that way.

Most of what crosses the border isn’t there because either side is desperate; it is there because both sides want it. The clearest example is energy: Canadian oil, gas and electricity flow south in volumes that keep the American grid and refineries running. This happens not because Washington lacks other options, but because it wants Canadian energy and has built infrastructure around it for decades.

Importantly, when you remove energy from the trade ledger, the picture changes entirely. The relationship becomes balanced and even. Residents on both sides of the border are simply choosing to buy what they want, from each other, in equal dollars, without government intervention. No one is getting ripped off.

So what is this argument really about?

It cannot be about proving whether the United States needs Canada. We all know the U.S. could survive on its own. But needing is not the same as wanting. Wanting means choosing to build a relationship. It is an act of partnership, not necessity.

For more than a century, Canadians and Americans have helped one another through wars, business and natural disasters. We have shared sports, entertainers, inventions and majestic lands and waters. Over time, we built integrated industries stretching from California to British Columbia, Alberta to Texas, Ontario to Michigan and Quebec to New York. We raised power grids, carved out shipping routes and laid down pipelines, railways and highways. We build vehicles together and generate energy together, moving goods across borders so seamlessly that people stopped noticing where one economy ended and the other began.

None of that was forced. It grew out of mutual trust, shared benefit and shared responsibility.

Water connects us in the same way. The water quality and health of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River pay no attention to lines on a map. Water moves where it wants. Fish swim, birds fly and pollution spreads without regard for borders. At least 40 million people depend on these shared waters for drinking, recreation, transportation and their livelihoods. For generations, Canadians and Americans have worked together to keep them clean. Not perfectly, but successfully. When countries share a watershed, they learn that joint stewardship works better than complaints and grievances. For Canada and the U.S., this has been best exemplified by 117 years of the International Joint Commission and agreements like the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The IJC is an institution with 6 commissioners appointed directly and equally by the President and the Prime Minister. 

The lessons of working together are easy to forget when trade disputes are weaponized. Every disagreement brings forth fresh grievances, every imbalance looks like proof of unfairness and both sides begin to view each other through a lens of suspicion. What gets purposefully ignored is what we built together and how much more we can still achieve.

In that light, maybe it’s time to for Canadians and Americans to ask themselves and tell their politicians whether they still choose to build together across our shared border.

Relationships are voluntary; they cannot be forced. Like all healthy communities, we choose to renew or abandon our relationships every day. Let us start there.

Standing on Wolfe Island, looking toward Cape Vincent, I am reminded of visiting upstate New York in the late 1960s. I vividly recall how different it felt yet how close it was to home. At the time, few young men were in the stores and gas stations due to the draft during Vietnam. I saw American flags everywhere and marvelled at the patriotism. I knew family friends who volunteered to fight alongside Americans in a war Canada opposed, just as I know there were many Canadians who volunteered to help the US after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Over the years, I made friends with fishing guides, water guardians and farmers. We felt like family but lived on opposite sides of the border. Our countries were always different but it never felt like a competition. Rather, just people living together with different flags and different leaders. But when the storms roll in, we were always there for each other. The river between us was real, but our connections were what defined us.

As we listen to our leaders argue, we should remember that some relationships are valuable because they are worth choosing, again and again. The real challenge facing our countries today isn’t proving we need each other. It’s proving we still want what we have built together and what we can build in the future.

The citizens of Canada and the United States have a special relationship. No one is getting ripped off. Yes, the U.S. has more money, power and people than Canada, a smaller, hard working neighbour. But that scrappy underdog has supported Americans throughout the world with friendship, resources and partnership for over 150  years.

Isn’t that what everyone wants?

With respect,

The former Lake Ontario Waterkeeper

Former Board Representative of The Great Lakes Water Quality Board

There's going to be plenty said about whether President Trump has the power and support to rename Lake Ontario. Lawyers will study it, so will politicians and constitutional experts. Social media will go off. For me, after twenty years working as the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, protecting the waters of the Great Lakes, it all feels like noise covering up the story that matters most.

Lake Ontario doesn't care that a border is running through it. Every morning it moves through a watershed that Canadians and Americans share, whether or not either country wants to admit it. The lakes supply drinking water to millions of people. They support farms and factories and ports, including the shipping lanes that keep both economies running. They support tourism and the recreation that people build summers around. They connect Toronto to Rochester, Hamilton to Oswego, Kingston to Buffalo, Wolfe Island to Cape Vincent, in ways that have nothing to do with nationalism. Indigenous peoples knew this water and depended on it long before either Canada or the United States existed, which is exactly why Lake Ontario still carries an Indigenous name, that means “Beautiful Waters.” Lake Ontario’s story started before Canada or the United States.

The President’s comment about renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” to get back at Ontario’s premier Doug Ford does bother me. I was never the Lake America Waterkeeper. But more troubling is what the comment implies. Can our shared history on Lake Ontario be treated like a bargaining chip in a trade fight? My sense is that the Great Lakes people are too smart for that, in every sense of the word.

Think about the work that's actually gone into these lakes over the decades and how little of it cared about the border. When pollution was killing the lakes in the 1960s, Canadians and Americans worked together to restore them, side by side. When invasive species started spreading through the system, both countries fought them the same way. When beaches closed or fisheries collapsed or drinking water came under threat, nobody was asking whether the fix should come from Ottawa or Washington. They were asking what work needs to be done. That's not a small thing. It might be one of the best examples of international cooperation we have left. 

The Canadian and American economies are powered by the Great Lakes. The lakes hold a fifth of the world's surface fresh water. They fuel one of the largest regional economies on the planet, with millions of jobs and thousands of communities that depend on the water and each other, every single day. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio are all states that decide American elections as often as not and Ontario's Great Lakes ridings do the same in Canada. And yet, the economic and political weight isn't the most important thing we need to remember about these lakes. What matters more is that they show us that water is bigger than politics.

So the real conversation should not be about re-naming Lake Ontario to flex some muscle. It should be about how we work together to protect the watershed and the people who live here.

Long after this trade dispute gets settled and long after everyone currently looking for political leverage has left office, Lake Ontario will still be here, doing what it's always done. Let’s not waste valuable time playing politics over a name and keep doing the work the lake and the Great Lakes actually make possible for the people that live here. Water has the power to unite people, to make them stronger, to build futures. That is why water is often called beautiful. That is why Lake Ontario.

Ten years ago today, The Tragically Hip played their last show at the K-Rock Centre in Kingston. Gord Downie had told the country he was sick earlier that year. The concert went out live across Canada, commercial free on CBC. Millions watched.

For one night, the country stopped and paid attention together.

CBC is airing it again this Saturday, August 22.

I'll be watching, like a lot of people will be.

But the anniversary has me thinking about more than the music this year.

It's been a quieter August than it would have been ten years ago. My life has shifted. I live on Wolfe Island now and most of what fills my days are important local concerns: reliable ferry service, emergency access, a community fund and sustainable growth. The decades spent overseeing Waterkeeper and Swim Drink Fish shaped how I think about public policy and law, teaching me how long it takes to change things but to never give up. The work is different, but my passion for seeing things change for the better is still with me.

And every year around this time, I think about Gord.

The final show was unforgettable for plenty of reasons that have everything to do with the music and the people. But what I keep remembering most is how I felt after it was all over.

We crossed back to Wolfe Island by boat that night, my family and friends, over to Brophy's Point. A hard wind came off the lake, the kind that tells you summer's about done and autumn is waiting in the wings. Rain came and went. Nobody really slept. We sat on the screened-in porch and let the weather move through, listening to the wind start and stop, none of us wanting the night to end.

I woke up to a grey sky, wondering what came next.

Gord had been part of our work for water for decades. A sounding board, an idea generator, a driver. After an event wrapped up, a court case got decided or a fundraiser came together, he'd send an email. It was almost always some version of the same three things:

Grateful.

What next?

We need more.

I called him a friend from the first conversation we had back at Queen’s University in the early 1980s. We shared an instant, deep love for Kingston, Lake Ontario and good books. He had the qualities people came to know him for long before any of it made him famous: funny, curious, confident without needing you to notice and honest in a way that made room for you to be honest too. Fame didn't change any of that. If anything, it just gave everyone else the chance to see it.

Gord made water a part of so many of his songs. He once sent me a list of 17 tracks he felt were directly inspired by water, asking for thoughts choosing a few to play at an upcoming fundraising event. He talked about "Yer Not The Ocean" as an ongoing argument with the lake: flattering it, insulting it, unable to leave it alone. He figuratively swam in Lake Ontario every day; lucky for us, people now literally do the same at the Gord Edgar Downie Pier on Kingston’s waterfront.

When Gord decided to get serious about environmental protection, he didn't treat it like something to attach his celebrity name to. He showed up. He fundraised, did media, talked fellow artists into caring and stood beside communities that needed backup.

Fewer people know how far he went into the actual legal details.

In 2006, Lafarge got provincial approval to burn scrap tires and waste as fuel at its cement plant in Bath, Ontario, just down the shore from the studio where the Hip recorded. The community was rightly furious about toxic smoke and fly ash runoff threatening the lake and fish. A group of us, alongside lawyers from the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA), used Ontario's Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR) to challenge the approval.

Gord didn't just lend his name. He came to research meetings. He sat through court proceedings, day after day, in the gallery at Osgoode Hall with a legal pad on his knee, taking meticulous notes. On breaks, he'd walk over to the barristers' lounge and go through those notes with us, asking sharp, insightful questions. He wanted to understand the legal doctrine, not just get an email about how things turned out.

That ruling became a landmark precedent for citizen participation under the EBR. Gord understood, better than most, that caring about something and doing the work of it are two different things and only one of them counts.

Over two decades, he helped raise millions of dollars that turned into hundreds of millions in remediation for places like Port Hope, Port Granby, Moncton, Toronto, and Kingston. But the most insightful idea of his wasn’t about law or fundraising. It was about the power of commitment.

Not long after that last Kingston show, Gord traveled with some of his kids up to Camp Onakawana with me and a few other close friends. He had been going up north for years to escape the phones and computers, fish and support the Tozer family’s work with youth from Moosonee and Moose Factory. One night around the fire on the riverbank, a guest asked him how he kept giving so much of himself, show after show, year after year.

He didn't say anything.

He just stood up, walked over to the woodpile, put a few more logs on the fire and sat back down.

That was his whole answer: Do the work. The magic takes care of itself.

I've thought about that fire more times than I can count, especially in the harder stretches of running an environmental organization, when accountants and directors urged you to scale back and only plan for what is already in the bank. Gord never operated that way. He believed meaningful work starts with commitment, not with budget forecasts. Put another log on the fire. Protect the lake. Help the community. Show up. Keep going.

