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November
25, 2004
The Liberty
Grand, Exhibition Place, Toronto |
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Meeting
the Conservation Challenge:
Notes for
remarks
by
The Honourable Leona Dombrowsky
Minister of the Environment
MPP Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox & Addington
Conservation Summit
Toronto, ON
November 25, 2004
(Check against delivery)
Thank you Donna (Cansfield – MPP,
Etobicoke Centre) and Jeb (Brugmann, President of the Conservation
Council of Ontario).
It’s wonderful to be here today.
This is the first conservation summit of
its kind in Ontario and I am excited to be the first person to have a
chance to speak to you.
This morning I want to talk about the
concept of conservation and how it has evolved.
I will also discuss some of our
province’s accomplishments over the past year and our future plans.
Then, I will take a few minutes to speak
about water conservation, a subject that is dear to me and central to my
ministry.
As you may know, I live in Tweed and
represent the riding of Hasting-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington.
My riding in eastern Ontario and covers a
large rural area. It has a lot of rugged natural beauty, and many of the
towns were founded and built on resource-based industries like forestry
and mining.
The riding is just south of Algonquin
Park, which was Ontario’s first public park back in 1893. Today
Ontario has 280 Provincial Parks.
This was our first definition of
conservation.
Over a hundred years ago, conservation
meant protection and setting things aside.
There were environmentalists back then,
but conservation was still something that the government did as a gift
to the people.
Conservation was a treasure to behold, not a duty to uphold.
Our parks are great treasures, but the
idea of conservation has grown.
Today we have Conservation Authorities
and their central body, Conservation Ontario.
We have dozens of active grassroots
organizations and advocacy groups like you that are helping to raise
environmental awareness every day.
Today when you mention conservation,
people think of public education, volunteers and community programs.
Thanks to your work, environmental
awareness has never been higher.
Now our task is to create a definition of
conservation, where this awareness shapes our values as a province.
Once, conservation was something you
could see.
Then, it became something you could
learn.
Today, conservation is something you can
do.
I want to push the boundary again to make
conservation a way of life.
It will not be easy.
Many Ontarians won’t simply embrace
conservation because it’s the right thing to do.
They will need to understand what is at
stake and what there is to gain.
Most people haven’t really asked
themselves if their actions are having a negative impact on their
quality of life, their health, or their family.
They haven’t looked at the costs, the
benefits and the risks of doing nothing.
Reaching these people and helping them
weigh all the issues may be the biggest step the conservation movement
has ever taken.
But it is an important step we must take.
We have a public duty to protect and
improve our communities.
Most importantly, people need to change
their thinking and understand that conservation is not exceptional: it
is normal.
Right now there is a lot of awareness
about the threats to the environment, but there are still a lot of
people who are happy to say, let someone else do it.
But that is not how neighbourhoods, or
communities, or governments work.
We all have to believe in a personal
commitment to conservation because we are all the better for it, in real
and measurable ways.
I am glad to speak to you today, the
front line organizations in environmental awareness and action.
We need you as partners if we are to
succeed.
I am sure that my colleague, Dwight
Duncan, the Minister of Energy, will speak about the importance of
energy conservation.
This is one of Ontario’s biggest
challenges right now.
Our government is taking real action to
address our province’s energy supply.
We recognize that it is essential to have
enough power to keep the province running.
But it is important to make that power
cleaner, renewable and sustainable.
I have full confidence in Ontario’s
energy supply.
It is the demand that worries me.
Ontarians are consuming more energy per
capita than ever before.
Even the blackout didn’t curb our
demand.
Why are we not cutting our energy use?
Every megawatt we conserve is a megawatt
of supply we don’t have to build.
I think the answer is that not enough
people have weighed the risks and benefits.
For instance, we need to do even more to
help them understand the connection between energy use and air
pollution.
If they saw the connection between energy
consumption and smog days,
if they understood the link to heart disease, respiratory disease and
childhood asthma,
they would act.
If they understood the risks they were posing to their own families,
they would value conservation more.
Our job is to help them make that
connection.
Which brings me to water conservation.
Our government has made it clear that
clean, safe water is one of our top priorities.
Every Ontarian has the right to a supply
of safe drinking water.
