On the north shore of Lake Superior, a group of researchers based out of Lakehead University are working hard to rehabilitate sections of the lake.
In 1972, Canada and the U.S. signed the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), a legally binding commitment to work together to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Great Lakes System.”
As part of this agreement, in 1987, the two countries named 43 areas of concern around the Great Lakes. Twelve of these were in Canada, five shared binationally, and the other 26 were in the U.S. Each of these sites developed a Remedial Action Plan (RAP) aimed at restoring habitat, cleaning up toxins from the environment, and making the area safe to use.
But recent cuts to U.S. agencies made by the Trump administration have Canadian researchers worried about how it might impact the overall health of the Great Lakes.
“Folks on the American side do a lot of work to study and understand the threats that we face as a lake and try to mitigate those,” says Tim Hollinger, the RAP coordinator for the north shore of Lake Superior. “If that machine isn’t funded or operating as it should be, then certainly we can see some kind of impact arise to the lake.”
In May, the Trump administration announced that it would be cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2026 budget by 54 per cent, reducing it from $9.14 billion to $4.16 billion. The agency will also be letting go of over 1,200 full time positions. The EPA is the U.S.’s lead federal agency for the Areas of Concern program.
On the Canadian side, Hollinger says they haven’t noticed much impact from the cuts, but it has become more difficult to meet with and share resources with their U.S. counterparts. “That’s one thing that gets hurt when you start to cut back programs, you can really only focus on what is dire,” he says. “A lot of that resource sharing can be lost in the mix.”
With fewer resources, it could be more difficult to protect against possible pollutants both on the Canadian and U.S. sides of the Great Lakes. In the U.S., for instance, Trump issued an executive order in April to increase coal production. According to Hollinger, coal burning plants are a major contributor of mercury in Great Lake fish populations. “We’ve tried to take those emissions out of our atmosphere and out of our lakes, and we’ve seen recovery of fish populations, but if we start burning coal again and putting that back into our atmosphere, we’re just going to undo all of the great progress we’ve made over the last 30 years,” he says.
On the Canadian side, there’s a push to introduce lithium refineries around Thunder Bay. Hollinger says there’s been little research into how this industry might affect Lake Superior.
Currently there are four areas of concern on Lake Superior: Thunder Bay, Nipigon Bay, Jackfish Bay, and Peninsula Harbour. The Canadian and U.S. governments agreed that these were areas of concern due to toxic effluent dumped into the harbours by papers mills and wastewater treatment plants in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and even earlier.
The Lakehead University team has been working to remediate these areas since 2008. They just received $346,250 in funding from the Ontario government, split between them, Bare Points Developments Inc. and the City of Thunder Bay.
According to Hollinger, the team has made significant progress in its remediation action plans. Nipigon Bay is in a restoration phase and has met its delisting criteria; Jackfish Bay is considered in recovery with the team monitoring its health; Peninsula Harbour is also in recovery; while Thunder Bay has two large restoration projects planned.
The hope is that this hard work won’t be reversed by U.S. decisions. “It’s tough to say what will happen,” says Hollinger, “but I have heard from my American colleagues that it’s tough times right now.”
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