Ten years on, the work is still going. The Lafarge decision still holds. The Swim Guide still serves communities across the country. The Biinaagami project, which Gord would have loved, created alongside Canadian Geographic and Indigenous knowledge keepers, is picking up real momentum across the Great Lakes watershed.

This weekend, millions of people will watch that last concert again. They'll remember the music, the poetry, the band and that voice.

I will too.

But I'll also remember a friend sitting in a courtroom with a legal pad, trying to figure out how to protect a lake he loved. He never treated hope like something you talked about; he treated it like something you did.

I still miss him. And after a good event, a hard legal fight or a win nobody saw coming, I still half-expect the email:

Grateful. What next? We need more.

The work continues. The lake remains. And like a lot of people who got to know him, I'm still standing at the woodpile because he showed us how to build the fire.

Tim Thompson made a short film about Gord’s work for 2018 SDF Gala Gord, The Waterkeeper

Jack Nicklaus came to Wolfe Island in the 1960s to hunt ducks with his uncle, a dentist from the Finger Lakes who organized the trips every fall. He’d never fired a shotgun before that first visit. An island hunting guide, Harold MacLaren, took him out behind the barn at the Mud Island camp, just off Wolfe Island and had him shoot clay birds until he stopped missing. By the end of the weekend he was a great shot. A couple decades later, on national television, one of the greatest golfers who ever lived was asked what he liked to do outside of golf. He said he used to go to a place called Wolfe Island and hunt ducks.

I owe that story to former Kingston CKWS broadcaster Mark Potter, who wrote it up recently for K-Town Sports and another former CKWS sportscaster Max Jackson, who interviewed Nicklaus on the Wolfe Island ferry in 1962. I think about the story often and write about it now not because Jack Nicklaus came here more than once or because I love to play golf now at our own Wolfe Island course called Riverfront golf course.

The reason I think about the Nicklaus visits is that they say something about Wolfe Island that shouldn’t be taken for granted. This is a place worth supporting, starting with the ferries. Kingston, Ottawa, Toronto and Albany all have a hand in whether these connections improve and it deserves more than an afterthought from any of them. We live it and sometimes don’t talk about it enough.

Wolfe Island sits where Lake Ontario narrows into the St. Lawrence River, the connector between the end of the Great Lakes and the beginning of the river to the ocean. A midway point between Toronto and Montreal. A stone’s throw from New York State. People and wildlife have used it forever as a crossing point, the last solid ground before the water opens up. The fresh water that flows around the island was and is drinking water for over 40 million people.

Today the island is mostly working land: hay fields, corn, soy, more recently wind turbines, with fish and birds a-plenty, not to mention Lake Ontario’s best and cleanest beach. It has a currently out of service ferry to Cape Vincent, New York and a village connected to downtown Kingston, Ontario by rotating ferries that are becoming less reliable than in the past. Called Marysville, the village is home to churches, restaurants, a store, a post office, a library, an excellent hockey rink, a well lit baseball diamond and hundreds of people on an island of a few thousand at its busiest times in summer. The island’s shorelines flood in spring and lower in the fall. The waterfront continues to attract large numbers of summer residents and fall duck hunters. Wolfe Island has never tried to be a resort town but really that is part of why it still works.

The Township that holds Wolfe Island is that type of place you only get to know when you are there. As they say: it doesn’t announce itself. The Township of Frontenac and the Islands, holds many islands including Howe Island, Simcoe Island, Horseshoe Island, Garden Island and Main Duck Islands. Each island has a great story.

Main Duck Island for example is a federal park most people in the region have never set foot on. In the 1940s it was owned by John Foster Dulles, who would go on to become U.S. Secretary of State under Eisenhower. He built himself a cabin there with no electricity and swam off the pebble beach. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip picnicked on that same beach in 1984. Parks Canada took the island over in 1977. It sits about 20 kilometres south of Wolfe Island in some of the roughest water on the lake, a graveyard for ships going back two centuries. A pristine and beautiful park sitting quietly not far from a city of 130,000 people, mostly unnoticed.

Main Duck Island

I don’t think this is an accident. Islands are isolated by water. And so it is with Wolfe Island. It relies on a ferry 365 days a year. For Wolfe Island, you need patience in the lineups and trust that government will maintain timely ferry service. Most importantly, when emergencies happen, the time to get help matters most. You can see Kingston General Hospital from the dock on Wolfe Island but it can still take over an hour to get there.

Everyone who has spent time here would live here if they could. Most people can’t, it’s an island, not a subdivision and that’s exactly why the ones who love it, love it the way you love something you earned. No one on Wolfe Island wants that to slip away.

Supporting Wolfe Island with reliable transit and emergency services isn’t about turning the island into something new. It is about preserving a way of life that already works. A place this good, emblematic of Ontario’s rural treasures, deserves better than being an afterthought.

Wolfe Island is close enough to Kingston to feel like part of the city yet far enough across the water, to still feel distant and wild. Migratory birds fly through here every year in flocks and rafts that amaze. Eagles and Ospreys nest along the shore. And the sun on the water at the dawn of the day is enough to make a young golfer remember a duck blind on a small Canadian island for the rest of his life.

As Jack Nicklaus knew, this is a place worth talking about.

(Photo Peter Mattson)

Wolfe Island is and has been a big part of my life, for as long as I can remember.

I’ve lived in several communities in Ontario, but Wolfe Island has always felt like home. My connection to the Island goes back more than 150 years when my family first arrived on the Island. Most of my earliest memories were made at Brophy’s Point, a peninsula at the end of the 10th Line on the St. Lawrence River. That is where I learned to swim, fish and hunt. It is where I discovered how a community supports one another.

What started in summers at a yellow cottage eventually became more permanent. Coming to Queen’s University and starting a law practice in Kingston kept me close to the Island. My wife and I have now built a home here and are proud to be growing deeper roots on the Island. 

Over the years I’ve given back where I could, helping Islanders with legal issues, publishing a summer newspaper, organizing a hockey tournament to support our outdoor rink, co-founding the Wolfe Island Literary Festival. Different projects, same reason, this community has given me a lot and I want to give back.

I’ve worked over three decades as a lawyer, and twenty-five years helping communities connect with and protect the water that flows around our shores. That work took me across Canada and beyond.Today, I hope to dedicate more of my time to serving the community that taught me why that work matters.

 Three priorities keep coming up as I talk to Islanders:

• Reliable and sufficient ferry service

• Emergency services that meet our health and safety needs

• Protection of the rural character that makes Wolfe Island unique and special.

Living on the Island requires collaboration. It takes practical problem solving and a willingness to work with residents, neighbouring municipalities, the province and the federal government. That’s the attitude and experience I will bring to Council if elected. 

A councillor needs to listen, share what they are hearing, respect the office of the Mayor and fellow councillors and support our public servants. The issues are real and the solutions are only possible if we work together. 

Municipal government doesn’t usually make headlines, but it’s where decisions that shape daily life get made including about roads, ferries, recreation centres, schools, libraries, emergency services and planning. It matters because of the critical impacts on people’s lives.

This fall, Wolfe Island will chart its own course for the next four years. I’ve spent much of my life helping others navigate the legal and policy corridors of government. It would be my privilege now to do that for the Island and its people that inspired my love for water and gave me the passion for public service

August is Canada's unofficial swimming month. The time when even the faint hearted are able to muster the courage to jump in the lake, river or ocean at their doorstep. Come to Canada in August and you will see people swimming.

It's impossible to forget the feeling of charging into the water whether you are 5 years old or 55. You are leaving the safety of the land to float in the water world that hides its mysteries well below the waves. And it is strange to think that I used my law degree to build a career around a memory of swimming, but I have.

Water runs through almost every memory, every photo and every feeling I get when I think of August and summer. And for me and many others, that's not sentimentality, it's proof that water lives in our hearts and dreams, generation after generation. It is passed on as a gift.

And so it is critical that this month, Canadians make every effort to get out and visit their waters. There are so many options.

Here in Ontario, a place shaped by water, we have more than 200,000 lakes, rivers, streams and communities built along their shores. Most of us are never far from a place to swim. We sometimes forget how special that is. Around the world, many people live hours from a swimmable shoreline. Here, access to lakes, rivers, beaches and swimming holes is woven into our identity.

And swimming matters to our water.

A swim is more than a way to cool off. It's exercise and adventure and it's one of the few chances left to disconnect from our screens and reconnect with nature. But most importantly, it is a sign of our governance that we keep our water swimmable so it protects humans, wildlife and guards fishable and drinkable water as well.

Many of life's most lasting memories are made in the water: the first jump off a dock, swimming to a raft, chasing minnows in the shallows or floating on your back under a summer sky. Swimming has a remarkable way of bringing people together and connecting us to the places we call home. And we have many ways of recording and sharing these memories for generations. There is hardly a family room in Canada that doesn't have photos of everyone around the water. And in my time, every politician went swimming in summer for a photo op somewhere and everybody knew the story of Marilyn Bell and her epic, unbelievable swim across Lake Ontario. Her spirit was the inspiration for generations in Canada to overcome their fears and limitations and get swimming across their lakes.

For a long time, the question at the centre of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper was embarrassingly simple: is it safe to swim here? The question wasn't abstract. It was about today, at this beach, right now.

For years, we didn't have a real answer. We tracked which beaches were open on scraps of paper and spreadsheets and once a year published a report on the swimmability of the watershed. It was interesting to us as environmental investigators but wasn't helpful to anyone hoping to go to their beach that day and decide whether to let their kid go in.

Out of that work came Swim Guide. A tool so simple but powerful, with a database that checks in with volunteers, Waterkeepers and monitoring agencies every day, turning all of that data into the answer to your questions about swimmability. With support from the RBC Blue Water Fund, Swim Guide grew from a Lake Ontario Waterkeeper initiative to a global tool tracking thousands of beaches across Canada, the United States, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia and the Bahamas, in partnership with watershed keepers in every one of those places.

Here are a few things you can learn from using Swim Guide.

An "official" beach with lifeguards and daily testing is the exception, not the rule. Most of the water we love, the rocky cove, the unmarked bend in the river, the sandbar three properties down from the cottage, receives little or no monitoring at all. Yet all water deserves to be swimmable. Right now, only the most convenient water gets checked.

Second, a beach posting is not a final verdict. It is a reflection of a specific time and like a weather report, needs to be updated regularly.

When temperatures spike, water levels drop or rain overwhelms urban and rural areas, postings often increase. Monitoring helps us understand when water quality changes and where action is needed.

