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Last summer, the world’s attention turned to the famed Seine River to watch as a parade of ferries, tourist boats and yachts carried Olympic athletes through the heart of Paris for the opening ceremony of the Summer Games.

The pageantry of the floating, four-hour saga was punctuated by persistent rain that drenched athletes and spectators alike as the parade cruised past landmarks like the Notre-Dame cathedral and the Eiffel Tower.

Then, at the sound of the starter pistol a few days later, triathletes dove into the water — right at the foot of the Champs-Élysées — for the first leg of their event, a 1.5-kilometre swim.

Years, months — even days — before the starting gun, it didn’t seem possible for the Seine to play such a starring role in the world’s biggest sporting spectacle. For one thing, it was the first time an urban river had been used for an Olympic swim since 1896. For another, swimming had been banned in the Seine since 1923.

Athletes compete in the swimming race in the Seine River in Paris during the women’s individual triathlon at the 2024 Summer Olympics — the first time an urban river had been used for an Olympic swim since 1896, owing at least in part to the city’s sewage woes. Photo: Martin Bureau / Associated Press

That’s because Paris, like Winnipeg, has historically used its in-city waterway as the backstop for its sewage system. Like Winnipeg, the French capital designed its underground maze of sewers to overflow into the river on rainy days, when the pipes that carry runoff and wastewater to the sewage treatment plants are over capacity.

In Winnipeg, these overflows dump, on average, 10 billion litres of effluent into the rivers each year — enough to fill 4,000 Olympic pools.

And like Winnipeg’s Red, Assiniboine and Seine rivers (yes, there’s a Seine in Winnipeg too), those overflows left the Parisian river polluted with E. coli, excess nutrients, garbage and other unsafe and unsightly contaminants — right up until the gun sounded.

The opening ceremony rainstorms had caused an E. coli spike that delayed the start of the swim, but eventually tests came back clean enough to allow the city’s leaders to celebrate a moment nearly a decade in the making.

Paris is seen by many as a success story when it comes to cleaning up rivers and stemming the flow of raw sewage. But for many other cities in the world — including more than 1,000 in North America — sewer issues are still a concern.

“Paris has shown that it is possible to bring even the most polluted rivers back to life,” Dianna Kopansky, head of the freshwater and wetlands unit of the United Nations Environment Programme, said in a release a month after the Games ended. “But if we’re to ward off a looming freshwater crisis, the world is going to need a lot more success stories like this.”

Sewer issues like these afflict more than 1,000 North American communities. Many have been working toward solutions for decades and their efforts have laid a roadmap Winnipeg’s policy makers and community groups can turn to as the city charts its own path to cleaning up the rivers. From giant cisterns to rain gardens, storage tunnels and parks, cities across Canada — and the rest of the world — have shown there are plenty of options to stop the overflow of sewage into freshwater.

A revival in Paris — fuelled by the international spotlight

It might not have happened without the Olympics.

As Winnipeg city councillor and former chair of the city’s water and waste committee, Brian Mayes, will tell just about anyone: convincing a municipal council to spend its limited budget on expensive upgrades to largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind sewer infrastructure isn’t easy.

“It gets frustrating,” he said in a late April interview, referring to his decade-plus of efforts to make progress on the city’s overflow problem. “It’s awareness, it’s political will, it’s costly.”

‘Afraid of the water’? Life in a city that dumps billions of litres of raw sewage into lakes and rivers

Winnipeg devised a master plan to reduce overflow volumes in 2019, nearly two decades after the provincial Clean Environment Commission urged the city to start taking quick and meaningful measures to protect its rivers. The plan aims to reduce sewer overflows by about half over the next 70 years, and comes with an estimated price tag of more than $1.15 billion (if you don’t count the contingency that doubles the projected cost).

Progress has been slow; the city budgets between $30 – $45 million each year for upgrades and has spent just under $200 million on everything from new sewer construction to improved data-collection technologies over the last decade, but overflow volumes are just six per cent lower than they were in 1992.

For decades, Paris was in much the same situation: the first pitch to clean up the Seine came from Mayor Jacques Chirac in 1988, the same year Manitoba’s Environment Act came into law and negated the long-standing water pollution exemptions that allowed Winnipeg to dump sewage in its rivers unabated. Like Winnipeg, Paris delayed serious work on river cleanup until the 2010s, starting in earnest to clean the Seine in 2016.

Knowing it had eight years to prepare for the 2024 Games, Parisian leaders seized the moment and came up with a US$1.5 billion strategy, dubbed “the swimming plan,” to reduce the frequency and volume of wastewater that overflows into the river from its network of combined sewers.

The star of the swimming plan was a massive underground cistern capable of holding 50 million litres — 20 Olympic swimming pools worth — of runoff.

It’s a simple, if inelegant, solution: combined sewers overflow when heavy rainfalls overwhelm the capacity of the sewage system, so the cistern captures excess runoff and holds onto it until there’s enough room to pipe the wastewater to a treatment plant.

Occasionally — like the day of the opening ceremony — there are still overflows, but they’re less severe, meaning fewer contaminants flow into the river.

In the 1970s, about 60 per cent of city sewage flushed directly into the Seine, choking off most aquatic life. Studies at the time found just three fish species surviving in the sludge. By 2023, that number had jumped to more than 30 species — a remarkable biodiversity rebound.

In 2023, Paris dumped 1.9 billion litres of diluted raw sewage (a mix of stormwater runoff and wastewater from homes, businesses and industry) into the Seine. At the same time Winnipeg, with a population just two-fifths that of Paris, dumped more than 5.3 billion litres into its trio of iconic rivers.

This summer, Paris expects to open at least three locations of the Seine for public swimming. In Winnipeg, most residents will still try to avoid touching the water.

A big tunnel saved the Ottawa River — could it work here too?

Today, Ottawa is often cited as a Canadian example of a city taking sewer overflows seriously and developing solutions with a bit of urgency. In fact, it’s one of the cities Mayes has looked to for inspiration on his quest to quell the overflows at home.

“I wanted to do the big tunnel like Ottawa,” he said. “Other cities have done that.”

Mayes is referring to the combined sewer storage tunnel, the six-kilomentre long, three-metre wide, $232-million cornerstone of Ottawa’s sewage overflow reduction strategy. It works much like the cistern in Paris: during heavy rains, it collects and stores about 43 million litres (18 Olympic pools) worth of effluent, which can be gradually pumped back to the sewage treatment plant after rains subside. Funding for the infrastructure came from all three levels of government, allowing the tunnel to be completed within four years.

Children jump into the Ottawa River. In previous years, sewer overflows made the river unsafe for recreational activities. Now a massive tunnel and other initiatives have made the river (usually) safe for swimming again. Photo: Justin Tang / Canadian Press

Between 2006 and 2020 — the year the tunnel was operational — Ottawa saw an average of 622 million litres of effluent spill into the river every year. From 2021 to 2024 there has been an annual average of 210 million litres.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In 2001, a group of Ottawans fed up with the city’s practice of allowing excess effluent to run into the Ottawa River went looking for accountability from political leaders. Because the river serves as the boundary between Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., there were several jurisdictional authorities to appeal to, and the residents decided to form their own non-profit entity to co-ordinate their advocacy efforts.

Ottawa Riverkeeper is a member of the international Waterkeeper Alliance — a global network of community advocacy groups with a mandate to hold politicians accountable to protecting local water bodies.

“Without any clear, single entity to hold accountable for these overflows, Ottawa Riverkeeper was formed,” Laura Reinsborough, current Riverkeeper and CEO, said in an interview. “This organization was formed around the issue of combined sewer overflows and responded to the need for an independent entity that could look out for the health of the river.”

The group’s advocacy originated out of a desire to stem the combined sewer overflows that made the river unsafe for recreational activities. Nearly 25 years later, Reinsborough said, “it’s been one of our biggest successes.”

Reinsborough says the Riverkeeper group worked closely with city officials, advocating for publicly available overflow data (including an email notification system and real-time overflow map not unlike Winnipeg’s), they trained community members to conduct water-quality monitoring, and eventually helped the city develop overflow-reduction targets and decide on a solution that would work within the tight constraints of the municipal budget.

