MGEU President Lois Wales was one of dozens of presenters at the Legislative Committee Hearings to support the initiatives inherent in Bill 46, The Save Lake Winnipeg Plan. The aim of the Legislation is to significantly reduce phosphorus and other nutrients that are drastically affecting the health of the world’s 10th largest freshwater lake.
“Like thousands of Manitobans, I am passionate about doing all we can to ensure we are acting in the best interests of the lake’s health,” Wales told the Committee. “I know, as do most Manitobans, that there needs to be swift and decisive action on this file. There is simply too much at risk for us not to act.”
President Wales emphasized her shock at learning recently the lake’s level of phosphorous is now three times higher than was found in Lake Erie several decades ago when that lake was commonly referred to as dead.
“Those are harsh realities requiring strong action,” she said
The Province’s plan will immediately focus on three key areas to reduce the pollutants that put the lake’s water at risk.
1. Keeping hog manure out of the lake by:
• banning any new hog industry expansion that does not use advanced environmental practices to protect water;
• enshrining in legislation a permanent ban on winter spreading of manure; and
• doubling funding for best environmental management practices that protect water and introducing a new tax credit to help farmers acquire new environmental technologies to treat manure responsibly.
2. Modernizing sewage treatment in Winnipeg and throughout Manitoba by:
• Requiring the City of Winnipeg to replace its North End Sewage Treatment Plant with a full Biological Nutrient Removal (BNR) Plant to keep pollutants out of the lake. Within a year, the city will be required to produce a plan on how it will meet strict limits of pollutant removal. The plan will then have to go to the Clean Environment Commission and the Public Utility Board (PUB) to ensure ratepayers are protected.
• Enshrining in legislation planning rules to ensure no new subdivisions outside city limits are built without an approved wastewater management plan.
3. Protecting Manitoba’s wetlands by:
• restoring natural filters like the Netley-Libau Marsh that keep pollutants from entering the lake by investing in projects like cattail harvesting that reduce nutrient loading to the lake and rebuilding the marsh through innovative pilot projects;
• putting new powers in place to protect wetlands on Crown land; and
• banning the rapid expansion of peat extraction from wetlands.
“I recognize the parameters of this legislation will require difficult changes in sectors that have no doubt contributed to growing our economy – particularly in the hog industry,” said Wales. “I would humbly suggest that most Manitobans understand the challenges these industries will be tasked with going forward, but they are changes that must be met.”
Sometimes commerce must take a back seat to common sense when something like Lake Winnipeg is at risk, she said.
Wales also called on the business sector to follow the lead of the labour community in putting real resources behind independent research intended to help chart a further course forward, and pointed to MGEU’s recent announcement of a scholarship fund for graduate students doing research on the lake as an example of how to do just that.
Bill 46 is expected to go to a third reading in the near future, at which point the measures contained within it become law in Manitoba.