Third, tracking and sharing water quality can restore polluted areas. Toronto's Bluffer's Beach is proof of what can happen when a community wants swimmable water. Once considered one of the Toronto’s dirtiest beaches, it improved through advocacy, investment, science and consistent monitoring. Communities can fix water quality problems when they're willing to work together.

And they should.

A clean beach is one of the last truly democratic spaces we have, free and open to everyone on every hot summer day, regardless of what's in their bank account. When a beach closes because of pollution, something is taken away from all of us. We lose access to recreation, health, community and a joy that should belong to everyone.

When I swim, I often think about the places I have been over the years and the special people I was with in the water: on Wolfe Island, the Onakawana River, Main Duck Island, Prince Edward County and on the Kennebecasis River in New Brunswick. And I think of the people who keep pushing to keep our water swimmable. None of the data and monitoring appears by magic. It's thousands of volunteers wading into the shallows with sample bottles, charities training the next generation of stewards, public servants sharing results and the philanthropists, businesses, governments, and community leaders who make the work possible.

Every time we swim in a lake, a river or along a shoreline, we build a connection to that place. Those connections are often where stewardship begins.

So go to the water this summer. Visit your local beach, find a river access point you've never tried or explore a lake that's new to you. Take your kids, your friends or your grandparents. Create memories that will last a lifetime.

And if you don't know how to swim, consider signing up for a local swimming or water safety program. It's never too late to learn. Swimming is more than a skill. It's a gateway to confidence and to a deeper connection with our planet.

Finally, before you head out, check Swim Guide. It's free, built by people who care deeply about clean water and it helps you find places where it's safe to swim today.

Spend enough time in the water and one day you might find yourself standing on a shoreline in August, smiling as the next generation discovers the beauty of water for themselves. That is a revelation.

It might not interest everyone at first glance, writing about this new Canada Ontario Agreement. But it should. On all sides of the border, across the lakes and throughout the watershed. This agreement will set the tone for the next 5 years of water quality for 20% of the planet's surface fresh water and set the direction for the future health or demise of our most important natural asset. Water is at the heart of our health, economy and overall prosperity. It is the foundation of our cities and our agriculture. It demands our attention and should direct our politicians.

On July 24th, the federal government sent the Great Lakes community a clear message: the Toronto waterfront is not a place to dump more fill and call it progress. You cannot point to a century of contamination and use it as the excuse to pour more concrete into the busiest harbour on the Great Lakes. Eighty-seven thousand people wrote in during the public comment period and for once, a government actually listened. Two days later Toronto gathered to celebrate on the waterfront. But celebration might be short lived as we are just at the beginning of the challenge.

This year is a moment for getting to the hard work of the Canada-Ontario Agreement on Great Lakes Water Quality and Ecosystem Health. This is an agreement that governs how the two governments protect the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. It is being renegotiated based on 9 previous agreements that have come before it since 1971. It would be easy, as has happened before, to take COA 9, change the date, refresh the annexes and call it COA 10.

I don't think that works this time. The watershed has too little left to give and our commitment to restoration is long overdue.

The Billy Bishop fight was supposed to be about just a little more lake fill as a spark for more jobs and more convenient flights for travellers. But in the end it became about a harbour with a century of waste and raw sewage that was working towards restoration in our lifetime and would not be up ended by political direction. The community desire for clean water needs to be fed, again and again, to realize the goal of swimmable drinkable fishable harbours.

Canada still has Areas of Concern it promised decades ago to fix. Restoration of Randle Reef in Hamilton Harbour has been underway for so long, it's easy to forget it was just the beginning of the job of restoring the harbour. Toronto Harbour still fills with sewage debris after every hard rain. Port Hope is still managing low-level radioactive waste from the Eldorado Nuclear and Cameco uranium refining process and is nowhere close to finishing the job. There are a total of 43 areas of concern in our two countries with 12 in Canada, 26 in US and 5 that share a border. And these are just the worst areas, many other cities and communities have well known pollution problems that were to be on the next list after these were cleaned up.

Today, it is becoming clearer that a community that has lived next to a contaminated harbour for generations doesn't want another progress report. It wants a date it can hold the government to finish the job. Delisting these sites is economic development for the towns and neighbourhoods that have carried the cost of that pollution the longest.

None of that happens without money attached to it. Every COA before this one made big commitments and left the funding vague and that gap is exactly where people stopped believing in what the agreement promised. If Ottawa and Queen's Park want this one to be different, it has to name dollar figures, name years and name who answers if the work doesn't get done.

There's a binational reason to get this right. COA exists to carry out Canada's obligations under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement with the United States. At a moment when the relationship with Washington is harder than it's been in a long time, a funded, credible commitment on our own side of the border is leverage. A country that can’t meet its obligations on the Great Lakes doesn't have much standing with our partners to the south.

Through Biinaagami, working with Canadian Geographic and a Shared Circle of Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, I've watched how differently this watershed appears to the 40 million people who live here once you stop treating water as something to manage and start treating it as a relationship. COA 10 needs that shift built into its structure, not added as language after the fact. Indigenous nations hold jurisdiction and knowledge this agreement depends on and that needs to shape COA 10 from the first draft, not get folded in after the two governments have already decided on the terms.

I'll say the part I wouldn’t put in the formal submission, because it's true and somebody should say it. Queen's Park is likely very unhappy right now, at ENGOs, at the federal Great Lakes program, at the sense that environmental advocacy just cost it a project it wanted. But the plan to use a special economic zone to ram the project through was a bad one. An SEZ would have handed the project immunity from the regulations and public process meant to protect people and the environment. No one should be angry that the public was heard and hopefully this won't carry into the room during this negotiation. Important, critical, funded and significant improvements to Great Lakes harbours and Areas of Concern are the stuff both governments must work towards.

The greatest threat to the COA may be that we get an agreement where a little money is doled out to nice ideas and good people but doesn't stop sewage overflows or pull heavy metals out of a riverbed. This agreement needs dates and dollar figures attached, not another round of good intentions. It will take partners and communities and yes, even engineers, not just a few environmental organizations, doing the work and building the clean infrastructure.

Long before the group I founded, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, had a name, the Canada-Ontario Agreement was one tool we had to hold both governments to their word. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that this week, tens of thousands of people just showed both governments they're paying attention. COA 10 is where we find out if either one was listening.

How to get involved

The next Canada-Ontario Agreement is being negotiated right now and both secretariats want to hear from communities and organizations who use these waters. Not just after a draft is released, but while it's still being written. If you want to weigh in on what COA 10 should commit to, reach out directly:

Federal Secretariat: Carla Torchia, Canada Water Agency — Carla.Torchia@cwa-aec.gc.ca

Provincial Secretariat: Carolyn O'Neill, Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks — GLO@ontario.ca

Late yesterday evening, on the same day the City opened ten more acres of Biidaasige Park on the harbour, the federal government killed the Billy Bishop runway expansion and lake fill project.

I will have more to write about this moment. That can wait. For now, it is enough to say that our city by the lake has recovered its ability to dream and is emerging as the freshwater capital city it was always meant to be.

That might sound like a lot. But the road here was long. Toronto Harbour has been an International Joint Commission Area of Concern for decades. Engineers said it wasn’t worth protecting. Some called it a sewershed. But after years of reconnecting people to the water, teaching the community about the rivers running down from the Oak Ridges Moraine, sampling water quality, reporting sewage bypasses, this time was different. When people were asked about the lake fill proposal, they surprised its proponents. The harbour was no longer available for sacrifice. As of yesterday, any future project has to make the harbour cleaner or there is no room for it.

The announcement about Biidaasige Park is about more than just a new park. It is about the chance to wander to the waters edge in Toronto and feel what it is like to live in a big city on a Great Lake. A place where you can see the city skyline, the sunrise and the sunset over the water from the same shore. It is about people coming together to do something magical. It is “sunshine shining towards us”

Grateful to the people who rallied for Toronto’s waterfront. It means the world to so many.

If you get a chance this summer, go down to the Toronto waterfront. Close your eyes for a moment. Stand by the water’s edge.

Feel the lake. Feel everything in motion around you. The southerly wind sweeping in over 50 km of open water. The lake cooled air on your skin, as the sun warms your head. Bird sounds mingle with splashing and laughter. People in shorts rushing by on their way to Lake Ontario. Some in the water, sailing across the surface of the lake.

Open your eyes. Welcome to Toronto, one of the world’s freshwater capitals.

With miles and miles of lake and river shorelines and miles and miles of rivers running through our ravines. Toronto is a water city. 

In a water city, we are all water people. 

Every minute of every day is shaped by Lake Ontario. Today, you drank water from the lake, you bathed your children in lake water, you grew your food and powered your home and office with lake water. 

Even in your body, if you live here, 65% of your body is Lake Ontario water.  We can’t afford to take our lake for granted.

And yet we do.

We dump our sewage in our lake. We drop our trash in it. We spill our fuels, soaps and salts into it. We divert it, fill it in, channelize it, try to tame the wild in the wilderness of it.

This city, our city, is one of the worst water polluters in North America, with thousands of sewage spills every year because we have combined sewer overflows when it rains and because we don’t have enough sewage treatment capacity to treat all our sewage. 

When people go fishing in the water, they are more likely to pull out plastic than fish.

When you walk the shore, only 15% of the original wetlands live to greet you. And less than 5% of our shoreline is swimmable water.

This is a Canadian urban waterfront in the 21st Century? It is not good enough. 

Government officials try to protect you by putting up “Don’t Swim” and “Don’t Fish” signs. All the signs do over time is push you away from the water and teach you that some problems are too hard to solve. So you stopped dreaming. You stopped innovating.

We all stopped doing the things we need to do to restore our waters.

The public health problems didn’t go away. They just found new victims. A lack of nature fueled rising mental health problems, heart disease and feelings of alienation.

However, with 20% of the world’s freshwater flowing by our doorstep, Toronto has the ability to start dreaming again.

All we need to do is start getting back to the water’s edge and ask: what would our waterfront look like if our dreams shaped this place?

The no swimming signs and no fishing signs would come down. You won’t be afraid of getting sick or wonder if the water is clean. Families would spend more time outside and by the water. Residents would be more active. Sustainable businesses would thrive.

You won’t worry about not owning a cottage or affording camp for your kids. It is all here in your city. 

The big question is if there is a way to keep these dreams alive.

The answer after weeks of discussion about the Toronto Waterfront is yes! I have seen and heard it, people are dreaming again. But we need to keep feeding the dream.

We need to get more people to the water’s edge. We need to find ways to connect people with the lake and each other. We need to inform people how to monitor the water on their own and how to help restore the health of the water. It’s a simple but powerful formula.

When people learn to love a place and they have the support and tools, they will do everything in their power to protect it.

Despite the new proposals for filling in more of our waterfront and bringing in more planes overhead, I am more optimistic about the future now than ever before. With more people wanting a clean waterfront, we may finally be able to combine science with technology to restore the water and to give the resources and tools to government and citizens to protect what they love. This is what our city by the lake needs. 

Toronto can be a swimmable city, with the best drinking water in world and unlimited access to one of the Great Lakes in the world. We can be a freshwater leader in harbour schools, nautical training and clean water advocacy 

We can make it happen … If we start to dream again at the water’s edge.

Water is the foundation for all life. If you care about youth, you care about water. If you care about economic opportunity, you care about water. If you care about reconciliation, you care about water. Only if water is protected can our other dreams come true.

Toronto is a water city. We are all water people. Don’t take this for granted.

Tomorrow ends the public consultation on an old proposal to expand the harbour airport and fill in more of the lake for bigger runways. I am sure thousands of people wrote the federal government and asked them to dream bigger. This consultation process is just the beginning for many. This is another beginning for Toronto’s waterfront. This time, we get to make it right. 

Let’s follow our dreams and protect and restore our lake. Visit the water this summer and dream big.

Swim Drink Fish has officially launched the search for our next Chief Executive Officer and President, in partnership with Odgers Berndtson.

I've spent the last few weeks wondering who will eventually read the posting and realize it's meant for them.

This is not just another leadership position. It is a chance to shape how communities across the country connect with and care for the environment that sustains them, building on 25 years of innovation protecting our greatest natural asset.

Swim Drink Fish is ready for its next chapter.

How We Got Here

Swim Drink Fish was founded on a simple idea: Canada's waters needed a strong voice. In 2001, following the Walkerton water crisis, concern was high about declining water quality and the loss of public connection to our lakes and rivers. Our charity started with little more than a mission and a belief that everyone deserved water that was safe to swim in, safe to drink and healthy enough to sustain life.

So, we got to work.

We sampled water. We shared results. We built tools. We connected people to the places they loved. And we helped communities understand that clean water is never something to take for granted.

Twenty-five years later, that work has grown beyond anything we imagined:

Direct Action: A research vessel, tens of thousands of water samples and thousands of dedicated volunteers.

Restoration: Major restoration projects tied to billions in cleanups and community-led monitoring programs generating vital data where none existed before.

National Reach: Swim Guide, providing water quality information for millions of beach visits every year; The Watermark Project, archiving personal stories of water connection; the WAVE Prize, helping cities reimagine urban waterfronts; and Biinaagami, bringing together Indigenous leadership, storytelling, science, legal advocacy and culture to protect the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River watershed.

It's an impressive foundation, but it isn't the finish line, it's just preparation for the future. Like the practice of law or medicine, the work keeps going. Now, a new leader has the opportunity to build the next twenty-five years on top of it.

Why This Work Matters

This role is about far more than managing an organization.

It's about helping communities reconnect with the waters that define them, building meaningful partnerships across Canada and creating the conditions where people come together around something bigger than themselves.

For those considering executive leadership in the charitable sector, it's a powerful reminder that some of the most impactful opportunities in Canada exist outside government and corporate boardrooms. Real change starts at the community level, where trust, relationships and persistence matter just as much as funding and policy.

What the Job Actually Is

Reporting to the Board of Directors, the CEO and President will help set and execute organizational direction, build financial sustainability through fundraising and scale programs that empower communities with data that drives environmental policy.

Swim Drink Fish is a small team supported by a network of partners nationwide. This is a role for someone who leads through connection, empathy and trust, not title.

It is also a national. The successful candidate will deepen relationships with funders, governments, Indigenous partners and community leaders from coast to coast, serving as a credible, compelling voice for our swimmable, drinkable, fishable vision while guiding the organization through its next phase of growth.

How is Leadership Defined

Talking about leadership is hard to do. It is easier to see. That said, after thirty years of being in a leadership role, experience and mentorship have taught me a few core truths about what makes a water leader. Most of it is about having insight into what makes a team successful.

Teamwork is everything. Collaboration with staff, supporters and partners is paramount. Nothing important gets done alone. Find exceptional people and empower them to support one another.

Hold the vision, clear the path. You don't need to be the smartest scientist, fundraiser or strategist in the room. Your job is to set the direction and remove obstacles so your team can excel.

Respect is earned daily. It shows up in who gets heard, who gets credit and how decisions are made.

Understand the broader system of laws, regulations and decision making. Water outcomes are shaped by many things, including: policy, economics, engineering, science and public interest. Great water leaders navigate these forces to keep people and ecosystems at the centre of all decisions.

Anchor your voice to the facts. Narratives shift, politics change and headlines come and go. Let facts underscore your work.

Prioritize joy. The best causes in the world can still lead to burnout. Joy and purpose are what make the work sustainable.

Keep working on short term and the long term projects. Deliver results today while building toward a future you may never personally see completed.

The Invitation

Water rewards people who show up, with energy, patience and passion. Importantly, doing the work long after everyone else leaves the room, is one secret to success.

You see it at the grand opening of a restored waterfront, on a beach where people have returned to go swimming or around a table when a community decides to move from talking about a problem to solving it. Success is often created over time after the most important work and workers are forgotten.

If you're the kind of leader who can hold a strategic plan in one hand and a genuine love of rivers and lakes in the other, if you can sit down with a government minister in the morning and a community water monitoring team in the afternoon and feel equally at home in both places, this opportunity may be yours. 

Most importantly Swim Drink Fish wants you to bring your own ideas, insights and leadership style to the role. We want to support your vision for the future. That's what we're looking for.

This is a once in a career chance to leave Canada's waters better than you found them.

The full posting is available through Odgers. We're looking forward to meeting you. https://en-careers.odgers.com/en-ca/job/31255/

photos thanks to Jim Panou

It is worth asking, after decades of environmental awareness, billions of dollars in infrastructure investment and generations of public debate about the Great Lakes: how much is actually restored?

On Lake Ontario, we have to look past the current proposal to expand Billy Bishop, past the similar debate from 2013 and past most of what gets discussed today. We have to go back to the 1970s, when Canada and the United States signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and launched one of the most ambitious environmental restoration efforts in the world.

The motivation was simple. Communities around the Great Lakes had seen what unchecked pollution could do, rivers on fire, beaches closed and fisheries disappearing. Governments agreed that some places were degraded enough to require focused restoration. They called them Areas of Concern. Toronto Harbour was one of them on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario alongside Hamilton Harbour, Port Hope and Belleville. All harbours intended to be restored to swimmable, drinkable, fishable water again.

Nearly fifty years later and billions in clean up, that commitment still deserves our attention. In literature, we're taught not to ask what a poem means but how it means. Meaning emerges from structure, rhythm and the relationships between its parts. Water is the same. Toronto Harbour is not just scenery or expensive real estate but a living system. Its currents and water quality and capacity to recover from pollution tell us whether our commitments actually match our actions.

That meaning is complicated but it is our responsibility to understand. To Toronto's credit, some of its response to past pollution is encouraging. The City is spending billions through the Don River and Central Waterfront project to address decades old combined sewer overflows that still allow stormwater and sewage to spill into the harbour during major rain events. And as we restore water quality in the harbour, our standards have improved too.

That's where the airport discussion becomes relevant. In 2003, studies on harbour infilling for airport access concluded that additional fill was unlikely to significantly worsen water quality because it was already so bad. Some read that as no worries. I read it differently. If conditions have already deteriorated to the point where it no longer mattered, that was not acceptable thinking. Polluted water shouldn't become the benchmark for future decisions. A degraded baseline shouldn't harden into a planning principle.

At the same time, even in an era of restoration, everyone recognizes that infrastructure proposals form part of broader public needs. Economic development, jobs, investment and transportation capacity matter.

And for sure, governments are under pressure to support growth and that pressure is legitimate. The challenge is acknowledging those realities while making sure they don't exclude environmental concerns. Good policy asks both questions at the same time, instead of letting one answer the other.

Toronto Harbour is Where That Balance Matters

Water quality monitoring by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and Swim Drink Fish tracked elevated bacteria and persistent pollution in parts of the inner harbour from 2016 to 2019, before yearly monitoring slowed with COVID. The results at Marina Four and Bathurst Quay, two of the most consistently tested sites, were bad. In 2018 alone, harbour sites failed recreational water quality standards 44 percent of the time. Bathurst Quay failed every single one of the 38 tests run that season. Further the report highlighted how the harbour was littered with floatables month after month: condoms, used needles and tampon applicators.

One of the more striking recommendations to come out of that period asked something almost nobody wants to hear: that Torontonians cut back on flushing toilets, running dishwashers and showering during heavy rain, specifically to reduce how much extra flow gets forced into the overflow system straight from their homes. It is a strange thing to ask of a modern Canadian city. Manage your water use during rainstorms to keep your wastewater out of your drinking water. But it says something about how thin the margin already is.

These results confirmed what many already suspected: despite decades of investment, Toronto Harbour remains polluted. Public agencies, environmental groups, governments and ratepayers have put enormous effort into improving those conditions since. That effort is proof there's still a shared belief that restoration is worth doing. The current proposal for infilling the harbour and lake deserves scrutiny for that reason. Because the harbour is still an active restoration site, not a finished one.

The City's analysis shows that even modest changes to harbour configuration and infilling will affect water circulation through the Western Channel, raising real concerns about how large scale infilling for airport expansion will affect flushing rates, water quality and the restoration work already underway. Early studies forecast that if planned infilling occurs the harbour water will mix 50% less with the lake and pollution will remain in harbour twice as long. These impacts can’t be dismissed. In fact, they are central to the future of Toronto’s waterfront.

Part of what makes the current federal public comment period so important is that the usual provincial and municipal channels may not be the ones deciding this. Ontario has proposed designating Billy Bishop under a Special Economic Zone, a tool built to fast-track projects by setting aside the normal consultation and study. That doesn't resolve the concerns; it just ignores them.

The question for our generation is whether we can articulate a shared vision for what this waterfront is supposed to become over the next fifty years. How transportation, housing, economic development, recreation, public access, climate resilience, Indigenous perspectives and Great Lakes stewardship are meant to fit together. What trade-offs are acceptable?

Projects built on investment opportunity, domestic or international, shouldn't get a pass because they promise economic benefit. And those of us concerned about environmental impact have to engage seriously with the laws, regulations, commitments and data available to us. We can't simply oppose on principle.

The debate isn't whether Toronto Harbour can support development, it's whether this development can support the future we actually want for Toronto Harbour. Do we continue the work and commitment of a previous generation when they decided restoring the Great Lakes is worth carrying forward? Or not?

