Over the past few weeks I've been trying to understand why the city of Kingston has for years continued to dump untreated sewage directly into Lake Ontario. In order to try and understand the issue I went back and read every Kingston Whig-Standard article on the topic from 1955 till the present day; and while the city has come a long way, I'm not convinced that the city is doing enough to protect the safety of those who use the lake for swimming, boating, fishing, rowing, and of course, for drinking.

The City of Kingston announced last week that they once again knowingly dumped untreated, raw sewage directly into Lake Ontario. The city claimed that May's near record levels of precipitation overwhelmed the system, and that the dumping was necessary to prevent sewage from backing-up into homes and businesses.

This is not the first time that the city has knowingly dumped raw sewage into our lake. In November 2001, the city of Kingston pumped sewage directly into the Lake for 25 hours, and during July, August and September of 2001, raw sewage flowed into the Cataraqui River for ten straight weeks before the problem was fixed.