By Anastasia Lintner, Lintner Law and Nancy Goucher, Environmental Defence
Last Thursday, the Government of Ontario filed a new regulation that, commencing on January 1, 2015, will stop diversions of water from one Great Lakes watershed to another (save for well-defined exceptions). With this new regulation, Ontario has finally fulfilled its commitments under an agreement we have with Quebec and the U.S. Great Lakes states, so that both Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions must follow strict standards and procedures should they want to move major amounts of water within or outside of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin.
The Great Lakes may seem like a limitless resource (we often hear that these lakes hold almost 20 per cent of the world’s available surface freshwater), but in reality, these water bodies are not as stable as some might like to think. About 99 per cent of the water we see is left over from when the glaciers melted some 10,000 years ago. That means only one per cent of the water in the lakes is renewed annually. If more than that leaves the system in a year, water levels will decline. That’s why we need to guard our water supplies and carefully control how much water we artificially move between watersheds.
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