The federal public comment period is one opportunity to have that conversation, open through July 24.

https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/public-consultation-future-billy-bishop-toronto-city-airport

Despite the narrow scope of the consultation, I urge people to use it. Record your support or opposition to the lake infill proposal for a runway. Discuss concerns about increased noise, traffic and pollution. Express your desire for a restored Toronto Harbour.

After decades of dedicated government and community restoration work on Great Lakes hotspots, the most important element of this debate will be whether this moment finally brings everyone to the same table to decide our collective future. Because in the end, the harbour does not just reflect our city, it reflects our choices and how the lake means to us

Toronto's Inner Harbour where the Don River and combined sewer outfalls meet the bay.

If you want to know whether a piece of shoreline still belongs to the public, don't ask who owns the abutting land. Ask who gets to decide what goes into the water and under what rules.

This week I went through a new supplemental report on the Billy Bishop file from Toronto City Planning staff, written in response to a Council request for more information on the runway expansion. In the report is an admission that anyone who cares about Toronto Harbour or any river, lake or shoreline in Ontario, needs to see. The Province's intention to designate Billy Bishop Airport a Special Economic Zone would allow broad exemptions from provincial environmental acts and regulations meant to protect our waters, including the ones that restrict the use of contaminated fill material.

That means the rules that exist to keep contaminated fill out of Toronto's Inner Harbour, the same rules that ensure swimmable, drinkable, fishable water across the province, won't apply here.

And it's not just a Toronto Harbour problem. If environmental protection can be ignored in the province's biggest city, with the most voters, there's nothing stopping the same move anywhere else in Ontario.

I've spent a long time asking questions of projects that want to infill waterbodies for more land. Where's the fill coming from? Who tests it? Who owns the new land? Who got consulted before the decision, not after? Who is protecting the water quality? Every one of those questions assumes there's a rulebook underneath them. An SEZ designation throws out the rulebook and makes our waters and watersheds vulnerable to abuse.

The Toronto report also confirms that serious water quality impacts will result if the lake filling occurs, regardless of exemptions over fill quality.

The Port Authority's 2017 Environmental Assessment found that a 200-metre runway extension would cut flow through the western channel by roughly half and nearly double how long water sits in the Inner Harbour before it flushes out. Wonder what a study for a 600 or 900 metre infill runway would do? That means less dilution of everything already pouring into that basin: the Don River, the storm outfalls, the combined sewer overflows that dump raw sewage during heavy rain.

Look at where that water actually goes. The map below shows the Toronto Bay sewershed, the drainage area that feeds directly into the harbour. Nine separate outfall pipes empty into Toronto Bay along this shoreline, carrying stormwater and combined sewage from Spadina down to Parliament and beyond. After a significant rain event, these pipes can discharge billions of cubic metres of combined sewage and stormwater into the harbour. This is the water the Inner Harbour is already struggling to flush. Cut the flow through the western channel in half, as the Port Authority's own study shows a runway extension would do and you're not just adding a delay, you're asking a harbour that already receives nine pipes' worth of sewage and runoff to hold onto that water twice as long before it clears.

Toronto Bay Sewershed outfall pipes discharging stormwater and combined sewage directly into the harbour.

The City is spending billions trying to get ahead of this problem through the Don River and Central Waterfront Project. A runway expansion works directly against that investment, constricting the polluted water in the harbour and exempting the project from fill standards that normally apply.

I am focused on water impacts here, as that is my biggest concern, but the report also raises accountability questions about ownership and lobbying. They are not accusations, but they are important to clear up, so clear answers and terms and conditions are set before the project is allowed to move forward.

Moreover, there is a pattern with the Billy Bishop proposal and with fast-tracked projects generally, that should be named now so it can be addressed. By the time the public figures out what questions to ask, the decision has already been made somewhere else. The 1983 Tripartite Agreement that governs the airport told us there were limits everyone signed on to respect. Now we're finding out those limits might not matter at all. And we have no clue what limits are replacing them.

This isn't hypothetical anymore. CBC News reported Friday on the same city planning report I went through last week and asked me for comment. I told them what I've been saying here: exempting Billy Bishop from these rules seems reckless and undermines the entire effort to reconnect Torontonians with Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes. On the SEZ designation itself, I said it plainly: it's a scary thought that there may be no rules or protection wherever the province decides to invoke that designation, in Toronto or anywhere else on the Great Lakes or Ontario.

The same CBC report includes Mayor Olivia Chow, who says the city is being kept in the dark while other levels of government get briefed. She and her staff were reportedly asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before discussing the airport's future with the Port Authority and refused. "Show us this secret plan," she said. That's the whole problem in a sentence: a public waterfront, a public harbour and a decision-making process the public and even the city that owns part of the land isn't allowed to see.

So, who protects the water quality in Toronto Harbour and the lake? Right now, it's starting to look like the answer is nobody and no rules apply at all.

That question: who protects the water, shouldn't be limited to a staff report or a non-disclosure agreement. It should be answered in public, by the people who actually govern this harbour: the City, the Province, the Port Authority, the federal government and the millions of people who live along this shoreline and call it theirs.

It's time for a public summit on Toronto's waterfront. Not another stakeholder briefing, but an open reckoning with the question this report has forced into the open: do we clean up this harbour or do we keep quietly filling it in? Every Ontarian who drinks, swims or fishes in the Great Lakes watershed or beyond has standing to ask that question. It's time we asked it together, out loud.

The Globe and Mail's Saturday editorial on Billy Bishop had one job: address the biggest waterfront question in Toronto right now, in the middle of a federal public comment period. It didn't. And I don't think that's very balanced.

The Globe can't make a case for filling in Lake Ontario. So it doesn't try. It leaves the lake out of the argument entirely and endorses the expansion anyway.

Here is how the argument works. The editorial admits "many different potential impacts are being discussed," then narrows the whole debate to one line: "the key question is if the economics of the expansion work."

That's the not the whole story. Everything important, the harbour, the habitat, the water, the Great Lake, becomes background noise. The business math gets the focus while the lake gets ignored. Again. 

The "Already Ruined" Loophole

Here's what the math conveniently skips over. A sad argument that justifies filling in the lake. 

In 2003, the Environmental Assessment for this airport found the Western Channel habitat already so degraded that further impacts weren't considered significant. It did not say the impacts of Lake infilling were acceptable. They were not even reviewed. Just: already ruined, so it doesn't count anymore. That's the sentence that justifies ignoring the environmental impacts. It keeps returning, even twenty years later, without anyone mentioning it. Nothing about the government and community efforts to restore Toronto’s harbour and lake?

Instead, the piece narrows the opposition down to noise and traffic. Waterfront residents who "knew they would live near the airport." Road congestion a shuttle bus can fix. It's a neat move: take your weak ecological argument, ignore it and focus on a neighbourhood dispute about decibels. Once it's a neighbour dispute, it's NIMBYism. Once it's NIMBYism, nobody has to talk about restoring the integrity of the harbour, the waterfront, fish habitat, recreational water opportunities or our binational obligations to protect and restore the Great Lakes. 

The editorial's entire environmental accounting is one line: jets might cause "some impact on boats." It's worth being specific about what the impact actually is. The Toronto Port Authority's own CEO has said the extension could require up to 900 metres of new landmass in Lake Ontario, most of it filled in toward Ontario Place. Nobody, not the TPA, not the province, has published a volume for that fill. No cubic metres. No truckloads. Just a length.

60,000 Truckloads Into the Lake

So I did the math myself, using their own numbers. A 900-metre extension, filled to a modest 4 metres of depth, across the width of the graded airfield strip required for runway safety, comes to roughly 700,000 cubic metres of fill. At 12 cubic metres a load, that's about 60,000 truckloads going into Lake Ontario. This is my estimate, not an official one, because there isn't one. An agency that can tell you the runway will be 900 metres longer can tell you how much lake it's filling in. It hasn't.

And this fill isn't routine. Look around the Great Lakes right now and new land creation has mostly stopped. Toronto's own Leslie Street Spit, the largest lakefill in Lake Ontario's history, is finished. Hamilton Harbour's big project isn't creating land at all; it's sealing off nearly 700,000 cubic metres of legacy industrial poison so it stops leaching into the water. Chicago just fought off an attempt to expand a lakefront disposal site. Billy Bishop may be the only place on the Great Lakes right now proposing to create new land in open water, rather than achieving its goals with what is already there.

And of course, where is the fill coming from? Who is assessing the quality of the fill? Will it be clean enough to put in the lake? Let’s talk about that. 

A Project That Is Currently Illegal

Most importantly, the editorial should have started with the heart of the story. The 1983 Tripartite Agreement that governs this airport, splitting ownership between the Toronto Port Authority, the City and Transport Canada, explicitly prohibits runway and landmass extensions. Not discourages. Prohibits. This project is currently illegal under the terms of its own governing agreement.

The onus to change the law is the government's burden and the government must be held accountable.

The province's answer has been to pass legislation taking over the City's seat at that table and to talk about declaring the airport a "special economic zone" to suspend the rules that would normally apply.

But a provincial special economic zone can only waive provincial and municipal law. It cannot waive the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act or the Migratory Birds Convention Act. It cannot ignore our transboundary obligations under the International Joint Commission, which treats water diversions and lake infilling as serious violations of the shared responsibility both countries, eight states and two provinces hold for protecting the Great Lakes.

Worth remembering, this spring, our provincial government gutted Ontario's own Endangered Species Act, stripping habitat protection from dozens of aquatic species and migratory birds and telling the public that federal law already had it covered. Concerned environmental experts warned that federal statutes don't sit at the permitting table the way the provincial law did. So Ontario is leaning on a federal backstop it just spent months arguing was sufficient, on the one project where that backstop is about to be tested. And the only environmental review that's actually been done on this airport, from 2017, was released to the public with sections redacted. Whether a full federal review is even required this time is still an open question and nobody in government has answered it.

That's the real story: not noise complaints, although they are legitimate; but the story is the future of Toronto’s waterfront, the governing agreements being overridden, a federal review whose scope is unclear and species protections quietly disappearing at the exact moment they're needed most. The Globe had space to ask about any of it. It asked about airfares instead.

How to Have Your Say (Before July 24)

The Globe has weighed in. I'd wager plenty of its editorial board have already sent their own views to the government that's actually deciding this. Transport Canada is taking public comment on the future of this airport right now, through July 24. This is not a symbolic exercise; the department has said feedback will directly inform the decision and will be summarized in a public report afterward. Hopefully, it will also acknowledge that the decision is not entirely theirs and that other federal authorities and jurisdictions are directly involved.

