The History of
Swim Drink Fish
Meet The Founder
Mark Mattson
Mark Mattson is one of Canada’s most seasoned environmental lawyers and the founder of several water charities, including Swim Drink Fish. In addition to being Swim Drink Fish’s President, he is the Waterkeeper for Lake Ontario, a water quality advisor to the International Joint Commission, a board member for the US-based Waterkeeper Alliance, and a member of Ontario’s Great Lakes Guardians Council.
The Beginning
In the spring of 2000, seven people died and thousands became sick after drinking contaminated tap water in the town of Walkerton, Ontario. That tragic event became the catalyst for a new commitment to protecting water in Ontario and a personal call-to-action for the founders of Swim Drink Fish.
Mark Mattson was a lawyer who practiced criminal and environmental law. He represented clients trying to protect their communities from landfill sites, hydroelectric development, and industrial waste of decades ago. Mark, alongside Swim Drink Fish co-founder Krystyn Tully (then a student studying radio and television arts and campaigning for environmental and fair trade nonprofits on the side), were swept up in the public inquiry that helped to trace the origins of the Walkerton tragedy and develop new rules to ensure Ontario’s drinking water supply would be protected in the future.
“Walkerton taught us a harsh lesson: rules matter, enforcement matters, and environmental protection can save lives. If one person had strictly enforced one rule, one time, maybe the whole tragedy could have been prevented.”
Mattson had been investigating and prosecuting environmental crimes for years before the Walkerton water tragedy. He’d worked with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment as well as volunteering his time to assist residents and nonprofits in polluted communities. Mattson’s knowledge of hydrology, chemicals, water quality and decision-making grew with each case.
Mark Mattson investigating landfill pollution on the Petitcodiac River circa 1999. Image captured for CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
In 1996, he started a volunteer group dedicated to giving meaning and force to environmental laws. With a number of lawyers, water experts, and volunteers, they conducted their own investigations and brought private charges against polluters. The first case was against the City of Kingston for an old landfill that was leaking into the harbour. The volunteer investigators then took on cases in Deloro, Hamilton, and Montreal.
Mattson knew from his work in environmental law that Ontario and Canada had (at the time) some of the best environmental protection rules in the world. The main problem was lack of enforcement.
By investigating environmental crimes and training other people to do the same, Mattson and his friends were proving that people didn’t have to wait for government to do the right thing. And by focusing on water pollution offences, Mattson discovered he could trigger a variety of environmental restoration activities promoting cleaner water, land, forest, and habitat.
“When it came to water, the most powerful thing we could do as individuals was help enforce the law. We could document pollution, point to the rule book, prove an offence was being committed, and then let the justice system do its job. We used that method over and over again to help secure more than a billion dollars in restoration and cleanups.”
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper: The Early Years
By 2000, Mattson was one of a handful of people enforcing environmental laws in Canada. He found kindred spirits in the Waterkeeper Alliance movement growing in the United States. The association of independent Riverkeepers, Baykeepers, Soundkeepers patrolled and protected their local watersheds. Each “keeper” advocated for enforcement of environmental laws and defended their waterbody with the same passion Mattson felt for Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.
“I loved that the Waterkeeper movement was driven by individuals who cared deeply about their local waterbody. They didn’t have to be scientists or lawyers or professional advocates. Anyone with a passion for water willing to put in long hours could make a big difference in their community.”
Mark Mattson sampling a sewer outfall on the Humber River in Toronto during a tour with Globe and Mail, circa 2003.
Mattson decided to follow their lead and create a grassroots organization focused on protecting his local waterbody: Lake Ontario. Tully agreed to help.
“I wanted to be part of something proactive, to help make sure no one on my lake ever got sick from touching the water, drinking it, or eating from it. After Walkerton, protecting water seemed like the single most valuable thing I could do for my community. So I jumped at the chance to be part of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.”
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper was established in February 2001. In June, its first patrol boat was launched from Wolfe Island on Lake Ontario. The boat, named for Angus Bruce, a Kingston-area resident who worked with Mark on his first environmental hearing, was acquired through loans from friends and family and from donations made by Hamilton Ontario environmentalist Lynda Lukasik using money awarded on the Rennie Street landfill case in Hamilton.
The Angus Bruce on the water in Kingston, Ontario
The “Angus Bruce” immediately proved its value. The first summer on the water was game-changing.
“We documented radioactive waste crumbling into Lake Ontario near Port Granby, and our first investigative report made headlines around the world. We drove through blobs of coal tar floating on Hamilton Harbour, bubbling up from one of the most contaminated areas on the Great Lakes. Every time we witnessed something that was toxic to fish, destroying habitat, or taking away the public’s ability to enjoy the lake, we’d document it.”
