Plan to pump untreated sewage into Lake Ontario’s West Channel is anti-sport

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.

Put another way, if the provincial government succeeds in dumping sewer water into the West Channel, you can add E.coli to the list of risks swimmers would face in a triathlon there. Except calling it a risk understates the odds. It’s more of a certainty.

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.

Harming an athletic venue

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.

Women's swimmers compete. — Athletes swim through a feed zone during the women’s open water swimming competition at Ontario Place during the 2015 Pan American Games. (Harry How/Getty Images)

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.

Except toilets flush. West Channel wastewater, according to this plan, will just sit. And maybe stink.

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.

And maybe it’s far-fetched to expect legacy venues to retain their Pan Am Games form forever. The new stadium at York University that hosted Pan Am track and field? The running surface is gone, and a subsequent renovation has optimized the building for team sports like soccer and rugby.

But at least sports are still the priority. The plan in store for the West Channel is more like turning the track stadium’s infield into a junkyard. Sure, you’re still welcome to play soccer here, but if you brush up against that rusted-out husk of a pickup truck at midfield, make sure you get a tetanus shot. Oh, and beware of the dog.

Broad access and high performance

The two big sports issues at play here — broad access and high performance — seem unrelated. If we plotted them on a Venn diagram we’d have two big circles that barely touched. We’d have hobbyists in one section, swimming and rowing in the West Channel to stay in shape and maintain social ties. And we’d have Olympians in another, needing to fine-tune their skills for the international stage.

In the context of a different sport, those circles would overlap at somebody like Andre De Grasse, Canada’s most decorated Olympic sprinter and a latecomer to track and field. His origin story is well-known — he joined the team on a whim in his final semester of high school, turned heads at his first competition and never looked back. But we also take for granted that, as a high school student, De Grasse had access to a team.

What if budget cuts had prompted his school to shutter its track program? Or a personnel shortage had left the team without a coach? How would his sports career have turned out? Who would have emerged to lead Canada’s men’s sprint program back to the Olympic podium.

We don’t need to answer those questions, because De Grasse had access, and access to programs and venues has value, regardless of whether the Pan Am Games return, or the Olympics ever come to Canada. Access allows late bloomers like De Grasse to blossom, and it lets hobbyists, like the swimmers and rowers who still use the West Channel, to explore sport for sport’s sake.

If someone tries to argue that both scenarios don’t have value, and aren’t mutually supporting, that person is full of…

You know what they’re full of.

The West Channel will be full of it too, if this plan proceeds.

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