“We assumed that the city of Ottawa did not want to be polluting the river and that they wanted to find solutions, and we — as a community group — could be a strong partner with them to bring that to the public and to other levels of government,” Reinsborough said.

What worked in Ottawa may not work in Winnipeg

But Winnipeg isn’t likely to get its own big tunnel anytime soon.

“Our staff wanted no part of that — too costly, I think,” Mayes explained.

Costs aside, there are logistical complications. A single tunnel works in Ottawa because the city has just over 100 kilometres of combined sewers (compared to just over 1,000 kilometres in Winnipeg) and most are clustered within a relatively small radius. Winnipeg’s overflows stretch from the western extent of the Assiniboine River to the northern city limit on the Red River and south on the smaller, shallower Seine River (not to be confused with the Parisian Seine).

5 things to know about Winnipeg’s big sewage problem

Winnipeg’s ultimate overflow solutions will be doled out on a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood basis; the 1,300-page master plan includes detailed engineering plans for each of the 43 combined sewer districts.

In some regions, Winnipeg will take the most extreme and expensive approach by building new pipes to completely separate the sanitary sewage (a term for all the gunk flushed down toilets, sink drains, showers and other indoor plumbing) from the stormwater runoff. Sewer separation makes combined sewer overflows moot, and allows all the sanitary sludge to be processed at treatment plants. Sewer separation projects are currently underway in the St. James, Seven Oaks and Fort Garry neighbourhoods.

Winnipeg’s rivers are muddy and fast-moving. The city believes this makes them unfit for swimming — even without the pathogens released during sewer overflows — but Winnipeggers have still found ways to enjoy the waters, as seen here in 1980. Photo: James Haggarty / Winnipeg Free Press

But it’s not feasible everywhere. As Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner, Gord Miller, wrote in a 2009 report on sewage issues in the Ottawa River: “The construction of sewers requires the destruction of existing infrastructure, especially roads. In older built neighbourhoods, the extent of destruction required may simply be beyond all reasonable limits with respect to the functioning of the city.”

Instead, Winnipeg plans to combat its woes with a combination of sewer separation, in-line storage (building control gates to hold overflows in the combined pipes during light rainfalls and pumping the effluent back to a treatment plant after the rain subsides), offline storage (like cisterns and tunnels) and screens that limit garbage from entering the rivers during an overflow.

In Winnipeg, sewer overflows dump, on average, 10 billion litres of effluent into the rivers each year — enough to fill 4,000 Olympic pools. Photo: Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press

All of these concrete, steel and heavy machinery solutions are called “grey infrastructure.” While they are an important — and proven — piece of solving complex problems like combined sewer overflows, they aren’t enough on their own.

‘Sponge cities’ are the future — and a faster way to stem overflows

According to the most recent Canada Infrastructure Report Card, the state of municipal infrastructure nationwide is at risk. A majority of this infrastructure is more than 20 years old and “concerning amount” — including 10 per cent of sewer infrastructure — is in poor or very poor condition. Many sewer pipes are now more than 50 years old and approaching end of life at a time when climate change threatens to add additional strain.

“We see these big shifts in temperature or big shifts in precipitation, bigger storm events, bigger rainfalls,” Dimple Roy, water management director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said in an interview.

“And these shifts in temperatures mean that we’ll see cracks in pipes, and the aging infrastructure will fail us on occasion.”

The 2024 sewage spill was caused by outdated infrastructure and flushed more than 200 million litres of raw sewage into the river over several days as crews worked to construct a bypass to stop the leak. The city claims the spill did not impact the health of Lake Winnipeg. Photo: John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press

Replacing this infrastructure often falls on municipalities, which own about half of sewage assets, but the costs are often out of reach for their budgets. To Roy, a city’s best course of action is to invest in “infrastructure refreshes” in critical areas — where the pipes are most at risk of failure, or release the most overflows — and balance those grey infrastructure investments with green, or natural, infrastructure solutions.

“Essentially, we want to see more spongy areas created in the city,” she explained, noting the “sponge city” concept has come into vogue in cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

It’s a simple theory: sewer overflows happen when there’s too much runoff entering the storm drains for the pipes to handle, but if a city can limit the amount of water running over concrete and asphalt into the drains, it can take pressure off the pipes and reduce the frequency of overflows.