If you think the lake deserves better than a line about boat traffic, say so before July 24.

 By Email: airportspolicy-politiquedesaeroports@tc.gc.ca(Use subject line: Consultation – Future of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport)

 Online: Submit via Transport Canada's anonymous online survey.

https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/public-consultation-future-billy-bishop-toronto-city-airport

 By Mail: Transport Canada, Air Policy, Place de Ville, Tower C, 330 Sparks St, Ottawa ON K1A 0N5

Say it plainly. Ask the government to follow all their environmental laws and processes before making a decision. Make your opinion known about what you want in the future from Toronto’s harbour and lake. Request that no infilling occur until they prove it makes the harbour and lake more swimmable, drinkable and fishable, not less so?

Then and only then, can we assess the market value and other benefits of an expanded second airport on Toronto’s waterfront.

James Lahey

I hear a lot of people telling me what's wrong with Canada these days. Most of it has nothing to do with living here and everything to do with how we feel about everyone else.

Maybe Canada Day is a good time to remember that living in Canada is probably our second greatest blessing, after being born at all. Not because it's perfect. But because of what it actually gives us, every day, whether we notice or not.

Here are five things worth celebrating.

Weather

Start with the weather, since we complain about it most. Some people dream of living near the equator, where it's warm all year. I understand the appeal. But too much of anything loses its luster.

As Shakespeare wrote years ago:

“They surfeited with honey and began to loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too much.”

Our weather keeps changing and it keeps us entertained; different sports, different wardrobes, different tires, different food, all year long. We're always grateful for what's good and ready for what's hard. We may not be the most temperate country on earth, but we get the best of all worlds.

That variety runs through everything else here, starting with how we talk to each other.

Languages

I grew up in Kitchener with German spoken all around me. At law school in Windsor, some of my classmates' parents spoke only Italian. Spanish, Chinese and Arabic are spoken everywhere now. And we're privileged to share this land with many First Nations languages that were spoken here long before any of the rest of us arrived, languages that still carry a wisdom the rest of us are only beginning to understand. Living here, you feel the pull of that original language and knowledge every day, if you're paying attention.

Why does this matter? Because every language is a door into a different way of seeing the world and we have more doors than almost anyone.

Wade Davis put it better than I can: a language is a flash of the human spirit, a vehicle for the soul of a culture to enter the material world. Every language, he said, is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Our many languages don't divide us. They make us wiser.

Culture

I've spent twenty-five years working at the water's edge, in cities and in the bush and here is what I've noticed: Culture is basically the way we do things and Canadian culture doesn't look like one thing. It looks like a canoe launch in Kitimat, a swimming pier in Kingston and a fishing boat off Cape Breton, none of them aware the others exist, all of them somehow the same country.

Northrop Frye understood this. He believed that forcing one national identity onto Canadians misses the point. Canada works precisely because it's a loose collection of local imaginations, each one true to its own place.

We connect our cities to our rural outposts by rail and river, radio and road, ferries and bridges and now, by the strange thread of social media, which, whatever else you think of it, reveals an entire country obsessed with the same things: birds, fish, animals, plants, sports and music. That obsession is very close to a common thread.

Education

It might not top everyone's list, but our commitment to education is remarkable. In dense cities and empty towns alike, we make the same effort. We have extraordinary universities and teachers who show up for it every day. While our current political hesitation around welcoming international students feels out of step with our character, the global desire to study here proves the value of what we've built. Families around the world want to send their children here; we should invite them to help us build what comes next.

What our schools give us, in the end, is us: the doctors who treat us, the judges who keep us honest, the writers who tell us who we are. All of it is built here, at home, out of the same belief that education is worth the effort.

Water

Water is still in our blood, even when we've buried it, dammed it, polluted it and mined around it. The canoe was here thousands of years before the wheel. On the Great Lakes, we threw a pipe for drinking water into the closest lake or river and a country grew around it. In the west, glacial melt from the Rockies feeds rivers running four directions at once. Water is a highway in summer and in winter, a place of fish and birds that feed us and bring us joy, whether we notice or not.

We haven't always treated it well. Poor planning and a handful of industries that took more than they gave have left a lot of it hidden in plain sight, degraded, discounted, forgotten. But it's still there, waiting for us to remember what it gave us for free.

Happy Canada Day. Go find some water today and be grateful for it

Despite its importance to Kingston, Toronto, Ontario and Canada, Lake Ontario rarely gets the attention it deserves. When it does, it’s usually from industry and stakeholders looking to exploit it.

So, as I return to environmental law after twenty-five years leading Swim Drink Fish, I’m not stepping back from the lake. I’m stepping closer. Because the conversation needs to intensify and I have more time to keep it going.

When I stand on the Toronto waterfront now, watching planes bank low over the harbour, I’m not seeing an aviation question. I’m seeing a lake that has already given a great deal, being asked to give more.

To the east are the Pickering reactors. Beyond them, Darlington. Further along the north shore, proposals for new reactors at Wesleyville near Port Hope, a community project already living alongside 2 large nuclear waste sites and a plant making fuel for Candus around the world. Above the harbour, the Billy Bishop traffic and now a proposal to extend the runway further into the lake.

Both projects are publicly funded. Both are advancing.

After a lifetime trying to draw attention to this lake, one pattern stands out: large, well-intentioned projects build momentum faster than public understanding can keep pace. Budgets are approved. Jobs are promised. Political commitments harden. By the time the lake gets a voice, the room is already arranged.

I remember standing on the Port Hope waterfront during the last round of nuclear hearings, during a break from the process and thinking the only thing left to decide is who will look after the waste.

That’s not corruption. It’s what happens when there isn’t enough space or time for people to engage meaningfully. And it’s a problem. Because Lake Ontario is not just infrastructure. It is the primary drinking water source for nine million people. Most of those people are not meaningfully part of the conversation about its future.

Lake Ontario has already lost more than 40% of its shoreline, over 60% along its western edge, between Port Hope and Hamilton. It is the smallest Great Lake, the most densely populated along its shores and the one carrying the heaviest legacy of impact.

So the question is not just: is this project acceptable? It is: who gets to decide what this lake can absorb?

Too often, the burden falls on communities to prove that additional impacts are unacceptable, while well-resourced proponents move forward with momentum, timelines, funding, and alignment. That imbalance matters. Because this lake is not owned by any one proponent, government, or interest group. It is shared.

I was reminded of this while revisiting a statement from a 2003 environmental assessment of Billy Bishop Airport:

“The entire habitat is already degraded, therefore none of the impacts are considered significant.”

Think about what that means.

Because the system is already damaged, additional damage is easier to accept. The baseline shifts. The standard lowers. And eventually, nobody remembers what we were protecting in the first place.

A degraded baseline is not permission.

Water is always worth protecting. And protected water recovers, improved quality, restored shorelines, people returning to swim. But only when people decide it matters and when there is space to hold that standard.

Take the runway extension. This is not fundamentally an aviation decision. It is a decision about Toronto’s relationship with its waterfront. For over a century, the harbour was industrialized and filled. Each step had a rationale. But over the past generation, something different has been happening. People are returning to the water. Access is expanding. Water quality is improving.

A runway extension is not just another project. It is a choice about whether that trajectory continues.

The same is true for new nuclear proposals along the shoreline. Nuclear energy may have a role in a low-carbon future but that doesn’t answer the question of where and under what conditions, it should be concentrated. Thermal discharge, tritium, long-term waste. These are not abstract issues. They accumulate, locally and over time.

The real question is not whether any one project can be justified in isolation. It is whether the lake, as a system, can continue to absorb more.

Through the Biinaagami initiative, working alongside Canadian Geographic and a Shared Circle of Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, I’ve come to understand water differently. Not as a resource to be managed. Not as infrastructure to be protected. As a relationship.

The kind that was there before you arrived and will outlast you. The kind that makes claims on you, whether you acknowledge them or not.

When you draw water from a lake, you are not just consuming a utility. You are taking from a living system that others depend on, people downstream, fish, birds, the next generation. What you return to that system carries the same weight as what you take.

Nine million people drink from Lake Ontario every day. Most of them have never been asked what kind of relationship they want with it.

That needs to change.

We don’t just need better decisions about this lake. We need better places to make them, places where people can understand trade-offs, where scientific, Indigenous, civic and personal perspectives can be heard in the same room, where the future of water is not pre-determined but shaped by those who depend on it.

That is the work that needs attention now. Not just advocating for outcomes, but helping create the space for an open, honest public conversation about Lake Ontario.

Turn on your tap in Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton.

Think about where the water comes from.

Then ask yourself: who is deciding its future?

There is a type of work that not many want to do.

Not because it is beneath them. Not because it is unimportant. But because it requires something most people and institutions can’t afford to give: an unconditional oath. To a cause. To the public. To a version of the future that doesn’t yet exist.

That is what a charity is, at its core. Not a tax designation. Not a funding vehicle. A promise, made in public, to do work that government won’t do and business can’t do and universities won’t touch and to keep doing it regardless of who is watching, who is paying, or who is trying to make you stop.

I saw it that way from the beginning as President of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper since 2001. The Waterkeeper model is built on exactly this logic. A person. A watershed. An oath of fidelity to the water and to the people who depend on it. Not a department. Not a program. A keeper. The word matters. You don’t manage a watershed. You keep it.

Our work at Swim Drink Fish is to make water swimmable, drinkable, fishable again. To return people to the water’s edge. To restore what was taken, not through litigation alone, but through presence, through data, through the patient insistence that clean water is not a luxury. It is a right. That’s not a metaphor for something larger. It is the whole thing. Every sampling trip, every Swim Guide entry, every swimming pier built in a harbour people had given up on, it all comes back to that.

The currency of this work isn’t money. It isn’t votes or clients or quarterly returns. It is trust. And trust, once broken, doesn’t come back. You either have it or you don’t.

I want to say something about what it actually means to lead an organization like this, because it is unlike almost any other leadership role I can imagine.

You are not selling a product or managing a department. You are asking people, donors, volunteers, communities, governments, Indigenous partners, scientists, artists, swimmers; to believe that something worth protecting is worth protecting. That the fight is winnable. That you are the person to lead it. And you are asking them to trust you with their time, their money, their names, their hopes.

That is a different kind of ask. It demands a different kind of accountability. You can’t hide behind quarterly results or shareholder returns or election cycles. The only thing standing between you and the erosion of everything you’ve built is whether people still believe you mean what you say.

Hard to teach. You either get it or you don’t.

In 2000, I sent two colleagues to a Waterkeeper conference in Florida. I had been involved with the idea of a Lake Ontario Waterkeeper organization because I believed deeply in the mission. But I thought I was better suited to the boardroom than to the frontlines. I thought someone else should be the waterkeeper.