With cases piling up, the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper team started to grow.
The Haskills point at a broken pipe where runoff from a radioactive waste site is released into Lake Ontario, outside of Port Hope, Ontario.
Growth
In 2002-2003, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper became an independent registered charity. Once again, friends and family helped Mattson and Tully by helping them set up an office, form a board of directors, and become a professional organization.
“I was the only full-time staff member at that point. Mark was working as a volunteer because we had no money. Friends and family were keeping us afloat paying our bills or giving us their time.”
Krystyn Tully at “Lake Ontario Keeper’s” first office in Toronto.
Waterkeeper’s first major grant came from the Law Foundation of Ontario. The Foundation provided seed funding for the Clean Water Workshop, a program that trained pro bono law students to help develop environmental cases. The program grew from two students to 25 at its peak, attracting students from five law schools.'
Mark championed the Waterkeeper model in Canada and mentored law students working on cases for Lake Ontario Waterkeeper’s peers.
Mark’s mentor Doug Chapman started Fraser Riverkeeper in Vancouver, supported by a talented young environmental lawyer named Lauren Brown Hornor. Karen and Kevin Lowe founded North Saskatchewan Riverkeeper in Edmonton. William Tozer became the first Riverkeeper in the north, working on the Moose River. Mattson was a founding board member for these organizations. (Fraser Riverkeeper and North Saskatchewan Riverkeeper are now officially Swim Drink Fish initiatives.)
Waterkeeper soon reached a point where it had more law students registered for the program than communities with the capacity to push cases forward.
“That’s when I realized we had a bigger problem than just pollution. Fewer and fewer people seemed to be spending time on the water, seeing how it was changing, wanting to protect it. The problems hadn’t gone away, but the public - the advocates - were disappearing.”
Mark Mattson leading a Clean Water Workshop year-end presentation at University of Toronto.
When you have an organization full of people who know and safeguard their water bodies, the communities on those waterbodies stand a better chance in the long run. But starting a group isn’t the right solution to every problem. Waterkeeper was realizing that success was best measured by the number of people working for water, not the number of organizations.
“Canada needs a movement of millions of people to truly protect swimmable, drinkable, fishable water. We were beginning to build that movement of people, when the whole field changed around us.”
Environmental Law Rollbacks
Water is so important to Canada’s history, culture, and economy that many of the nation’s earliest laws were passed to protect waterways. In the 1970s, “environmentalism” became a global movement and governments around the world created environmental departments to protect air, water, and habitat.
Cuts to environmental programs began in Ontario in the 1990s and slowed slightly in the wake of Walkerton. Then again, around 2012, sweeping changes to federal laws gutted protections for the environment, especially water.
Mark Mattson defending federal environmental law at a Senate Committee hearing.
“Federal rollbacks got the most attention because they were the most dramatic. But Ontario’s rules and protection programs had been systematically weakened, too. All levels of government created loopholes for polluters and cut enforcement staff and monitoring programs. It was part of this prevailing political notion that rules, transparency, and a level playing field are burdens on society; they aren’t of course.”
Up to that point, the Waterkeeper program had focused on training specialized advocates like young lawyers. They would identify a threat to water quality and participate in the appropriate formal process, like a private prosecution, an environmental assessment, or a licence review.
When sweeping changes to environmental law made those kinds of targeted interventions less powerful and less accessible, Mattson and Tully began looking for avenues and solutions beyond the legal process alone.
It was time to focus on building a broader movement of people with authentic connections to water who could work to safeguard a swimmable, drinkable, fishable future.
Emergence of technology
“On the one hand, the environmental law rollbacks were devastating. They were bad for the environment, and it was painful to watch something I’d spent my career championing just gutted.
On the other hand, it’s not like people just decided water wasn’t important anymore. Our values stayed the same, even when the laws changed. We just needed to find a new set of tools.”
As luck would have it, the internet and mobile web technology provided just the opportunity the movement needed.
For years, people had been asking Waterkeeper “Where can I swim in Lake Ontario?” It was people’s number one question, partly because the lake had a history of water quality issues and partly because people in urban areas had a difficult time finding beaches near them.
Staff had been tracking beach locations and water quality monitoring results for a few years, releasing annual reports to show which beaches met government guidelines and which failed.
The reports were helpful research tools, but they didn’t help people find a beach in real-time or tell them if a beach met water quality standards when they wanted to swim.
“Many beach hotlines were simply recorded voicemail messages that changed every day. Unless we called and wrote down the list of open beaches, the information just disappeared. You’d have no idea how well a beach was doing over the course of a summer or if there were chronic water quality concerns. On the flip side, beaches that were actually clean had a reputation for being dirty just because they were on Lake Ontario.”