The easiest way to do that is to encourage nature to take its course. Where urban environments were traditionally designed to wick water off the concrete and into the drains as fast as possible, natural ecosystems tend to absorb and store that same water like a sponge and release it slowly back into the environment.

By swapping out impermeable surfaces like concrete and asphalt for permeable ones — be it parks, green roofs, rain gardens or even more permeable types of pavement — cities can allow nature to share some of the load, and save money in the process.

Vancouver has implemented “tree trenches” on medians that filter rainwater through soil around a roadside tree and collect the excess into a holding tank below, releasing it slowly back into the environment. Toronto mandates all buildings of a certain floor space install green roofs, which reduce noise pollution while capturing up to 60 per cent of the rain that falls on them. Montreal has policies to build “sponge sidewalks” and “sponge parks,” which it expects will retain three Olympic swimming pools worth of water at half the cost of a grey infrastructure equivalent.

Reworking sewer infrastructure is expensive. Winnipeg believes it will take until 2095 — 70 years — to stop the leaks. Across Canada, 10 per cent of sewer infrastructure is in poor or very poor condition. Many sewer pipes are now more than 50 years old and approaching end of life at a time when climate change threatens to add additional strain. Photo: Katherine Cheng / The Narwhal

Winnipeg’s master plan does account for green infrastructure. Of the total $1.1 billion capital cost estimate, $104.6 million (about 10 per cent) was designated as “green infrastructure allowance,” and each district is required to have a green infrastructure element. But there’s a caveat: the city recommends 10 years of pilot projects and testing to evaluate the sustainability of green infrastructure before committing wholeheartedly.

While Mayes gives the city credit for ensuring green infrastructure will be part of the broader sewage solution package, he’d like to see Winnipeg pick up the pace on implementing it.

“My job is to be the nag to keep saying: ‘How much have you done? What are your plans? Stop doing zero,’ ” he said.

Roy notes some of the newer developments in and around Winnipeg have already proven the case for these spongy solutions. Communities like Sage Creek and Meadowlands have retention ponds with native wetland plants that absorb and filter runoff.

In 2015, Save Our Seine, a community group dedicated to maintaining the wellbeing of Winnipeg’s Seine River, installed a rain garden near a riverside trail and a large grocery store. The garden collects runoff from the roof and parking lot of the grocery store and filters it through a 450-square-metre patch of native plants and trees, cleaning and absorbing runoff before it drains into the Seine. The garden cost about $100,000, and was planted by a group of about 75 volunteers. The city references the garden as an example of green infrastructure in its sewer overflow plan.

“Those are the kinds of solutions that we would propose as much as possible,” Roy said. “There are some opportunities to … think strategically about where we can invest a bit of money and get quick wins.”

Creating ‘political will’ to find solutions is key: advocate

Ultimately, a combination of tight budgets and a lack of political will remain the biggest barriers to making progress on reducing sewer overflows.

In Paris, the spotlight of the Olympic Games created the conditions for municipal leaders to invest in sewer system upgrades.

In Ottawa, a mid-2000s sewage scandal — wherein an equipment failure caused more than 764 million litres of raw effluent to pour into the Ottawa River and city officials kept the incident under wraps for two years — created outrage and public awareness of the overflow problem.

But according to Reinsborough, with Ottawa Riverkeeper, it was the two decades of education, collaboration and consultation between citizens and the municipal government that eventually led to success.

“Together, our voices were stronger, their argument became stronger, and I think that helped them find the political will … to ensure that they could find solutions,” she said.

An overflow at a combined sewer outfall in winter 2021 caused outrage as sludge poured out over a popular skating trail. Photo: Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

Marianne Cerilli, a former provincial MLA, and a long-time environmental advocate, was inspired by the Ottawa Riverkeeper approach when she tried to organize her Wolseley neighbourhood to raise a stink about sewer overflows to their councillor. It was part of a broader effort — ultimately interrupted by COVID-19 lockdowns — to create a network of well-supported community groups, able to advocate on an almost block-by-block level.

As Winnipeg grapples with its own legacy of sewage spills, she believes neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood organizing will be key to convincing leaders to invest in changes.

