“There comes a time in every climate reporter’s life when you’ve gone through the studies, the development plans, the regulations … eventually you’ll hit a pile of crap.”
That’s what reporter Fatima Syed said, referring to her latest story that follows an undiscussed thread of the Ford government’s plans for building more housing in southern Ontario — the fate of the sewage that would flow from those homes.
“In York Region, the population is set to double by 2051. That means moving tens of millions of litres of more water from the Lake Huron watershed every day,” Fatima told me.
Where would that wastewater go, exactly? The answer to that question has been a pressure point for 14 years. After over a decade of debating whether to build a new treatment facility, the province finally decided last fall to move more water down south to an existing treatment plant on Lake Ontario instead. To do so, it’s eyeing the protected Oak Ridges Moraine, through which it wants to expand a network of pipelines.
Moving water from one Great Lake watershed is known as an intra-basin transfer, and it’s a big deal. For Lake Huron — and Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, which flow from it — it means a loss of water, at a time when levels are already often low. For Lake Ontario, it means absorbing more wastewater: treated wastewater, yes, but the water body is also coping with an unprecedented number of sewage spills, and facing other environmental pressures.
Then there’s the issue of the journey itself, which our art director Shawn Parkinson visualized in a 100 per cent accurate way.
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