We all know that part of protecting water
quality is protecting water quantity.
We live on the shores of the largest
freshwater supply on Earth so it is hard to imagine that we could ever
run out of clean water.
But just like energy, water conservation
is about both supply and demand.
Let’s start with supply.
The Great Lakes Basin and our many lakes
and rivers contain billions of litres of water, but that doesn’t mean
all of it is safe to drink.
Our water is threatened by everything
from industrial pollution, to farm runoff, to poorly constructed wells.
If you do not protect water effectively,
it gets contaminated. And that means there is less supply to meet the
same demand.
Our government has taken a great number
of measures to protect our water supply.
We have implemented 24 O’Connor
recommendations in just one year.
We have provided $12.5 million for
studies that will help us create watershed-based source protection plans
across the province.
The Ministry of the Environment is now
responsible for making sure farms are complying with their nutrient
management plans.
We have invested $13 million this year to
help clean up areas of concern around the Great Lakes.
And earlier this month, my colleague
David Ramsay, the Minister of Natural Resources, made it clear that
Ontario will not sign the draft Great Lakes Charter Annex unless changes
are made to enhance the level of protection for the waters of the Great
Lakes Basin.
We are also doing more to protect water once it has been drawn from the
source.
We have hired 25 per cent more water
inspectors and have introduced new training and certification standards
for water treatment plant operators.
All of these measures will help ensure
that more of our water supply is kept clean and safe from source to tap
and back to the source.
Protecting our water supply is the
government’s responsibility.
But the government can’t reasonably
control demand for water.
Moving to real-cost pricing for water
would help people understand how much it costs to sustain a modern water
infrastructure.
But even that wouldn’t necessarily
convince people to cut their consumption.
In a strange way, our problem is that
water is cheap and plentiful.
At least, plentiful for now.
Ontarians don’t see any reason to cut
their demand.
Canadians are the second-highest per
capita users of water in the world after the United States.
We consume an average of 350 litres per
person every day.
That’s twice as much as France,
Britain, Germany or Scandinavia.
Those countries with economies much
larger than ours are getting by on half the water we use.
Clearly it can be done. We just have to
show the will.
Perhaps it would help if we understood
the impact of high demand.
First, there is cost.
Collecting water and treating it twice
before it returns to the source is expensive.
It requires monitoring and inspection and
sampling and staffing.
It is easy to understand that if we
consume less water, then one treatment facility can accommodate more
people.
Reducing our demand for water also puts
less strain on our sewage treatment facilities, which in many
communities are working near capacity.
Next, there is the matter of groundwater.
Water taken from aquifers doesn’t get
returned there immediately. Our understanding of Ontario’s groundwater
is getting better but it’s still not perfect.
We don’t know if our aquifers are
recharging at a sustainable rate.
This means a town could drink itself dry.
An aquifer could take hundreds of years
to recharge fully.
Many communities are simply gambling and
hoping that isn’t the case.
Conserving our source of life and
livelihood is not a complicated idea.
But every year we neglect our
responsibility, we make the situation worse and harder to reverse.
We have the opportunity to protect a
sustainable supply of water before there is a crisis.
The little day-to-day gestures like
low-flow taps, shower heads and toilets will add up to save millions of
litres of clean water.
But the biggest change we need to make is
in our attitude towards how we consume water.
We need to value water more. That
doesn’t necessarily mean raising the price.
It means weighing our options and
deciding what’s important to us.
Is it more important to have a
sustainable water supply or to wash our vehicles every week?
Is it more important to protect an
aquifer or to run the dishwasher every night?
We need to engage the people of Ontario
to think about it, and then to act.
I wish I had the single answer right now
that would make it all happen. But we all know it’s not that easy.
It is going to take hard work and strong
partnerships.
I hope this first conservation summit
will give you a chance to identify what you have in common, and to share
your individual strengths.
The measure of our success will be next
year’s summit.
When we gather again, I look forward to
hearing the success stories about how what we learned and shared today
led to real action and real results.
Conservation has evolved and it must
continue to evolve.
We have brought conservation into every
home in Ontario but not into every heart or every mind.
Not yet. But we can.
Some things are never in short supply,
like hope and commitment and enthusiasm. These are our natural resources
and we should use them wisely.
Thank you.
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