“When elected representatives hear from people from their local ward … when they’re being lobbied and there’s research presented to them and policy advocacy from their constituents, then they pay more attention,” Cerilli said in an interview.

“There is power and strength in numbers. That’s the kind of community development that’s needed in our city — on issues like the combined sewers, and many others as well.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

From the marshes and swamps that dot the land surrounding the Great Lakes to the bogs and fens scattered farther north, Ontario is a province of many, many wetlands.

If you’ve spent time in the rocky stretches of the Canadian Shield — where water often pools in stony hollows and wetlands can seem a dime a dozen — it can be hard to believe that the soggy landscapes left are just a fraction of what was here 150 years ago, before European settlers began filling them in. In southern Ontario in particular, about three-quarters of the wetlands that once existed are gone.

Of the ones that remain, a vanishing few are protected from development. An even smaller number have been assessed to see if they’re worth preserving: just 30 in the past decade. Fewer still are bestowed with protective status at the end of the expensive, time-consuming assessment process, a title known as “provincially significant.” Only one site achieved the title from May 2021 to May 2022 — which is why it’s so remarkable that a group of citizens managed to secure it this year for a soggy site in Bracebridge, Ont., a stone’s throw from Lake Muskoka.

Though the newly minted South Bracebridge Provincially Significant Wetland Complex shows the height of what a group of people who care can accomplish, the lengths they had to go to also show why the existing wetland protection system can seem impossible to navigate. The process required thousands of hours of volunteer work, a small army of hired experts and ultimately, half a million dollars.

“How does the average person cough up the dough to fight something like this?” Michael Appleby, a director of the non-profit South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group, said.

“They don’t. The whole thing is stacked against them.”

It’s a process that matters more than ever. Wetlands are a natural climate solution — they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They provide a home for species at risk and soak up rain and melting snow that could otherwise cause floods. Even small or degraded ones have an outsized impact on their ecosystems.

They’re also disappearing. Last year, Ontario’s auditor general concluded the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry — which has made it harder to protect wetlands and abandoned a strategy aimed at conserving them — has done very little to prevent more from being filled in or paved over.

Another member of the south Bracebridge group, Lisa Cumber, said advocates don’t exactly see an ally in the politician charged with overseeing Ontario’s wetland policy, Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith. Before entering provincial politics, Smith was the mayor of Bracebridge, and voted in favour of allowing development near the wetland in 2021 without doing an assessment first. After the group appealed Bracebridge’s decision to a provincial tribunal, the project is going ahead but with stronger environmental protections.

Smith’s office didn’t respond to questions from The Narwhal, including whether any other wetlands have been designated as provincially significant this year. Back in 2021, however, Smith said he didn’t take the decision to approve the development lightly.

“It’s probably easy for people to say I’m being insincere when I say we’ve listened to the community and appreciated those comments but voted in a way that some people in the community don’t support, but such is the life of folks on council,” he told local media. 

So, what’s a would-be wetland protector to do?

“The system is broken,” Cumber said. “The public has to keep pushing and pushing.”

The Trans Canada Trail wraps around Henry Marsh, which is a portion of the protected south Bracebridge wetlands. Photo: South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group

South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group president Wendy Nicholson and board member Michael Appleby at Henry Marsh. Photo: South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group

Bracebridge signed off on development without wetland evaluation

Before they were a development battleground, the south Bracebridge provincially significant wetlands were best known as a hiking spot for cottagers and locals alike, brimming with life. In most seasons, birdsong echoes through the air — over the years, people have reported seeing 177 different avian species there — while frogs and turtles poke their heads out of the water.

The Trans Canada Trail wraps around the public stretch of the wetland, known as Henry Marsh, which connects to other wetlands on the property that’s now set to be developed. It drains into the Muskoka River, which empties into Lake Muskoka, an iconic cottaging hotspot. 

The Town of Bracebridge, however, had decades ago earmarked the area around the wetland complex as part of its urban centre, meaning the properties around the trail could eventually be rezoned for development. A highway is set to be built there too, one day. Various people proposed various projects over the years, but nothing stuck — until 2018, when Toronto entrepreneur George Chen applied to the town to build a private boarding school there.