My friends came back from the Waterkeeper Alliance conference and told me I was wrong.

Not in those words. But the message was clear: there was no one else who had the qualifications as a lawyer, writer, water person. If I didn’t step forward, the thing we were planning wouldn’t get built. So in 2001, I put on hold my law practice and became the President and Waterkeeper. And everything I thought I knew about myself, about where I belonged, about what I was willing to give, had to be renegotiated from scratch.

Twenty-five years is a long time to hold an oath.

Thomas More understood this better than almost anyone. When Henry VIII demanded that More break his oath to the Church and to the law and give the king what he wanted, to bend, to survive, he refused. His wife came. His daughter came. They begged him. He told them: taking an oath is like holding a handful of water. The moment you open your fingers, it is gone. You cannot gather it back.

I have thought about that image many times over twenty-five years. And not by accident, water is exactly the right image for trust in this work. It is what we are fighting for. It is what holds everything together. And it is what disappears the moment you start making trade-offs.

I have watched the pressure to run charities like businesses quietly hollow out the sector. Efficiency metrics. Revenue diversification. Strategic alignment with funders. All of it sounds reasonable. Some of it even is. But when you start making decisions based on what is advantageous to your funding rather than what is right for your cause, you have opened your fingers. The water is gone. The trust is gone. And no amount of repositioning will bring it back.

The work of a charity is not to be liked. It is to be trustworthy. Those are not the same thing.

What I can tell you, what twenty-five years at Swim Drink Fish has proven to me, is that the oath works.

When you hold it, people come. They come with generosity that still moves me. They come with friendship that has outlasted campaigns, setbacks, funding gaps, and the particular grinding frustration of fighting for something the world isn’t quite ready to see yet. Donors who became allies. Allies who became friends. Communities that showed up not because we were powerful but because they believed we were honest. Indigenous partners who shared knowledge and trust across a divide that institutions rarely cross. Scientists and artists and swimmers and parents, all of them drawn not to our brand but to our word.

That is not nothing. That is everything. It is the proof that the thesis holds.

Charities that hold the oath build something that money can’t manufacture and politics can’t replicate: a community of people who trust each other because they have watched each other do the right thing, over and over, even when it was costly.

Our early supporter Gord Downie understood this too, in his own way.

As I have mentioned here before, after the final Tragically Hip concert in Kingston, I joined Gord and his family at Camp Onakawana, where the Abitibi and Onakawana Rivers meet. One evening, after chopping wood, we sat by the fire. Someone asked him how he had managed to give so much of himself, night after night, for so many years. He didn’t answer. He stood, walked to the woodpile and placed a few more logs on the fire. As the sparks rose into the dark and mixed with the stars, he made his answer without a word.

Do the work. The magic takes care of itself.

Gord was a board member of Swim Drink Fish. He knew what it meant to commit to something larger than yourself, to show up when it was hard, to keep the fire going when others had gone to bed. He also knew, by the time of that concert, that his time was running out.

He used to wear a Star Wars t-shirt on stage when singing and performing. It always reminded me of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the line Obi-Wan says to Darth Vader in the moment before the lightsaber falls:

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

That is not a line about invincibility. It is a line about what happens when you hold the oath all the way to the end. When you refuse to open your fingers. When you trust that the cause is bigger than the person carrying it and that the carrying itself is the point.

The people who tried to strike us down only made us stronger. The communities that believed in us made us stronger still.

I am not sure you can teach someone how to run a charity. You either understand what the oath demands or you don’t. It doesn’t always mean power, money, or influence. It often means hard hours and pressure and the particular loneliness of caring about something most people haven’t thought about yet.

But if you hold it, if you keep your fingers closed around the water, even when the pressure to let go is enormous, something happens. The trust accumulates. The community grows. The work outlasts the worker. The sparks rise and mix with the stars.

Twenty-five years in, I believe that more than I did in 2001. Not because it has been easy. Because it hasn’t. And because the proof is in the people who showed up anyway, for the water, for each other, for a future worth swimming toward.

Do the work. Trust the oath. Hold the water.

The magic will take care of itself. And anyone who wants to work or support a charity, gets the opportunity to live in that better world

And as of today, I am moving to the Board of Swim Drink Fish and we are searching for a new president. Hoping for the right person who wants to lead a charity. A water charity.

The harbour is already ruined.

That’s the line. Not from a press release. Buried in a 2003 Environmental Assessment, filed when the Port Authority wanted a bridge to Billy Bishop. Their words, exact: “The entire habitat associated with the Western Channel is degraded, therefore, none of the impacts are considered significant.”

I’ve sat with that sentence for twenty years. I know exactly what it’s built to produce. What’s the point? The damage is done. Why fight an uphill battle to reset a broken system back to good, when you could just shrug and let it go?

That shrug is the oldest argument in this fight.

It’s not the only one.

There’s the economic case: jobs, growth, competitiveness, a recent $8.5-billion-a-year figure from Queen’s Park that arrived without much math behind it. There’s the convenience case. Fly downtown, skip the Pearson slog, until you ask what gets filled in to make that possible. Until you realize the 20-minute train ride is faster than walking or taking an Uber during busy times in summer or at rush hour from Billy Bishop to Union Station. There’s the NIMBY case, which turns anyone asking about drinking water or public access into an opponent of progress. And lately, the monopoly case: this isn’t about an airport anymore, it’s about breaking Porter’s grip, lower fares, consumer choice.

Four narratives. Four different audiences. All of them built to avoid the same question: what is the plan for our harbour and our lake?

Underneath all four sits the oldest one. The harbour, the lake, is already dirty. A little more landmass won’t change that.

That shrug, the “what the hell,” is the actual product here. Not the runway. Not the jobs numbers. The resignation. A tired city doesn’t object. A city that believes its harbour is already lost will hand it over a few hundred metres at a time, forever, and call each one reasonable.

Resignation is a choice. But don’t buy it. We have all watched this exact argument lose before.

What We Already Proved

Fifty years ago, harbours across the Great Lakes were dying for real. Industrial discharge. Raw sewage. Rivers people joked you could set on fire. The Great Lakes are the rust belt, after all. Earth Day, 1970, didn’t happen because everything was fine. It happened because enough people refused the “what the hell” answer and treated a degraded lake as a starting point instead of a verdict.

It worked. Not perfectly. Not finished. But it worked.

Toronto’s own waterfront is the proof: a working industrial shoreline, slowly and stubbornly, turned back into a place people swim and paddle and gather. The constant smog days of the 1980s are a thing of the past. People are fishing all over the harbour, and people are moving back to the water’s edge.

The Spadina Quay Wetland is a small example of what can be replicated, over and over. The same 2003 EA tried to use it as a paper offset for a bridge it hadn’t earned. Didn’t matter. The wetland grew anyway, into a real home for Northern Pike, for waterbirds, because somebody decided a degraded channel deserved restoration, not a stay-away sign. We’ve sampled water off Ontario Place since 2018. Same lesson, smaller scale: give a harbour a chance to recover and it will.

Nature doesn’t owe us a fast recovery. It heals on its own clock. Not our time. Not unless we put in the work to make it ours. But can we agree we want to live beside a clean lake? I can. And I’ve met thousands of others who support Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, who agree, and who fund the charitable work that proves it.

Ask Other Questions

As a Waterkeeper, I ran any Great Lakes proposal through six questions. Does it address the legacy of past pollution? Reduce sewage entering the lake? Restore habitat? Expand real public access to the shoreline? Treat the lake as something held in trust, not a resource? And, this one came out of the Biinaagami work (Biinaagami.ca), what do First Nations think? Not a checkbox. A condition of getting it right.

Run the Billy Bishop expansion through those six. It fails. Every one. Not because it’s malicious. Because nobody ever asked it to answer them. It was built to answer different questions like jobs, competition, quarterly traffic numbers. Questions that are hard to quantify but benefit a stakeholder, a business. They don’t measure anything about the damage to our public resource: the water.

So ask better ones. New investment in sewage and stormwater treatment for the harbour, for a start. Should we protect the wetlands, beaches, shorelines we already have? Are we protecting the drinking water that’s the lifeblood of our prosperity — the Great Lakes? Are we living up to our shared responsibility to this watershed, setting an example for everyone downstream who depends on it?

Look past the harbour to the nine rivers running through this city, are they healthy? Could cold-water fish live in them again?

None of that is wishful. It’s restoration work this city has already done, in smaller pieces, more than once. It just takes deciding the lake is worth it before you’ve got proof. The proof comes after.

A Legacy Worth Continuing

Gord Downie never answered that question in words: how do you give so much of yourself, night after night? He just stood up, walked to the woodpile, put another log on.

Do the work. The magic takes care of itself.

That’s what the people who reclaimed this waterfront understood. Whether they were marching in 1970 or sampling water off Ontario Place last summer. Nobody handed them a guarantee. They kept adding logs to the fire, one generation to the next, until a working harbour became a swimmable one.

We’re being asked, again, to decide if that’s still worth doing. The federal consultation closes July 24.

https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/public-consultation-future-billy-bishop-toronto-city-airport

That date doesn’t have to be a deadline for a fight we’ve already lost in our heads. It can be an invitation. Write politicians. Organize in groups.

Say out loud what you actually want this waterfront to be, for your family, your friends, the people who’ll stand on this shoreline fifty years from now.

The hidden argument says the harbour is already ruined, so nothing we do here counts. It lost in 2003. It can lose again. Not because we out-argued it. Because we believed in something better instead.

That’s worth showing up for.

I’ve been at the water’s edge at Ontario Place by land and by boat, since 2018. It sits out in Lake Ontario, away from the shore and the sewage pipes and stormwater runoff, to the extent that it offers visitors a real connection with the water, wind and weather that few other places in Toronto can offer.

That’s when Swim Drink Fish started sampling the water there and found something remarkable: the southern waterfront had some of the cleanest water in Toronto on a day-to-day basis. Cleaner even than the island beaches. Unaffected by the city’s imperfect sewage system that overflows when it rains, it was and is a perfect site for a public swimming pier. The kind that could do for Toronto what the Gord Edgar Downie Pier did for Kingston. Connect a generation of kids who don’t have cottages to a freshwater lake that belongs to them.

When the chosen Ontario Place proposal came forward, I was relieved it had some silver linings. Not because I believed a private spa was the right vision for Ontario Place. But because it was the only proposal that included a public swimming pier, the first new swimming beach in Toronto in over fifty years. Also, it included some important partners like the local First Nations and artist organizations like TIFF. We supported and were prepared to work on the swimming pier with anyone interested in seeing it come to reality as a safe, fun and meaningful park to connect with Lake Ontario. That support was right.

