Cities ask federal government for better help in protecting water

Beaconsfield Mayor Bob Benedetti joined 54 other mayors from both north and south of the Canadian-American border recently to ask their respective federal governments to do more in terms of protecting water resources around the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.

"There's a whole bunch of issues," Benedetti told <@Ri>The Chronicle$p>. Chief among these are updating the infrastructure of water-related equipment in the areas, such as waste water management plants, or protecting the water from hazardous waste.

Benedetti, who joined the group of mayors collectively known as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (GLSCI) last year, said the provincial government of Quebec, and even the United States federal government, have by and large been more co-operative on the issue than Canada on a federal level.

"The St. Lawrence River is something that, if it weren't there, Beaconsfield wouldn't be what Beaconsfield is," Benedetti said. "This is the same for all the other cities that are in front of the Great Lakes," he added.

The mayors convened in Toronto in mid-July for their annual meeting, where they signed off on a number of resolutions to get federal governments to move and to sign a Great Lakes pact with the province of Ontario.

Besides including smaller cities like Beaconsfield, the GLSCI also counts some heavy-hitters among its members, like Toronto in Canada and Chicago in the United States of America.

Lac St. Louis Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia said one of the reasons GLSCI may perceive the federal government is not as helpful as the provincial government is because water-related legislation is usually a provincial issue.

Scarpaleggia said the federal government, however, could be doing more to help out. "I've proposed that the government create a junior minister for water," he said. However, the vote was rejected in the House of Commons, he added, because of opposition from the Bloc Québecois and the ruling Conservative Party.

Scarpaleggia theorized the Bloc rejected the notion simply because it did not want to "build up" a federal government it did not believe in. As for the Conservative Party, "they told their MPs we just want to create another bloated ministry," Scarpaleggia said. However, what he has in mind for a junior ministry of water is a small office of about a dozen employees helping co-ordinate different water-related issues between other federal ministries, provinces and municipalities.

Scarpaleggia said about 63 per cent of waste water management plants in the country are outdated.

He added a recent Environment Canada estimate put a dollar amount of $3 billion on estimates for water-related infrastructure updates in Ontario and the St. Lawrence basin in Quebec.

When Conservative Senator Michael Fortier visited the West Island in his former capacity as Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, he pledged $100 billion in infrastructure to municipalities in the next few years, partly to see to projects such as water filtration plants.

Environment Canada did not return a request for comments as of press time.