Plans for the school, which will be called Muskoka Royale College, show a campus of about 180 hectares. It includes five “precincts” — classrooms, residences and a fitness complex, connected by roads winding through open space. When finished, it will be home to 1,800 students. 

Quinto Annibale, a lawyer representing Muskoka Royale who is also known for his work with the right-wing group Vaughan Working Families, told The Narwhal the developer planned the project as if the wetlands were provincially significant even before the official designation. 

Graydon Smith is Ontario’s Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry. In 2021, when he was mayor of Bracebridge, he voted in favour of allowing development of a school named Muskoka Royale to go ahead without a wetland evaluation. Now, he’s in charge of the ministry that oversees wetland protection. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

“Protection of the environment and the wetlands and all other natural heritage features on the property has been, and will continue to be, a paramount concern for my client,” Annibale wrote in an email.

Provincial urban planning rules can restrict development in and around significant wetlands, but they don’t require a wetland evaluation before building starts. And as a private project, Muskoka Royale isn’t subject to a provincial environmental assessment.

Chen has submitted some environmental studies to the town. According to Annibale, Muskoka Royale’s plans would increase the amount of protected land on the property. The site was previously zoned to allow a golf course, which would have disturbed more land than the school proposal, Annibale told The Narwhal. 

Still, the impact of Muskoka Royale on the South Bracebridge wetlands remains debated. Some mapping commissioned by the environmental group this fall indicates buildings could come close to the wetlands, infringing on the required buffer of space around them, and planned roads could cross them. 

Annibale called the group’s mapping “inaccurate” and said the building locations on the plans were “conceptual only,” and don’t show the “intended actual location of the buildings.” 

“The purpose of the plans was to demonstrate that the buildings could be accommodated within each precinct boundary while still protecting the wetlands as though they were [provincially significant wetlands],” Annibale said in an email.

As the development moved through the approval process in 2019 and 2020, locals worried the studies Chen had submitted voluntarily didn’t properly take the sensitivity of the wetlands into account. They suspected the wetlands might qualify as provincially significant, but without a formal assessment, how could anyone be sure? 

The South Bracebridge Provincially Significant Wetland Complex was officially protected in June 2023. Photo: Andy Zeltkalns

A wetland evaluation takes a while. It isn’t cheap, and depending on the details of a particular project, the results can make building more difficult. But the residents felt it was important.

“There is a mentality up here that says, ‘We’ve got so much of it, that we can afford to destroy a little bit,’ ” Appleby said. “Council elected to remain willfully ignorant.”

So a mix of cottagers and year-round residents formed the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group in 2019 and started pushing the town’s council to ask the province for more studies. 

“It was like a frickin’ high school study group,” Appleby said. “It was all of these 50- and 60-somethings hanging out together, going back to school …  learning about the process. It was brutal.” What astounded them, he added, was that there seemed to be no checks and balances — no way to ensure their elected officials took their arguments seriously.

The group spoke at council meetings and asked experts to weigh in, prompting conservation group Ontario Nature and wetland scientists to write Bracebridge council in support of a full evaluation. But it didn’t seem to make a difference: in 2021, the town approved Muskoka Royale without the assessment the group had asked for. “I believe I have the information to make a decision,” then-mayor Smith said. 

The group kept pushing. At one point, they even hired a public relations firm to help bring attention to the issue. They hired environmental lawyer David Donnelly to appeal the case to the Ontario Land Tribunal. They also hired ecologist Corey Stinson to do the wetland evaluation they thought was needed. 

To determine the value of the interconnected wetlands in the complex, Stinson visited the site 13 times in 2022, devoting early mornings and late evenings to cataloguing the flora and fauna and how the water flowed — both on foot and using aerial photos. 

The south Bracebridge wetland is among the first to be evaluated under new guidelines the Ontario government first proposed last year, which make it harder for bogs and swamps to be protected. Photo: Andy Zeltkalns

“It’s kind of a magical place to be,” Stinson said. The wetlands are unusually well connected to each other, he said, covering about 140 hectares — roughly 260 football fields — storing a ton of water and forming the right habitat for a wealth of plants and animals. He found species at risk, too, like western chorus frogs and a secretive, heron-like bird called a least bittern.

