Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Large amounts of "unsightly" and smelly vegetation has been washing up on Toronto's Cherry Beach shoreline recently, but the director of water programs at Swim Drink Fish Canada says there's no need for alarm. Gregary Ford says the mixture of "submerged aquatic vegetation and a form of algae" is harmless to humans and animals. "We get photos like this all the time; people are often concerned when they see something green washing up on their shorelines," Ford told CBC Toronto.
A recently proposed private member’s bill that would make it a criminal offence to dump raw sewage in waters frequented by fish was dismissed as a step backwards by environmentalists and opposing MPs. Bill C-269, proposing changes to the Fisheries Act, was tabled by former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada Andrew Scheer, and underwent second reading May 10. The proposed changes would basically be a return to the laws under the old Fisheries Act, which were ineffective and rarely enforced, said Mark Mattson, environmental lawyer and president of Swim Drink Fish Canada.
Canada's old-fashioned city sewer systems dumped nearly 900 billion litres of raw sewage into this country's waterways over five years, enough to fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool more than 355,000 times. Data posted in early February also show that wastewater-treatment plants across the country failed tests of their water quality thousands of times between 2013 and 2018.
