Out of sight, out of mind.

Canada's Northwest Cities Are Beautiful, But Their Raw Sewage Goes Right Into the Pacific

Canada's British Columbia is a region of stunning natural beauty. The Pacific Northwest city of Vancouver, nestled between coastal mountains, the calm waters of English Bay and the Burrard Inlet, is in many ways an ideal place to settle. Vancouverites are always ready to extol the virtues of their home--its gentle climate and its wealth of recreational options: You can ski, you can sunbathe, you can take a walk on the seawall around Stanley Park, or you can simply enjoy the breathtaking views from any number of spots in and around the city.

Across the waters of Georgia Strait, on the south coast of Vancouver Island, sits Victoria, the provincial capital, a smaller city trying to retain some of the "English" charm which supposedly still clings to its North American facades. Afternoon tea is served in the Empress Hotel, and roofless red double-decker buses, ex-London Transport, ply the streets.

These Canadian scenes seem picture-postcard perfect. How distasteful, then, to discover that millions of gallons of raw, untreated sewage are spewed daily into the waters around Victoria and Vancouver.

The two major sewage outfalls from Victoria, administered by the Capital Regional District (CRD), are simply untreated and flow into the Juan de Fuca Strait, which separates Vancouver Island from the northern extremity of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The situation in Vancouver (where waste management is overseen by the Greater Vancouver Regional District [GVRD]) is a little more complex: There the sewage receives primary treatment, but the old combined sewer and storm drains are so often overloaded that more raw sewage is dumped by Vancouver than by Victoria.

Laurie MacBride, executive director of The Save the Georgia Strait Alliance (SGSA), is in no doubt as to which city is doing the most harm to the marine environment. "Victoria discharges about 21 billion gallons of raw sewage a year; Vancouver has primary treatment, but 38 billion gallons per year miss the treatment plants altogether and are spilled over through combined sewer overflows [sewage, storm water and toxic runoff--waste from Vancouver's industries, which include electroplating, chemical industries and sawmills]. In parts of Burrard Inlet, 80 percent of the English sole have precancerous tumors and lesions, probably from fossil fuel hydrocarbons in the runoff."

The pollution problem in Vancouver is made relatively worse, MacBride points out, by the fact that it discharges into sheltered waters where there is very little tidal movement. "Vancouver is dumping into the Georgia Strait, which is essentially a bathtub," she says. Victoria's sewage, on the other hand, is pumped into the deeper waters of Juan de Fuca Strait, which flows directly into the Pacific Ocean and is more efficiently flushed by tides.

Last year, armed with data collected by the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (not to be confused with the U.S. Sierra Club), SGSA filed suit against the Greater Vancouver Regional District under the Federal Fisheries Act, which makes it a criminal offense to dump harmful effluent into any fish habitat. However, the prosecution was taken over by provincial officials and, says MacBride, the government "has been sitting on it for a year."

The federal government recently ordered two GVRD plants on the salmon-rich Fraser River to upgrade to secondary treatment by 1995 and 1997 or face huge fines. A federal grant of $200 million, to be used in the upgrading of Annacis Island, the largest of the two plants, was confirmed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Liberal government in May last year.

But, says MacBride, upgrading the plants won't in itself solve the runoff problem. What is needed is replacement of the storm and sewer drains with separate pipes, the construction of large storage tanks to contain excess sewage, and effective laws and public education to reduce the quantity of harmful toxins that are being dumped into the system. But at the present rate of drain reconstruction, the work will take 65 years, she says.

Environmentalists have to choose their battles, and SGSA has focused its energies on Vancouver; but there remain the 21 billion gallons of raw sewage discharged annually by CRD. The shellfish beds around Victoria have been closed for years due to high fecal coliform counts, and elevated levels of heavy metals have been found more than a mile from the shoreline.

Ron Driedger, director of Municipal Waste Reduction for the British Columbia Ministry of the Environment, says that targets had been set for CRD to have primary treatment plants operating by 2002, and secondary treatment by 2008. But, he adds, "We can't say unequivocally there'll be funding" to meet these targets.

An unlikely obstacle to progress is the CRD itself. In 1992, it initiated a referendum on sewage treatment which, Driedger implies, was intended to produce a "no" vote. "They asked the public if it was willing to spend millions of dollars for secondary treatment." Over 50 percent voted no to any form of treatment.

Further ammunition for those reluctant to admit Victoria urgently needs to fix the problem came recently from a report released by the Marine Science Panel of the B.C. and Washington State Environmental Cooperation Council, created in 1992, which concluded that raw sewage discharges from Victoria are not contributing significantly to pollution in Juan de Fuca Strait, and that Vancouver and Seattle are far worse offenders. The Victoria Times Colonist got an inspiring quote from Frank Leonard, chairman of CRD: "Of all the things our governments have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on, sewage treatment should be well down the list."

In Washington State, however, particularly in the Olympic Peninsula communities of Port Angeles and Port Townsend, only 20 miles or so across the Juan de Fuca Strait from Victoria, there continues to be rumblings of discontent at what is seen as Canadian complacency. There have been calls for a tourist boycott of Victoria, and People for Puget Sound, a Washington-based environmental group, even suggested that visitors to the August '94 Commonwealth Games in Victoria refuse to flush toilets in the city.

Tom Tierney, director of inter-governmental relations for the city of Seattle, explains that primary treatment has been the rule in the state for 20 years, and Seattle since the mid-80s has been upgrading its plants to secondary treatment. He tries to be diplomatic. "I think CRD believes it's attacking the most significant environmental problems, and sewage discharge is one they will face later." But, Tierney adds, "Communities in the U.S. have taken on significant added expenses of secondary treatment of wastewater discharges, and so to have [Canadians] emptying raw sewage into basically those same waters is extremely troubling."