A MAJOR ARTICLE ON THE GRAND RIVER IN THE GLOBE & MAIL

A Roy MacGregor from Glen Morris, Ontario wrote an article about our Grand River which was published in the Globe And Mail last Sunday. The title is "Grand River: A waterway's rise to its former greatness". Indeed he mentions a number of positive signs such as bald eagles around the Cambridge area, flyfishing for brown trout and the numbers of canoeists and kayakers on the river. With my first reading I was quickly wary of puffery and PR perhaps having taken too strong of a hold. I personally lived beside the river for a decade well upstream in West Montrose. There I could see the difference in water quality and fish from what I had experienced long ago down in Kitchener and Waterloo. Also I currently have a son working on his Master's degree, studying the Grand River and he has certainly advised me of some of the poor water quality in parts of the river below Kitchener and further south.

That said I reread the article and Mr. MacGregor has honestly indicated a very sad past going as far back as the 1930s when Maclean's magazine in 1937 described the river as "an open sewer". At the first annual convention of the Canadian Institute on Sewage and Sanitation Mr. MacGregor quotes "...that the industrial waste from two abattoirs, three tire and rubber factories, three tanneries, a glue factory and a dye works "make the Kitchener sewage the strongest known in Canada." Good Lord! Now I'm beginning to understand why he is raving about the current state of the river when compared to its very worst years and decades.

Of course it's all about the comparisons. One hundred and fifty years to two hundred years ago ago there were trout in the Grand River. Heck up here in Elmira there were trout in the Canagagigue Creek before the second World War. Long gone now in the "Gig" although still a few survive in cold water tributaries of the "Gig". Perhaps comparing to times that we can remember such as when I was a kid, things have indeed improved. In the early 60s I fished in the Grand River at Bridgeport. Shiners, suckers and carp was about all that was available. O.K. when looking at relatively recent history the Grand has come a long ways. Bass derbys are held in the Grand River in Kitchener each year. The Brown trout are in the Grand above West Montrose as well as in the Conestoga River below the Conestoga Dam along with bass.

There are lots of water quality issues in the Grand including too many sewage treatment bypasses during heavy rainfall events. Climate change will not help this problem. All this said perhaps careful optimism is the route to go. Telling people about the positive aspects of the Grand River currently may help raise our expectations of what the river can and should be, for us and our children and grandchildren.