Monday, April 06, 2020

Lake Ontario flooding is not the result of an international conspiracy

Most people who live around Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway - and, for that matter, most of the rest of the Great Lakes area - have seen how climate change has resulted in much
higher water levels than historically. We see it all the time on our beach, which is going through yet more restoration and protection work as we speak.
Some people who live right on the shoreline of Lake Ontario have seen devastating floods over the last 3 years or so, and some pretty fancy lakeshore properties have been impacted. So, it's hardly surprising that some of the fancy property-owning classes are turning to the courts to try to force the International Joint Commission (IJC) - which is the body that controls the water flow through Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, principally through regulation of the Niagara River dams and the Moses-Saunders dam near Cornwall, Ontario - to favour the Lake Ontario area more over the lower St. Lawrence, to tweak the rules in their own favour.
The complainants argue that the IJC leans too far towards commercial shipping interests, and that they are paying the price. The IJC, though, has a whole host of interests to balance, from property damage to wetland destruction to shipping interests to ice jams to power plant capacities. Its current Plan 2014 (which actually came into force in 2017) is the result of 14 years of deliberations and discussions with the various stakeholders, and it believes it has struck the best overall balance.
There will always be some winners and some losers in this kind of zero-sum game, and it doesn't seem to me to be deliberately stacked against those with low-lying high-value property on Lake Ontario. The complainers say they just want to "share the pain" with those further down-river. But Montreal - a city of nearly two million people don't forget - has had its share of pain over the last few years too. And, by some estimates, lowering the water level in Lake Ontario by 1 centimetre could raise water levels in Montreal by as much as 12 centimetres, which could be pretty catastrophic.
Maybe we can put up with a bit more construction work on our boardwalk to avoid much worse outcomes further down the river. Maybe we should just let the IJC do its job.

No comments: