Major Canadian cities dump more than 1 trillion liters of sewage with little or no treatment into oceans and other bodies of water each year, according to a study by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, which calls the waste treatment problem “a national disgrace.” The worst offenders among the 21 cities studied were Victoria, Halifax, and St. John’s, which don’t treat their sewage at all and dump about 122 billion liters of it into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans each year. In addition to human excrement, Canadian sewage contains about 200 synthetic chemicals. In Quebec, about 20 percent of soft clam and blue mussel harvesting zones have been closed because of municipal sewage pollution.
