For decades, scientists and government officials working in and around Lake Superior have been playing an ecosystem version of whack-a-mole. Their target: the sea lamprey, a parasitic fish native to the Atlantic that had long devastated fish stocks in the greatest of the Great Lakes.
In recent years, however, The Great Lakes Fishery Commission—in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—began applying a lampricide in the lamprey spawning grounds, the network of shallow rivers and streams that empty into Lake Superior. The timing is key: the chemical needs to be deposited during a brief window in May, depending on the water temperature. The control program had reduced lamprey populations by 90 per cent in most areas and allowed the regeneration of dozens of previously threatened native species.
“There is an optimal time, and people know that’s when the adult sea lamprey are going to come for spawning,” says Jérôme Marty, a University of Ottawa limnologist and the executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research. The control campaign is critical, he adds, given that a female lamprey can produce up to 100,000 eggs per season.
Earlier this year, however, the Trump administration threatened to upend this indisputably successful international effort to protect the world’s largest freshwater lake and its $5.1 billion fishery. In February, the FWS staff responsible for the program were all summarily fired, as were most of the employees of an Ann Arbor, Mich.,-based agency called the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, which disseminates water data. The layoffs also meant that a crucial Lake Erie algae bloom forecast would be discontinued.
“That created a massive wave of worries,” says Marty. “We knew that if we were to miss that [window], that’s it.” The layoffs sparked a “big pushback”—the leadership of the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, which runs the program, loudly lobbied state and federal politicians to fix the mess. The FWS staff subsequently were re-hired in time to apply the lampricide. Yet the warning for scientists was clear: that the status quo— decades of collective management of an enormously consequential ecosystem—could be eclipsed by Trumpian chaos at any moment.
The story of the sea lamprey offers a glimpse of the tension now hanging over the bilateral management of the so-called boundary waters between Canada and the U.S.—the Great Lakes, as well as the St. Lawrence River and the Columbia River basin that straddles the border running between B.C., Washington State, and Montana. Such incidents have also served as a wake-up call, says Ashley Wallis, the associate director of advocacy group Environmental Defence. “It has forced more conversation in Canada about freshwater security.”
Climate change has recast our relationship with water, as evidenced by torrential storms, sea level rise, prolonged droughts, and vanishing glaciers. More recently, the advent of AI has drastically upped the ante, as the massive data centres required to run these applications consume vast amounts of water. A 2024 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, data centres in the U.S. consumed 17 billion gallons of water for cooling—a figure that could quadruple by 2028. In the same year, 211 billion gallons of water went towards generating electricity to power these centres.
Amidst all the flux, however, the Great Lakes have proven remarkably stable, largely due to a century of responsible, bi-national oversight. Since 1909, the 24-page Boundary Water Treaty between Canada and the U.S. has governed these extraordinary continent-straddling resources. The International Joint Commission (IJC), whose commissioners are appointed by the American president and the Canadian cabinet, is tasked with overseeing disputes and the management of flows, water levels, and ecosystem health.
“Back in the 1970s, President Nixon and Prime Minister Trudeau decided the Great Lakes were really in bad shape, particularly the lower lakes,” says Gail Krantzberg, the former Canadian co-chair of the IJC’s science advisory board and a professor emeritus of engineering and public policy at McMaster University. The unchecked dumping of industrial run-off and raw sewage was negatively impacting fish stock. They signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which led to extensive remediation efforts. The intervening 50 years, in fact, demonstrated the benefits of robust international collaboration on such ambitious initiatives, she says. “Ever since, that shared management of the Great Lakes has been a fact, and there’s been no debate about who does what.”
In 2024, the IJC commissioned a poll of residents living on either side of the Great Lakes: 96 per cent of respondents supported government investment in water protection, with four in five agreeing the region’s economy would suffer if the lakes aren’t healthy.
Yet the second Trump administration has shattered that sense of equilibrium, say experts who are involved in joint scientific and governance institutions. In March 2025, the president mused about opening up a “very large faucet”—of course, no such thing actually exists—to divert Canadian water to parched areas in the U.S. The New York Times reported in March that he had talked about tearing up the Boundary Water Treaty and considered the Canadian-U.S. border to be illegitimate. “I have not heard threats to the treaty since,” says Krantzberg. “And I don’t really want to advertise that language. But it got a lot of us extremely angry and shocked, because the transnational cooperation has been seamless and unquestioned.”
The current state of play is perhaps best described as a waiting game.
In western Canada, the future of the treaty governing the Columbia River basin—which begins in the Rockies, dips south into the U.S., then comes back to Canada and finally drains into the U.S. northwest—is up in the air because Trump indicated he wanted to re-open it. “B.C., Canada, and Columbia Basin First Nations are committed to working with the United States to reach agreement on a modernized Columbia River Treaty,” said Peter Lonergan, a B.C. Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions spokesperson, in a statement. “These discussions are paused right now as the U.S. government conducts a broad review of its international engagement.”