What we didn’t see clearly enough was the frame we were operating inside. We arrived at a table where the terms had already been set, where the range of options had been narrowed before the public conversation began. We were so relieved that something good might happen that we didn’t push hard enough on the process that produced it. The pier was real. The constraints around it were real too. In retrospect, it’s not the swimming pier we question, it’s how we got there and what was lost in the process.

I don’t want to make that mistake again.

For most of its history, Toronto treated Lake Ontario as infrastructure. The harbour served industry, transport, and waste. The lake was essential and available.

That city has grown out of that space. Slowly, expensively and with genuine public commitment, Toronto has been reclaiming its relationship with the water. Billions invested in remediation, habitat restoration, sewage management, public access. A shoreline once closed by industry is reopening to people, to life, to the lake itself.

Something deeper is shifting too. Toronto sits at the heart of the Great Lakes basin, home to the largest freshwater ecosystem on earth. It is also home to Queen’s Park and the Premier of Ontario, the single most powerful political figure when it comes to protecting the Great Lakes, with responsibilities over drinking water that exceed those of any other public official, including in Ottawa, Washington, and Chicago. No city carries more responsibility for these waters. Toronto is learning that it is the freshwater capital of the world. And people are beginning to understand what that means.

Which is why the Billy Bishop expansion proposal has run into something its proponents didn’t fully anticipate: a city that no longer sees its harbour as available.

A runway pushing 900 metres of new land into Lake Ontario. Four to five billion dollars over twenty-five years for an airport that doubles or triples aircraft movements in a confined harbour already bounded by recovery and reinvestment. These numbers landed differently than expected. Not just because economists are questioning whether they hold. But because people recognized immediately that this wasn’t a transportation debate.

It was a waterfront debate.

Once shorelines are altered, once lakebed is filled, once infrastructure is fixed, these decisions don’t expire. They become the new baseline. Future choices are made in their shadow.

That permanence changes the standard.

When I look at any proposal touching our freshwater in the Great Lakes, five questions matter: Does it address the legacy of past pollution? Does it reduce sewage entering the lake? Does it restore habitat? Does it expand genuine public access to the shoreline? And does it treat the lake as something held in trust, a relation, not a resource?

A sixth question has emerged from the Biinaagami project and it is just as important: what do First Nations think? Not as a procedural checkbox, but as a necessary condition for getting it right, legally, practically and in terms of our shared responsibility for these waters.

Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They are a standard. And they’re useful precisely because they shift the frame from the project to the place.

A runway filling hundreds of metres of Lake Ontario, in the harbour of the city most responsible for the Great Lakes, fails that standard clearly. It moves in the wrong direction at exactly the moment the direction finally matters.

There’s a kind of courage this moment requires, not the kind that announces itself, but the quieter kind. The kind that shows up when it’s easier not to. When competing pressures are real. When the gap between knowing what’s right and actually doing it feels wide.

Environmental decisions are usually made in that gap.

When consequences are gradual or dispersed, it’s easier to defer. To assume impacts can be managed. To move forward without resolving the larger question. That is how waterfronts get lost; not dramatically, but incrementally, one reasonable-sounding compromise at a time.

Toronto has spent decades clawing its way back from that pattern. The July 24 federal deadline for public comment on Toronto’s waterfront is not a procedural formality. It is a test of whether the city, the largest in Canada, a Great Lakes capital, can speak clearly, when it matters, before the concrete is poured.

The work is to use this moment well.

Submit your comments before July 24 at:

canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2025/04/have-your-say-on-the-proposed-expansion-of-billy-bishop-toronto-city-airport.html

All small ships turn back.

Every Canadian has a favourite body of water. It’s part of who we are.

But most of us live in cities. And somewhere along the way, we let our urban waterways become polluted, constrained or simply out of reach. So we leave on weekends, those of us who can, to find somewhere we can actually swim in the water.

Here’s the harder question: do we love our waterways enough to show up for them, even when the issue isn’t in our own backyard? Even when it is?

Right now, there’s a federal consultation open on the future of Billy Bishop Airport. More importantly, it’s about the future of Toronto Harbour and the connection to Lake Ontario. The consultation closes July 24, 2026. Unfortunately many people won’t participate. They’re busy. They assume someone else will weigh in.

That’s how we lose things.

In June 2026, Ontario passed legislation allowing acquisition of the city-owned airport lands, effectively breaking open the 1983 Tripartite Agreement that had governed the harbour for over forty years. That agreement placed firm limits on runway expansion and building into the lake.

Those protections are now uncertain.

What happens next, how the harbour evolves, what gets built, what gets protected, is not settled. It’s being shaped right now, through this process.

Some voices have already dismissed this consultation as a sham. That’s a mistake. Not because governments get it right but because participation only works if people actually participate. Walking away sends its own message: that the public isn’t engaged, that trade-offs don’t need to be tested, that decisions can move forward without meaningful input.

Silence is not a strategy. And to be clear, this matters even if you don’t live in Toronto

Urban waterways across Canada face the similar pressures to Toronto: competing land uses, expanding infrastructure, climate stress, unequal access. Toronto Harbour isn’t an exception. It’s a test case.

For many people, the waterfront isn’t a secondary amenity, it’s the only accessible connection to open water. Not everyone has a car, a cottage or the ability to leave the city on weekends. When decisions get made about shoreline access, habitat, noise and infrastructure, they don’t land equally.

Participation matters because it ensures those realities become part of the record.

What you can actually do, takes 8 minutes

The federal survey is anonymous. No account, no registration.

The open text fields are where it counts. Write what you actually care about, swimmable water, drinking water protection, healthy habitat, real public access. Government analysts read these responses. They look for patterns. A hundred people independently writing “swimmable water” in plain language carries more weight than clicking the nearest checkbox.

Take the survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/PFJSW2X

Want to say more? Email Transport Canada directly:

airportspolicy-politiquedesaeroports@tc.gc.ca

Subject line: Consultation – Future of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

Deadline: July 24, 2026.

The lake cannot submit feedback. The harbour cannot write an email. Water depends on people to speak for it. When we don’t, it gets treated as empty space, something to build over, expand into, absorb the impacts of.

Most people won’t take the time to do this.

If you do, it matters.

Speak for the shoreline. Speak for the lake you love.

The water is needs your voice and participation.

With summer comes the Joe Burke Wolfe Island Literary Festival at Brophy’s Point. Thanks to the supporters and the writers, the festival continues to come together at the last minute and always shines brightly. This weekend is the 21st annual and despite its age, the tradition remains as meaningful and fun as ever.

Joe Burke was a criminal lawyer from Ottawa with a real passion for friendships. He died unexpectedly in 2003 and left a mark on everyone who knew him. His friends and fellow lawyers Mark Ertel, Donald Bayne, and Hal Mattson wanted to carry on something of his spirit and began supporting the litfest.

I had met Joe through Hal and Mark but it was when playing on Dave Bidini’s hockey team, the Morningstars, that we really made the connection. Joe worked the door on the bench and escorted us to the bars after hours. A few years later, I was in Ottawa for a long trial and Joe made me feel at home. He ran the trivia pursuit nights, put up guests in his spare bedroom, always had a fresh towel folded on the bed and always with a book to recommend. He was generous and thoughtful.

21 years later the Joe Burke litfest has come to represent something larger than his own story. He represents all our friends and family, once full of energy and warmth, who have left us over the years. The LitFest is a way of honouring that feeling every year, of remembering and celebrating the joy we keep afloat with our connections.

There is no better place to do that than on Brophys Point, with the lighthouse on the north shore, where the Lake ends and the St. Lawrence River begins. Former reader of poetry at the festival, Gord Downie, once told me that Kingston was the conversation city because of all the words floating by and out to sea. You feel it, all that water, words and lives lived upstream. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario, millions of people and their stories, flowing past our gathering. It is as if the river is the audience.

From the very first readings on a snowy afternoon in May 2004, the litfest has been a place where people who had never attended a literary festival or some who admitted they had never read a novel, walked away with words and wonder.

This years lineup is exceptional.

Bill Gaston (Victoria) arrives with his new book, Spying on America from Heaven - narrative non-fiction about an 11-day road trip through red-state America with his two adult sons. Author of seven novels and seven collections of short fiction, his work has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice for the Governor Generals Award.

Liz Howard (Montreal) is one of Canada’s most powerful poets. A former litfest reader, her debut collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her second, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage, born on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, her poetry braids Indigenous knowledge with Western cosmology.

Dave Bidini (Toronto) - founding member of the Rheostatics and the festival co-founder, he has written thirteen books including On a Cold Road and Tropic of Hockey. He is a three-time National Magazine Award winner and publisher of the West End Phoenix. Dave has never missed a LitFest. That loyalty is a kind of tribute to Joe and to the river. Dave also hosts the Lake Ontario Cup hockey tournament on Island in February.

Emer OToole (Montreal, via Ireland) is a writer, performer, and regular contributor to The Guardian and The Irish Times. She is Associate Professor of Irish Performance Studies at Concordia University and author of Girls Will Be Girls.

The event is free. Saturday, June 13 at 3 PM at Brophy’s Point, end of 10th Line, Wolfe Island, Yellow Cottage. Look for signs at the top of the ferry dock or on 10th Line.

Past Readers:

Dave Bidini

Tanis Rideout

Bill Kennedy

Darren Wershler

Jonathan Bennett

Grant Lawrence

Priscila Uppal

Andrew Nikiforuk

Wayne Grady

Michael Winter

Alison Pick

Joseph Boyden

Steven Heighton

Michelle Berry

Brian ODea

Gord Downie

Sonnet LAbbe

Paul Quarrington

Michael Holmes

Christian Bok

Joe Fiorito

Marylyn Simonds

Ken Babstock

Saleema Nawaz

Kevin Barry

Carmine Starnino

Tasneem Jamal

Alexandra Leggat

Jane Gowan

Bernie Finkelstein

Liz Howard

Dani Couture

Michael Crummey

Helen Guri

Paul Vermeersch

Darryl Webster

Amanda Leduc

Zoe Whittall

Ron Deibert

Mark Medley

Lemon Hound

Jeremy Dodds

Denise Donlon

Hana Shafi

Bill (Spaceman) Lee

Diane Schoemperlen

Gwen Benaway

Katrina Onstad

Jennifer Baichwal

Nick DePencier

David OMeara

Emma Healey

Eva HD

Chris MacDonald

To every writer, performer, speaker, and designer who has been part of this: thank you. You are the reason the festival matters. You are the reason we come back.