Great Lakes in Peril

This post from Dave Dempsey's Substack, authored by Dan Macfarlane, offers important observations about the waning strength of Great Lakes transboundary institutions and domestic policies that should be protecting the lakes, and growing threats that current policies aren't addressing in effective and sustainable ways. We wanted to share this with Great Lakes Together readers and others who care about the health and vitality of the lakes and the region.

Great Lakes in Peril

Undoing Decades of Progress

In case you haven’t heard, figurative waves are crashing along the water border separating Canada and the U.S. Historically a respectful partnership, the relationship between the two nations is strained. It’s an ominous time that has considerable implications for the Great Lakes.

I’m turning this post over to a distinguished expert on the environment with a special focus on the Great Lakes, Dan Macfarlane, who has lived on both sides of the international border.

Dan Macfarlane is Professor in the School of the Environment, Geography, and Environment at Western MIchigan University. He is also a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto and the author or co-editor of 6 books. Born and raised in Canada, he recently became a citizen of the U.S.

Here are his thoughts.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump told then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he wanted to walk away from several US-Canada agreements, with the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and the Great Lakes Compact high on the president’s hit list. Since then, Mark Carney has replaced Trudeau as prime minister. But Trump’s bluster, and desire to gut environmental protections, have only increased.

The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty (BWT) between the United States and Canada granted equal navigation access to their many shared waters, adopted regulations concerning water diversions and changes to water levels, and even addressed pollution. Any changes to the level of a border water needed agreement through the International Joint Commission (IJC), created by the BWT, or a special agreement between the two federal governments.

The Boundary Waters Treaty has been characterized as a pioneering form of international environmental governance, while the IJC has been portrayed as a model for bilateral cooperation. The IJC is a six-member body with an equal number of Canadian and US appointees who are technically independent from the government that appointed them. According to a former commissioner, the philosophy of dispute-settlement and conflict avoidance built into the BWT and IJC was far more sophisticated than any comparable piece of bilateral machinery then existing in Western society.

One of the IJC’s major functions is administering the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). Responding to the extensive degradation of the Great Lakes, in 1972 the United States and Canada arrived at the first GLWQA. This agreement committed each nation to develop common water quality objectives and regulatory standards for several pollutants, and to create and implement their own national programs to achieve these goals. The focus was point source pollution, chiefly excess nutrient loading. The main strategy to reduce the nutrient inflow involved improving municipal sewage treatment.

Algae along the Lake Michigan at Sleeping Bear Dunes.

This 1972 agreement only applied to the two lowest Great Lakes, however, as well as the international section of the St. Lawrence River. Nevertheless, this initial GLWQA was quite successful in cleaning up Lakes Erie and Ontario. Indeed, the GLWQA has been touted as an international model for transborder pollution governance.

Building on this success, an updated version of the GLWQA was agreed to in 1978. It is still in effect today. This accord expanded the scope to include all the Great Lakes and widened the focus beyond just conventional pollutants, such as phosphorus, to include toxic and hazardous polluting substances. It also created mechanisms for transborder scientific research, monitoring, and reporting. In 1987 an annex was added to the GLWQA creating the Areas of Concern (AOCs) program for the most polluted parts of the basin, with Remedial Action Plans (RAPs) to clean them up.

Another of Trump’s targets appears to be the 2008 Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact (or Great Lakes Compact for short). Its principal provisions included a ban on new water diversions in the U.S. as well as measures for limiting and monitoring water use and consumption with the Great Lakes states. Granted, there were controversial exceptions to the new diversion rules, such as for counties straddling the watershed and a loophole allowing unlimited water exports out of the basin in containers less than 5.7 gallons. The Compact’s provisions were extended to the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec by the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement.

These three diplomatic accords – the BWT, the GLWQA, and the Compact – can all be characterized as successful. Unfortunately, they are fairly easy for Trump to abrogate or just sideline.

