Plastic Microbead Accumulation in our Freshwaters: North American Great Lakes Assessments and Perspective

The authors review recent studies conducted across the Great Lakes of North America to assess the quantity and type of microplastic waste found in these waters, sediments, and beaches. Findings from their own studies are shared, sampling plastic pollution from remote and secluded Nature Reserves in Lake Erie (ON), and the Ottawa River watershed (QC), showing significant accumulation of microbeads. Spherical ‘microbeads’ made of plastics are now ubiquitous in a wide range of personal healthcare and cleansing products, used by the average North American consumer now at upwards of quadrillions per day. Designed to be flushable, these plastic microbeads inevitably end up in municipal wastewater streams, and then to a large extent leak into our freshwater ecosystems. Recent studies throughout the important Great Lakes system of North America have reported microbeads at essentially all locations examined. On the shorelines, in surface waters, throughout water columns, and in sediments of these freshwater systems, microbeads are now ever-present, and are accumulating in significant amounts. Their small and stable shape and composition, and limited pathways to degradation produce a long lifespan, with the capacity to remain in the freshwater environment for potentially hundreds of years. This review collects and compares initial microbead studies between 2013–2021 in the Great Lakes region to provide a snapshot of the current levels and locations, and to serve as a baseline for future tracking to assess progress as the microbead contamination and accumulation problem is addressed. We as well present findings from our own local study of microplastic/bead accumulation downstream of the Great Lakes, in the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers near Montreal. Aspects of microbead contamination represent a unique subset of the worldwide microplastic problem, in that much control remains over their life cycle and eventual fate. Consequently, the power to address this microbead problem can rest with polymer chemists and engineers, who, armed with a better understanding of the relevant physical polymer properties of the beads that govern their movement into the aquatic environment, hold the ability to rationally redesign microbead composition and develop removal techniques.

Occupancy, Land Rights and the Algonquin Anishinaabeg

This article is about Indigenous territorial title and land rights, and specifically those of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation. In 1983, the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn, residing in the province of Ontario, petitioned the Crown to recognize Algonquin territorial title and rights to 36,000 square kilometres of their natal homelands in the Ottawa River watershed. With negotiations beginning in the early 1990s, an Agreement-in-Principle was developed and ratified in 2016, the penultimate step to the largest modern treaty in Ontario's history. In this article, we examine the argument for moral rights to territory, not in terms of the Canadian or international legal order, nor even through examining the documents and voice of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg, but through the lens of an argument that has been advanced as the basis of the international territorial rights of states. We argue that the justifications for state rights territory—grounded in the considerations that ensue from an analysis of occupancy groups—provides a stronger claim to territorial jurisdiction and title in the case of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation than the competing claim by the Canadian state.

(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City

This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.

Adapting River Bridge Infrastructures To Climate Change

Climate change forecasts project up to 20% increase in precipitation for southern Ontario based on several climate change scenarios and models and an unpredictable change an average wind speed that may range from 5% reduction to 15% increase by the year 2100 compared to 1971 to 2000 reference period. Average annual air temperatures are predicted to increase between 2.5 and 3.7°C by 2050 from baseline average between 1961 and 1990. This research studied the impact of climate change on bridge infrastructure using the Portage bridge on the Ottawa river in southern Ontario as a case study. Result shows that increase in precipitation due to climate change will cause 0.3m/s increase in stream velocity and about 0.85m increase in water level for a 100-year storm. This increase will result in scour depths at bridge piers to increase by 0.86 m while bending moments on piers increased by 21 kNm. Shear forces also increased by 43 kN.

Adapting River Bridge Infrastructures To Climate Change

Climate change forecasts project up to 20% increase in precipitation for southern Ontario based on several climate change scenarios and models and an unpredictable change an average wind speed that may range from 5% reduction to 15% increase by the year 2100 compared to 1971 to 2000 reference period. Average annual air temperatures are predicted to increase between 2.5 and 3.7°C by 2050 from baseline average between 1961 and 1990. This research studied the impact of climate change on bridge infrastructure using the Portage bridge on the Ottawa river in southern Ontario as a case study. Result shows that increase in precipitation due to climate change will cause 0.3m/s increase in stream velocity and about 0.85m increase in water level for a 100-year storm. This increase will result in scour depths at bridge piers to increase by 0.86 m while bending moments on piers increased by 21 kNm. Shear forces also increased by 43 kN.