With funding from RBC, Waterkeeper created a free app for early versions of the iPhone that let people see the list of beaches and most recent water quality results on Lake Ontario. Built entirely by staff and volunteers, the app called “Swim Guide” showed how technology could help reconnect people to water and nurture a new generation of water leaders.
Within weeks of its launch, the first version of Swim Guide had more than 10,000 users and was being featured by Apple as one of Canada’s best apps.
Within a year, Swim Guide had expanded to major cities in Canada and the United States, with dozens of affiliate organizations contributing data to the platform.
“Swim Guide showed us that technology can help more people connect with water and train more people to recognize, document, and report pollution than a single person ever could.
Those powerful behaviours I learned in the 1990s - how to investigate, how to document, how to advocate for restoration - used to require a lot of hands on training and mentorship. It took years to learn how to do it and hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars to collect and share data.
Most people can do that now by following a few prompts on a screen, with the phone they have in their pocket.”
Other early forays into technology included the Swim Drink Fish music club, an online music service with an annual membership benefiting Swim Drink Fish, and the Living at the Barricades podcast that also ran on campus radio networks 2007-2010.
Working with artists
Before the Angus Bruce even hit the water, the Rheostatics, The Tragically Hip, Steven Heighton and other artists offered their support for the cause.
“Artists can also envision a future where people are connected to water, where our culture and our well-being are enriched as a result of that connection. Like activists, they spend their lives imagining worlds that don’t yet exist and trying to bring new ideas to life.”
Gord Downie, a Swim Drink Fish Ambassador, board member, and creative force behind the movement performs in Port Hope during the Heart of a Lake Tour, 2006.
Musician and writer Gord Downie was one of the leading spokespeople for the organization. He dove into legal casework, fundraising, and artistic performances in an effort to build a movement and protect water. Downie was a board member at the time of his death in 2017.
Since 2012, more than 200 painters and photographers have donated works that raised $1,360,000 for Swim Drink Fish initiatives. Those funds helped to propel the reach of the organization’s work far beyond the boundaries of Lake Ontario.
Turning Point: Becoming Swim Drink Fish
“The years from 2011-2013 were a time of enormous change.”
The National Water Centre officially opened in New Brunswick in fall 2014 to help thought leaders and artists devise new ways to build a movement of people working for water and to highlight the important role water plays in society.
That year, the number of people using Swim Guide and Waterkeeper’s programs hit 1-million for the first time.
Aerial view of the National Water Centre on the Kennebecasis River near Saint John.
With Swim Guide expanding rapidly and artists spreading the word everywhere they went, the organization’s programs split into two streams: there was the local advocacy work to protect Lake Ontario, as well as the apps and program models that could be adapted by other communities to replicate its local activities.
Mattson and Tully began thinking about the coming years and how best to support the growing movement.
“We needed a simple way to introduce ourselves, something that would tell you right from the first moment we meet what we stand for.”
Swim Drink Fish was the obvious answer. The phrase had been the organization’s mission from the very beginning and captured its mission perfectly.
“The environmental movement gets a bad rap sometimes because critics say we’re against everything. We want to be known for what we love, what we’re protecting, so we put it right there in our name.”
Swim Drink Fish describes the organization’s vision for the future: swimmable, drinkable, fishable water for everyone. It is also a reminder of the organization’s roots in environmental law.
Communities need access to swimmable, drinkable, fishable water to thrive. Water is a necessity, not a luxury.
“Our early work was a reaction to the ‘don’t swim, don’t fish’ signs we saw going up all around us. Government thought the easiest way to protect people was to keep them away from the water, and they gave up on solving the underlying environmental problems.”
As it turns out, pushing people away from the water didn’t protect people.
“We’re in an age of ‘nature deficit’. People don’t spend enough time by the water. They don’t know where to go or what to do. This physical disconnect is driving growing rates of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and feelings of isolation. The only way we turn this around - for the environment and for health - is to get people back to the water’s edge.”
In November 2017, the organization’s new brand was unveiled. Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, Fraser Riverkeeper, North Saskatchewan Riverkeeper and its digital platforms were all consolidated under the name “Swim Drink Fish”.
Swim Drink Fish Today
“We’re here to help people protect the waters they love. Thirty years in this field have shown me that people will do everything they can to protect water, if they have the tools they need and a community to support them.”
Swim Drink Fish is here for people each step of the way, helping them connect with the water, collect and share data, and restore swimmable, drinkable, fishable water for all.
The organization focuses on using technology to connect people with water and nurture the next generation of water guardians.
“No matter where you are in your relationship with water, Swim Drink Fish is there to help you.”