A Canadian flag flies along the waterfront of Lake Ontario in Toronto on Aug. 27.COLE BURSTON/AFP/Getty Images
Scott N. Higgins is a senior research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area.
I have spent decades working in both the field and in halls of power alike, trying to get decision-makers to take Canada’s water security and the health of the Great Lakes seriously.
So, imagine my surprise when the name of one of them grabbed headlines around the world, for the most bizarre of reasons.
Regardless of where you may stand on how we refer to the smallest of the five Laurentian Great Lakes, one thing about which we should all agree is that recent events should stoke a real, adult conversation about where our two neighbouring countries stand on co-managing them.
It’s easy enough to forget that four of these five lakes are truly international, crossing both countries’ borders. More than 40 million people in Canada and the U.S., for example, rely on them for drinking water every day.
And despite recent events, I would still hold U.S.-Canada co-operation on the Great Lakes up as a venerable example of what we in the biz call “transboundary collaboration.”
Quick history lesson: After the Boundary Waters Treaty was signed in 1909, the International Joint Commission (IJC) was established. Ever since, the IJC has facilitated joint commitments to combat pollution, toxic hotspots, and restore ecosystem health as well as share science and data between the two countries.
So, despite recent undulations, here in North America, we are in an enviable spot.
And while Canada should never jeopardize this invaluable relationship with its southern cousin when it comes to protecting the Great Lakes, we should always be working to support and bolster our own data, expertise and, of course, sovereignty.
What should this look like?
The Canada Water Agency is already pulling together a National Water Security Strategy and has reached out to solicit ideas and counsel from experts and the public alike. This is an imperative and long-awaited move from the federal government.
While there are many great individuals, agencies, as well as local and provincial jurisdictions that are monitoring the health of Canada’s abundant freshwater supplies, we sorely need a federal plan that will harmonize these nationally, allowing them to share data, resources, and expertise.
Let’s think about that data for a second. Across the country, individual citizens, remote sensors and dedicated entities are busy collecting samples on the health of their local water bodies and sending them to public datastreams that collate and find patterns.
Incredible initiatives to aggregate the results of all these efforts exist aplenty in Canada, but a federal plan could, and should, tie them all together. Said strategy should also provide standard monitoring metrics, so that, basically, a dedicated student in Victoria and a limnologist in St John’s are testing for the exact same thing, and when the data is published, it is easily understandable and accessible to those who need it.
Only then can we build a truly coherent and panoptic view of the health of the country’s water, cutting down on unnecessary replication while building more effective solutions.
We should also consider questions of data sovereignty. On whose servers are our data stored? Do foreign companies have access to them? Water security increasingly requires not only protecting our waters but ensuring the data needed to understand and manage them remains under Canadian control.
Working in silos tends to come up as a familiar trope in freshwater protection. For a few years now, I have been excited by the idea of dipping into another sector to harvest satellite images of our water bodies to provide us with another source of data. Collaborating with the Canada Space Agency to share resources would be great example of a partnership in service of a shared national interest (and a cross-sectoral approach from which other nations already regularly benefit).
And, of course, in all these instances, said data and expertise should be mutually shared with our American neighbours who often work on the same water bodies, toward the same goals.
At a time when cross-border relations are endlessly occupying column inches for all the wrong reasons, I want to ensure that the stewardship of the Great Lakes continues to be held up as a beacon of what this relationship can look like at its best.
That does not mean Canada standing in the shadows but rather valuing its own expertise and sovereignty enough to secure its own water security now, and for generations to come.