“With All The Ghosts that Haunt the Park...”: Haunted Recreation in Brent (Ontario)

When I first visited Brent, the defunct logging village, now campgrounds in the northern reaches of Algonquin Provincial Park I went searching for ghost stories. Often described as a “ghost town,” Brent has been occupied since the earliest days of logging in the Ottawa River/Kiji Sibi Valley and holds an important place in the oral history of the Park. The village was a place where many died after violent accidents during the timber rush of the eighteen-hundreds, where Algonquin Anishinaabe Peoples had camped and likely held a village of their own prior to colonization. Brent was once a bustling community, the former site of the Kish-Kaduk Lodge and an important railway stopover during the First World War. Further, Brent was home to the last year round resident of the Park. Mr. Adam Pitts, known to many local cottagers as the “Mayor” passed away in his home in 1998 one year after the railroad tracks were removed by the Canadian National Railway Company and the electricity was shut off. Now his cottage is a ruin some claim to be haunted by the Mayor’s restless ghost. And there are other ghost stories I heard in Brent that haunt the edges of the colonial imagination, stalking unwary travellers as they meander through what they sometimes assume to be “pristine wilderness.” Common patterns of self-apprehension and identity formation associated with tourism and heritage management in Algonquin Park are imbued with nationalist value through a prismatic complex of cultural appropriation, the denial of complicity in colonial violence, and the contingent obfuscation of Indigenous presence and persistence in the area, a process I call haunted recreation. Countering this complex is critical for working past the historical and intergenerational trauma associated with Canadian settler-colonialism and the contemporary inequities of Canadian society.

A multi-year assessment of blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis) population establishment and Lyme disease risk areas in Ottawa, Canada, 2017-2019

Canadians face an emerging threat of Lyme disease due to the northward expansion of the tick vector, Ixodes scapularis. We evaluated the degree of I. scapularis population establishment and Borrelia burgdorferi occurrence in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from 2017–2019 using active surveillance at 28 sites. We used a field indicator tool developed by Clow et al. to determine the risk of I. scapularis establishment for each tick cohort at each site using the results of drag sampling. Based on results obtained with the field indicator tool, we assigned each site an ecological classification describing the pattern of tick colonization over two successive cohorts (cohort 1 was comprised of ticks collected in fall 2017 and spring 2018, and cohort 2 was collected in fall 2018 and spring 2019). Total annual site-specific I. scapularis density ranged from 0 to 16.3 ticks per person-hour. Sites with the highest density were located within the Greenbelt zone, in the suburban/rural areas in the western portion of the city of Ottawa, and along the Ottawa River; the lowest densities occurred at sites in the suburban/urban core. B. burgdorferi infection rates exhibited a similar spatial distribution pattern. Of the 23 sites for which data for two tick cohorts were available, 11 sites were classified as “high-stable”, 4 were classified as “emerging”, 2 were classified as “low-stable”, and 6 were classified as “non-zero”. B. burgdorferi-infected ticks were found at all high-stable sites, and at one emerging site. These findings suggest that high-stable sites pose a risk of Lyme disease exposure to the community as they have reproducing tick populations with consistent levels of B. burgdorferi infection. Continued surveillance for I. scapularis, B. burgdorferi, and range expansion of other tick species and emerging tick-borne pathogens is important to identify areas posing a high risk for human exposure to tick-borne pathogens in the face of ongoing climate change and urban expansion.

Nd isotope mapping of the Frontenac Terrane in the SW Grenville Province

Nd isotope analyses are presented for granitoid rocks from the western part of Frontenac Terrane in the Grenville Province of Ontario. TDM ages show no correlation with the silica content of the rocks, but instead correlate with geographical location, suggesting that the TDM ages are indicative of regional crustal formation age, and do not result from mixing between sources with different provenance ages. Based on these observations, we identify a new crustal age boundary that follows the Desert Lake – Canoe Lake fault and the Rideau Lake fault, and hence a new juvenile crustal block (Westport domain). This domain is identified as part of the ensimatic back-arc rift zone that formed the juvenile segment of the Central Metasedimentary Belt in Ontario. However, additional sampling along the Ottawa River suggests that the juvenile Westport domain does not extend into Quebec. Instead, a narrower ensialic rift zone is represented by the Marble domain in Quebec. Based on comparison with the Taupo volcanic zone and the northern Red Sea as modern analogues, we suggest that the transition from a wide ensimatic rift zone in Ontario to a narrow ensialic rift in Quebec was accommodated by transtensional motion along a zone of diffuse shear east of Ottawa.