Similarly, there’s been little change, for now, in IJC operations, which involve extensive Great Lakes water-level monitoring and testing, as well as reporting on climate change-related indicators, such as water temperature and wave action, necessary for navigating these water bodies.
“All these things are mandated, so all that has continued pretty much unabated,” says Alain Pietroniro, a professor in engineering at the University of Calgary and the former executive director for the National Hydrological Service within the Meteorological Service of Canada. “There’s always the concern, from a water security perspective, what this current administration could do,” he says, citing the possibility of further cuts to ongoing climate-related monitoring activities, such as water level measurements taken every 15 days. “But that’s a pretty big lift for anybody to do because you can’t just arbitrarily change the treaty.”
Canadian water watchers also note that commercial trade in water or large-scale cross-border water diversion—which is explicitly prohibited under the treaty—haven’t surfaced publicly in the Canada-U.S. tariff negotiations. Wallis points out that Prime Minister Mark Carney specifically ruled out trade in water in his election platform. But, she adds, “it is something that we are definitely keeping an eye on.”
An extensive network of bilateral scientific organizations, both governmental and academic, are involved in keeping tabs on the Great Lakes, and the bulk of that work is geared to ensuring, on a day-to-day basis, that these water bodies are healthy, safe, navigable, and productive. For instance, the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers (GSGP), a political body led by the adjacent states and provinces, has initiated a massive tree-planting campaign and is investing in a sustainable fisheries program.
Unsurprisingly, many of these joint efforts involve climate change, which has become a prime target for the Trump administration’s budget cuts and its de-regulation efforts through the Environmental Protection Agency. “One of the first things they cut that hit us particularly hard was funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),” says Krantzberg. “The NOAA’s capacity for research, monitoring, and surveillance eclipses what we can do in Canada. Many Canadian researchers use data from the NOAA for forecasting weather and changing climate patterns. It is now no longer readily accessible, so our ability to predict future changes to the Great Lakes, whether it’s harmful algal blooms or severe weather events, has been hampered.”
Marty points to the extensive water-monitoring efforts meant to track expanding blue-green algae blooms in the Great Lakes, with the goal of anticipating and containing contamination from toxins released by these growths, and the ensuing fall-out in affected communities. “We have a massive deployment of equipment in Lake Erie that includes buoys to monitor water quality,” he says. “We have drone and satellite surveillance that is giving us data on where algae is and how much we have.”
Before Trump took office, Canadian scientists relied heavily on U.S. data. But that information flow has been affected and cross-border communication is now challenging. Marty says the situation has become so dire that he knows of federal employees and their Canadian counterparts who have stopped communicating by smartphone and computer for fear of being monitored or fired.
Water temperature and circulation data represents another source of endangered information, particularly for communities on the Great Lakes. In an era of increasingly unpredictable weather, “We need [that information] to protect communities that will be affected by major storms,” says Marty.
Earlier this summer, the IJC released a draft version of a review of its water protection activities. The 51-page document, notably, reads as if the Trump administration doesn’t exist. There are various technical recommendations pertaining to increased representation of Indigenous Peoples and more extensive groundwater monitoring and management. “It is recommended,” the document states, “that the federal, state, and provincial governments encourage advancements in the state of science on climate variation impacts in the Great Lakes through additional funding and synthesis of the state of the science.”
Unlike so many U.S. institutions, the IJC appears to be speaking truth to power.
“That’s a great indicator of the strength and integrity of the commissioners [on the IJC] to say, ‘These things are important and we will be heard,’ ” says Gail Krantzberg. “The current U.S. co-chair recently said, ‘We need to be bold. We need to say what needs to be said.’ ”
Such signals dovetail with other recent expressions of cross-border solidarity—Great Lakes governors and premiers met in Quebec City in early October to discuss pressing concerns and affirm their commitment to existing bi-national partnerships. Last March, the Great Lakes Commission, a 70-year-old “compact agency” made up of eight states, also called for the resumption of bipartisan support and made a request to the U.S. Congress for $475 million USD in 2026 and $500 million per year from 2027 to 2031 for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
Marty notes that even Republican governors who attended the Quebec City summit agreed on the importance of a non-partisan approach to managing these international boundary waters. “[They] were saying, ‘We want to work together again. We want to restore the relationship.’ There is the idea that politics don’t apply in the Great Lakes regions because we’ve been doing things well together for a long time. Yes, it takes years and years to restore the Great Lakes. But we have [had] some successes.” As he stresses, “It’s a mission that includes two partners.”
John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and editor. He has written stories about cities, climate, and business, which have been published by outlets including The Globe and Mail, Corporate Knights, and Spacing.
This story originally appeared in our Winter ’25 issue.
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