Plan to pump untreated sewage into Lake Ontario's West Channel is anti-sport
CBC
Triathlon is a contact sport.
I learned that quirky fact back in 2015, when a group of Canadian triathletes described how they planned to navigate the 1,500-metre open-water swim at the Pan Am Games in Toronto on a course laid out just north of Ontario Place. They explained that athletes don't intentionally smash each other in these mass-start races, but when hundreds of people hit the water simultaneously, swimming to the same finish line, you brace yourself to take some knocks.
Collisions. Elbow strikes. Black eyes. Broken noses. All job hazards in big open-water swim races.
On Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported that the Ontario provincial government, as part of its plan to lease Ontario Place's valuable real estate to a private spa operator, intends to empty sewer pipes into the West Channel, the same stretch of water that hosted the Pan Am Games triathlon, and which is still in use by rowers, open-water swimmers and other water sports enthusiasts.
But I misspoke there, too, unfairly casting the E.coli bacteria as the only pathogen floating around on a race course full of sewer sludge. You can also get gastroenteritis from viruses, which also abound in wastewater. These sewer pipes would offer swimmers a variety of ways to get sick, not just the most obvious one.
Local stakeholders have assailed the plan as short-sighted, which it is.
"The absolute worst place for an overflow sewage outlet is in shallow water with no current," said Darrell Brown, the chief executive of the Canadian National Exhibition Association, in an interview with the Toronto Star.
It's also anti-sport.
Cities and societies tell you everything you need to know about what they value based on where they put their money, their infrastructure, and, often, their human feces. So in a city and province that claim to value sport, this decision to essentially wipe an athletic venue off the map is especially dispiriting.
Triathletes at the Pan Am Games didn't complain about swimming through filthy water, but dangerous E.coli levels have served as a subplot to open-water swimming events at the Paris Olympics this past summer, and in Rio in 2016. From here, we can either accept water-borne stomach bugs as a risk athletes assume when they participate, or find a way to keep water clean for hobbyists and elites alike.
I'd take the second option, mainly because it makes sense. I'm all for access to sport. And by access to sport I don't mean our dwindling ability to afford high-priced tickets. I mean facilitating opportunities for as many people as possible to participate in as many sports as feasible. Pumping untreated sewage into the West Channel fails the access test, and is tough to justify in a city and province that celebrate sport.
I'm old enough to handle contradictions. Toronto is multiculturalism personified; its job market is also home to a wage gap based on race and gender. One of those facts is a virtue and the other one is an urgent problem that needs solving, but they're both true.
Still, it's difficult to reconcile the soaring, taxpayer-borne costs of the 2026 World Cup with this unwillingness to find a better way to dispose of wastewater. It crosses the line, for me, from contradiction to hypocrisy. Either we care so much about sport that we'll bust the budget to fund some soccer games, or we care so little that we'll turn a rowing and triathlon course into a toilet bowl.
As far as high-level sport is concerned, perhaps it never becomes an issue. Toronto had never hosted a multisport games before Pan Ams in 2015, and maybe never will. The prospect of a Canadian medal contender becoming violently ill after inadvertently gulping a mouthful of sludge might remain a hypothetical forever.