As a treaty, the BWT is theoretically legally binding. But it wouldn’t be difficult for the US to walk away from this treaty. To terminate the BWT, all that is required is for either country to give one year’s notice that they plan to do so. Even if the treaty isn’t formally ended, the two nations can mostly avoid invoking it and IJC by not referring matters to the commission (as they have sometimes done in the past). Not to mention that Canada, as the much smaller nation, has little realistic recourse if the United States just chooses not to live up to its international commitments.

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, for its part, is a non-binding “executive agreement” that does not have the teeth of a formal treaty or diplomatic agreement. It requires both sides to live up to their commitments; arguably neither side has really been doing that in recent decades. The Compact is what is known as an “interstate compact,” meaning that it has the assent of Congress and the eight Great Lakes states. This gives it some level of legal enforceability, which the companion agreement with Ontario and Quebec does not.

Nevertheless, despite its status as an interstate compact is not hard to imagine scenarios where the Trump administration tears up or ignores the Great Lakes Compact and proceeds with diversions, especially with the support of the recipient regions. Granted, it would take many years to build the infrastructure to move large volumes of water from the Great Lakes to the west and be exorbitantly expensive. By that time, Trump’s second term would be over (of course, there are all those unsettling rumblings about a third term …).

The Trump administration’s penchant for gutting and dismantling other federal environmental protections will also directly or indirectly hurt the Great Lakes. This includes undermining the Environmental Protection Agency, which has many responsibilities and roles pertaining to the Great Lakes, or the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.

While it is easy to blame the current occupant of the Oval Office, the fact is that both Canada and the United States were failing the Great Lakes long before Trump came into office.

Then there are the range of domestic transborder scientific and monitoring efforts that are threatened by the actions of the Trump government. For example, cuts to NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) have purged much of the staff and operating expenses. This leave gaps in in the lab’s ability to monitor and study the health of Great Lakes – such as the algal blooms in Lake Erie primarily caused by farm runoff. Such cuts also result in the loss of institutional knowledge and continuity of research. And there many other ways that the United States and Canada formally share and harmonize Great Lakes science that are potentially imperiled.

I previously mentioned the Areas of Concern program under the GLWQA. Since its inception in 2010, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to rehabilitate various AOCs in the American portion of the Great Lakes. In the past, this program has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Congress, including from many Republicans. Though a pulse of GLRI funding was approved during Trump’s first presidency, he made some noise about abandoning it. Things seem to be trending in a direction where that is likely what will happen this time around.

But it isn’t only the United States the Great Lakes need to worry about. The new Carney government is more friendly to environmental concerns and regulations than its American counterpart. But faced with an economic downturn from American tariffs and trade negotiations, Carney’s Liberals are promoting a nation-building spree, and planning an austerity budget, that is going to be bad for the environment and for the Great Lakes. This includes pushing through new infrastructure such as fossil fuel pipelines. (On that score, the Trump administration is trying to ram through a Line 5 tunnel in the Straits of Mackinac under the guise of an “energy emergency”).

Ontario, which is the only Canadian province touching the Great Lakes, doesn’t have strong environment credentials either. Premier Doug Ford’s policies, including his environmental and Great Lakes record, would look weak if compared to anyone else but Trump. Indeed, Ford, and his brother Rob (the former crack-smoking mayor of Toronto), could be seen as Canada’s closest political analogues to Trump.

While it is easy to blame the current occupant of the Oval Office, the fact of the matter is that both Canada and the United States were failing the Great Lakes long before Trump came into office. Both countries, and their major parties, are committed to neoliberal policies where economic growth and consumption trump all else.

Indeed, when we consider the range of problems from microplastics, toxic substances, agricultural and municipal pollution, invasive species, biodiversity loss, and climate change that now bedevil the lakes, they might actually be worse off than they were in the 1960s – when Lake Erie was declared “dead” because of eutrophication and rivers in the Great Lakes basin were catching on fire. We need to move beyond just tweaking policies or voting for the other party and come up with fundamentally more sustainable ways of living and relating to the Great Lakes.

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