OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Claire Malcolmson, executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition and co-chair Ontario Salt Pollution Coalition.
For a country that prides itself on freshwater opportunities, it’s a mystery why Ontario has not moved forward with urgency on addressing salt pollution.
Attorney General and MPP (now Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte candidate) Doug Downey has the power to make the changes we need. Will he do it?
Salt pollution is growing in streams, lakes and groundwater in southern Ontario’s urbanized areas, and as the road network expands, so will the damage.
Freshwater critters, like many types of zooplankton, can’t adapt to salt-water conditions and at elevated levels they die. They are important parts of our lakes’ and rivers’ food chains, which our fishermen and women rely on.
Voluntary programs and best management practices have reduced the salt application rate, but chloride (salt) levels are not going down in our waterways.
Indeed, chloride concentrations in Ontario streams and lakes have doubled since the 1960s. Reacting to the clear but slow-moving crisis, conservation authorities from the Credit Valley, Toronto and Region, and Central Lake Ontario Source Protection Region wrote in their discussion paper of March 2024:
- “It is not expected that current salting policies will have a significant impact in reduction of salt trends”
- “Risk management plans to manage the salt issue do not appear to be having the desired effect and take a great deal of municipal resources”
- “Until incentive programs that reduce liability … to ensure safety but consider the environment are enacted, no significant change will occur and sodium and chloride in surface and groundwater will continue to rise."
Landscape Ontario and the Ontario Salt Pollution Coalition, which the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition is part of, have part of the solution, and have been asking Ontario to act since late 2023.
Together these groups are asking Ontario to create a certification program for the snow and ice management sector and private parking lot owners which uses provincial best management practices, eliminates hazards on sites, and would reduce the financial risk from slip and falls claims that plague the sector.
This “limited liability” approach has stood up in New Hampshire and its courts. It is anticipated that these changes would cut salt application in half where private companies clear snow.
We have been asking Attorney General Doug Downey and Ontario’s environment minister, Andrea Khanjin, now candidates in the Feb. 27 provincial election, what they are going to do about it, but they keep telling us that the same old approach is going to work.
The experts are pretty clearly telling us it’s not.
Claire Malcolmson
Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, executive director
Ontario Salt Pollution Coalition, co-chair