Stinson scored the wetland complex using a standard provincial manual, which awards points based on factors like the species living there, human activity in the area and how much carbon it might hold. Then, Stinson fired off the results to Smith’s Ministry of Natural Resources. The ministry used to review wetland evaluations before making them official, but after the province changed the rules last year, the process is considered complete once the results have been sent to a “local decision maker.”  

As of June, the wetlands officially qualify as provincially significant. All told, the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group’s efforts cost half a million dollars, Appleby told The Narwhal.

Muskoka, a vast area encompassing several towns and many lakes, hosts both year-round residents and cottagers. Not everyone in the region is affluent — about a tenth of its permanent population is considered low-income, according to data from the 2021 census, and the District of Muskoka says 60 per cent earn less than $40,000 per year. But many in the area, particularly the summer residents, have deep pockets. Cottage owners on Lake Muskoka include Victoria and David Beckham, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. 

The board members at the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group aren’t celebrities, and they’re a mix of seasonal and permanent residents. Cumber and Appleby, for example, both live there year-round. Some in the group do have experience dealing with governments and big businesses, though. If getting their local wetland protected was a stretch for them — despite their ability to fundraise, hire experts and spend time volunteering — it’s hard to see how most other small communities could do the same.

“I get the sense from networking with other community groups like ours that we’re clearly not alone,” Appleby said. “We just happen to be … one of the communities that had a donor community that could write a cheque and help fight back.”

Like all wetlands, the provincially significant ones in south Bracebridge naturally absorb floodwater and carbon from the atmosphere. Photo: Andy Zeltkalns

In early November 2023, the tribunal issued its decision about Muskoka Royale: the project can go ahead, but more environmental impact studies must be done first and there must be a larger buffer between the areas that will be disturbed for building and landscaping and the wetlands. Originally, the town approved Muskoka Royale’s proposal of a 15-metre buffer, but reversed their support for that during the tribunal process. The buffer is now set to be 30 metres.

It’s not everything the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group wanted, but it’s a step in the right direction, Cumber said. 

Natural features “can’t be protected if they are not recorded anywhere,” Cumber said. “So now we have a record and that is key to me.”

Annibale said the new designation “has no impact on my client’s development plans for the site.” The tribunal hearing was about whether the land could be rezoned to accommodate the school, he said: specific site plans, including building locations, are the next step in the process. 

“Muskoka Royale is extremely happy with the decision and the outcome of the hearing,” he wrote in an email. “The merits of the proposal have now been confirmed by the Ontario Land Tribunal … in what is a thoroughly considered and carefully reasoned decision.”

The Town of Bracebridge didn’t respond to questions from The Narwhal.

The South Bracebridge Provincially Significant Wetland Complex is a stone’s throw from Lake Muskoka, an iconic cottaging destination. Photo: Andy Zeltkalns

Auditor recommended Ontario learn from wetland protection systems in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick

The auditor general’s review of the province’s wetland protection rules last year found a series of problems. Many marshes that are vital to urban flood control don’t qualify for protection. Swamps that do qualify face delays in getting the official mantle. Wetlands that have not been studied can be destroyed, even if they’re likely to meet the standard for protection. At times, Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives have also used a special land-zoning power to override wetland protections and allow development. 

A matter of weeks before those findings were released, Smith’s ministry rewrote the provincial manual used to evaluate whether a wetland is provincially significant, making it harder for sites to gain or keep protection. The Bracebridge wetland is one of the first to be evaluated under the new rules. It still made the cut, but nearly 50 hectares of vernal pools in the complex — or wetlands that contain water for only part of the year — were not protected, although they would have qualified under the old rules. 

Although the province has invested in some piecemeal wetland restoration projects, Smith’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry didn’t commit to a single one of the auditor’s recommendations to make the system better. For example, the auditor suggested Ontario look to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where wetlands that haven’t been studied receive a default protection until they can be assessed. As of now, that’s not happening here.  

Cumber said she believes it’s worth fighting to fix Ontario’s flawed system for protecting wetlands, even if she doesn’t have a lot of faith in the decision-makers.

“I think the system is broken, but it’s also broken because nobody’s been held accountable,” she said. “Now, they’ve been challenged.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.