As U.S. states look for more money to clean up the Great Lakes, the province of Ontario, has come up with some, albeit not a lot. Ontario announced that it will spend about $35 million to clean up the Great Lakes over the next five years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk has more:
Transcript
As U.S. states look for more money to clean up the Great Lakes, the province of Ontario has come up with some, albeit not a lot. Ontario announced that it will spend about 35 million dollars, U.S., to clean up the Great Lakes over the next five years. Dan Karpenchuk reports:
Ontario’s environment minister, Elizabeth Witmer, says the money will be spent in several areas, including the clean up of contaminated sediment at seventeen sites on the Ontario side of the Great Lakes. She says the goal is to make the Lakes swimmable again.
Witmer says there will also be more monitoring and reporting of water quality, and the health of fish and wildlife in and around the Great Lakes region will be studied, but it’s not the first time that the province has pledged a huge clean up of its share of the world’s largest body of fresh water. More than half of the seventeen sites targeted by Witmer were supposed to have been cleaned up by the year 2000. So far only one has been cleaned up, and work is underway on only one more.
Opposition politicians and environmentalists call the plan a pathetic effort, and say the amount of money pledged isn’t nearly enough. They say it could be used up just by the city of Toronto in one day.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.