The Incredible Shrinking Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement

Sunset over Georgian Bay, Georgian Bay Association

Over the holidays I enjoyed a dinner with friends we rarely get to see, and our conversation rolled around to what everyone was doing these days. I mentioned the volunteer work I do for Great Lakes Ecoregion Network, and that the new year would bring the required public forum for the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) review.

Realizing that not everyone knows about the Agreement, and prompted by one of my friends, I provided a very short history of this remarkable agreement between the United States and Canada, peppered with my somewhat acidic commentary on its slow descent toward irrelevance. (As I write in my book, there is a reason why people don’t invite environmentalists to dinner.) Still, the points we talked about have been bothering me since, so with the Governments’ February forum on the most recent review of the GLWQA’s progress just a few weeks away, I thought I’d share a more detailed assessment with a wider audience.

I was in high school when the U.S. and Canada hammered out the first GLWQA, signed with fanfare by President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was a big deal at the time, because it offered hope for Lake Erie in the first era of massive algal blooms, and healthier waters for all the Great Lakes. It was also the first notable transnational agreement to address environmental threats to shared waters, and people around the world were paying attention.

1972 was also the year the U.S. enacted the first modern Clean Water Act and Canada had formed Environment Canada in 1971. These actions served as catalysts for cleaner Great Lakes. The two nations’ federal governments (also known in diplomatic speak as the “Parties”) revised the Agreement in 1978 to include urgent research and related strategies to address the widespread threat of toxic chemical pollution—especially in the Great Lakes food web.

The International Joint Commission (created under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty) carries out some Agreement activities, e.g., critiques, evaluations of progress, and recommendations to the Parties. The Agreement also set up boards of experts, including the Science Advisory Board and Water Quality Board. Advice from these bodies shaped IJC recommendations to the governments and helped drive new policy to reduce phosphorus inputs and toxic pollutants (including domestic bans on manufacture of PCBs, DDT, and a few other persistent toxic chemicals).

The 1987 update to the Agreement expanded objectives to include cleanup of 43 toxic hotpots (Areas of Concern) throughout the region and it flagged a lengthy list of known and potential chemical pollutants to the Great Lakes and highlighted the priorities which helped shape regulatory strategies. Environmental leaders considered these and other improvements significant  achievements at the time.

However, based on decisions by the domestic agencies that oversee the agreement, (U.S. EPA, and at the time Environment Canada), the new language also shifted institutional roles. The Parties chose to establish an executive committee of agency staff (now known as the Great Lakes Executive Committee) to coordinate joint projects, and self-evaluate their own progress.

This weakened the IJC’s previous role as an agenda-setter and independent voice. What agency staff rationalized as a change for “efficiency” also reflected a simple truth that public agencies really don’t want an independent watchdog hovering over them and telling the public how well the governments are doing (or not) on a set of objectives they didn’t control—despite the fact that the Parties had written and signed off on the Agreement.

A parallel thread was that industry also didn’t like the voice of the IJC pointing fingers at their pollution and its impacts and pushing for innovative technologies, sunsets for dangerous chemicals and practices, and other things that could tarnish industrial images or affect bottom lines.

Under the GLWQA, the Parties must review the progress under the Agreement every three years, and after three cycles, conduct a deep and comprehensive review. Each three-year review also requires a public forum.

In the late ‘70s and through the ‘80s, the public forums were attracting significant public involvement—with some meetings bringing together hundreds and upwards of a thousand or more people over several days, from the agency staff to local conservation groups and the media. Some included demonstrations (I remember the fish costumes) most had packed sessions with extensive public comment. One commissioner described these large and sometimes boisterous gatherings as a “circuses” and industry urged “getting these things under control.”

Thus, in the post-1987 agreement era, the “leave us alone and trust us” approach from the federal agencies, and the industry eagerness to quell public and government action fostered a steady decline in the GLWQA’s relevance and impact. What started as a visionary global model for environmental cooperation has shrunk to a mere shadow of its former self,  and not surprisingly, the public constituencies have shrunk as well.

In 2012 the Parties stripped out all the toxic and hazardous chemical lists from the 1987 version, and added an industry representative to a committee to determine any new “Chemicals of Mutual Concern.” They also eliminated nearly all deadlines and benchmarks, and limited climate change response to scientific exchange between the Parties.

For the 2022 review, the Great Lakes Ecoregion Network submitted its own independent 21-page critique of the status of the Agreement and needed changes. We never got a response from the U.S. EPA, or Climate Change and Environment Canada (CCEC). Perhaps it was a fool’s errand then, and now.

Advocacy groups have always had a two-fold relationship with public agencies. We want them to succeed, but we also want them to do a better job, with more resources, to comply with the laws, regulations and human health and environmental goals. So, we support them, and we criticize them. At a time when public environmental agencies, especially in the U.S., are under attack by our own President and his cronies, critique seems harsh for a reduced staff carrying an impossible load. But things aren’t great in our Great Lakes, and someone needs to say something.

The 2025 review has been minimal compared to other eras. The Parties will hold the public forum at EPA headquarters in Chicago on February 4 and 5.  If you want to weigh in, register for the forum at GLForum@epa.gov.

Perhaps like me, you face the advocate’s dilemma. Do we criticize the shallow and cursory review to exercise our right to express public input, or is this event merely performative to check the box of holding the review, and thus not worth our effort? If we sit it out, do we acquiesce to the continued decline of a once-remarkable tool of human cooperation to protect a vital ecological system?

We know that our Great Lakes are in trouble, and so do the Parties, whether they are allowed to say so out loud or not. Whether it’s the 32 lingering Areas of Concern, the steady presence of legacy pollutants like PCBs and mercury in the system, more recent threats like PFAS, the whitefish crash (and other ongoing invasive species impacts), the loss of regulatory capacity through EPA cuts and budget-stressed state governments, or emerging threats from data centers and more, someone needs to do something.

Perhaps the greatest loss of a diminished Agreement is that at its best, the GLWQA helped to coalesce a transnational team of top-notch thinkers devoted to solutions on big thorny problems that plagued the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes, regardless of whether a domestic government found these ideas uncomfortable. This energized public constituencies and built public support for the Agreement’s implementation and wider Great Lakes protection.

Some of the most important big-picture solutions on the table in the late 1980s included the Precautionary Principle, i.e., don’t do something unless we know it won’t cause harm, and Zero Discharge: if it is toxic, don’t let anyone discharge it into the lakes. Between anti-regulatory sentiment and industry muscle, those faded from the agenda. But we need these approaches, and many more innovative approaches to safeguard the Great Lakes because the current framework isn’t enough. Period.

Imagine a transnational team of people working at the top of their fields designing an operational framework for precautionary strategies, or envisioning a regional habitat resilience plan for the warming waters of the Great Lakes with goals and benchmarks for how we would roll it out. In the old days, the IJC could have fueled this kind of effort. Now?

These are serious issues, and we need serious analysis and serious people to wrestle with the long-term solutions. We need brilliant science, systems thinkers, deep citizen engagement, and committed leadership. For now, the governments seem to be ceding their roles and responsibilities—and this has been the trajectory since 1987. Who else can do this, and how do we get there from here?

—Jane Elder, Blog Editor, Great Lakes Ecoregion Network

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