County councillors, at their May 28 meeting, got an update on how the ‘Testing the Waters’ program is going in the Highlands.
Andrew Gordon, director of U-Links, and Jim Prince, co-chair of U-Links and chair of Woodlands & Waterways EcoWatch made a presentation to the meeting.
U-Links Centre for Community-Based Research has been working on various projects in the County since 1999; bringing together Highlands’ organizations with students and faculty from mainly Trent University and Fleming College – much of it environmental.
The two said water quality is one of the primary contributors to our enjoyment of fishing, boating and swimming, property values, and the economy, especially tourism. They noted Watersheds Canada picked Haliburton for its national conference in early May.
The biggest threats, they said, are general lake health, including drinking water and fish populations, septic systems, shoreline vegetation removal, invasive species, microplastics, and the impact from watercraft.
Gordon and Prince also talked about blue-green algae, noting “a significant increase in reported blue-green algae blooms in the last eight to 10 years.”
They entered into a fee for service agreement with the County a couple of seasons ago to provide an overview of the physical and chemical indicators for water quality. They started in 2022-23 with 10 lake associations, and in 2024-25 have grown to 25 lake associations, across 39 lakes, and 61 sites.
The two said while there are four other testing programs in the County (Lake Partner Program, MECP trout lake monitoring, MNRF broad scale monitoring and Kennisis Lake Cottage Owners Association with the LPP), Testing the Waters samples three times a year, including winter ice-on sampling, the only one to do that. They monitor clarity, total phosphorous, ammonia-nitrogen, nitrate+nitrate – Nitrogen, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, sulphate, pH, total alkalinity, conductivity, hardness, dissolved oxygen and temperature.
In producing their reports for lake associations, Gordon and Prince said the focus is on what waterfront property owners can do to sustain good water quality, such as managing septic systems properly, and keeping shorelines natural.
The two said the program works, providing an example of a septic problem on Little Kennisis Lake discovered when doing the testing. Dysart’s septic inspection program, which found one third of systems damaged – then fixed or replaced – has improved phosphorous numbers. The two said it is only though building a sampling database that trends can be identified, and hopefully rectified.
“We’re almost at a point where we can take a snapshot of the County and tell you ‘this lake looks like a hotspot area right here, we’ve got some problems going on, this area over here is clear’ and with that we’ll be able to make some management recommendations as to what you might be able to do to improve the water quality in that particular area.”
