As summer temperatures across Canada rise with climate change, many cities are considering the swimming potential of their lakes and rivers — and contending with contamination, infrastructure and squeamishness.
Gregary Ford grew up swimming in the Great Lakes, a childhood filled with happy memories of splashing in the water. But in 2011, while visiting Pelee Island in Ontario, a toxic algae bloom meant he couldn’t get in the water. “It was the first time that someone told me you can’t swim in the water,” he said. “It was the first time I was told that you cannot go because it’s dangerous, it is not safe.”
That moment made a deep impression. He’s now the vice-president of Swim Drink Fish, an organization which aims to restore the health of local waters so that shoreside signs prohibiting swimming, fishing and drinking are unnecessary. It was one of the first organizations in Canada to join the Swimmable Cities alliance.
Swimmable Cities wants everyone to have a childhood like Ford, one filled with easy access to joyful swimming. The organization was established in 2024, on the eve of the Paris Olympics, capitalizing on interest in the Games’ river-based swimming events, to “establish common principles to empower decision-makers, advocates and actors in their work with local natural waterways.”
As the climate crisis heats up, many cities are experiencing increasingly sweltering summers. In this new reality, access to water is not only fun — it can also help people deal with extreme summer temperatures. And Canada seems like it should be a leader in the urban swimming movement. After all, who has more shoreline, lakes and rivers than us? But only four Canadian organizations are among the 125 signatories of Swimmable Cities, and in many Canadian cities, there is practically no swimming access in the surrounding waters.
As beating the heat becomes a more urgent problem every year, what can we learn from the cities that are getting it right?
Many Canadian cities lack access to swimmable water
Pollution is a big factor preventing people from swimming in many jurisdictions. In Winnipeg, 91 per cent of those surveyed said that they wouldn’t swim in the Red River (thankfully, it is cleaner than many people think.)
In St. John’s, N.L, sewage was dumped into the harbour for more than 100 years, only ending in 2015. While the harbour is still considered too contaminated for swimming, St John’s residents can cool off in the nearby Georges Pond, which was converted from the city’s back-up water supply to a recreation site in 2022.
In Edmonton, swimming enthusiasts aren’t overly worried about pollution in the North Saskatchewan, nor do the currents deter them. However, a lack of infrastructure is a real concern. There’s only one spot to easily access the water: a sandy spit known as Accidental Beach that appeared in 2017 during the construction of a nearby bridge. Despite high public interest, the city has declined to develop the area.
But in other cities, there’s a lot to celebrate. In Canada’s national capital, not only is the Ottawa River clean enough for swimming, there’s purpose-built infrastructure to make it easy. The National Capital Commission (NCC) River House, a century-old heritage building, offers a free public swimming dock staffed with lifeguards. The wheelchair-accessible site includes a canoe and kayak launch, changing rooms and free lifejackets to borrow.
While other Canadian cities lack swimming infrastructure on their rivers, Ottawa made its river a popular destination by opening the enclosed dock at the National Capital Commission River House to the public in 2023. Photo: Justin Tang / The Canadian Press
In Halifax, where the harbour was once notoriously polluted much like St. John’s, wastewater treatment plants started operating in 2008. In 2017, a local initiative called Jump In started campaigning to change public perceptions about the water’s cleanliness. Today, events like the United Way’s Harbour Swim draw crowds of swimmers into the heart of downtown. Still a busy port, the Halifax harbour has limited recreation areas, but there are a number of urban beaches nearby where there is little chance of backstroking into a ferry or Coast Guard vessel.
In Oakville, Ont., Great Lakes Open Water Adventures (GLOW) is a group of open water and marathon swimming enthusiasts whose home beach is Coronation Park on Lake Ontario. For many Oakville residents, the barrier to enjoying a dip there isn’t pollution or access but that many residents simply didn’t think of it as a swimming destination. The adventurers signed on to the Swimmable Cities charter and are working to change perceptions about urban swimming in their community.
“Nobody embraces Lake Ontario,” Madhu Nagaraja says. One of the founders of Great Lakes Open Water Adventures — as well as a member of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame — he says Oakville’s affluent residents have a curiously indifferent relationship to the nature around them.
People “go up north to their pristine lake houses, while they have this gorgeous body of water … So that’s where we actually started.” Nagaraja says.
You can find Nagaraja swimming in in the lake nearly every day of the year, but his swimming concerns are much the same as any casual paddler or occasional beachgoer. What are conditions like today? Do I have a swim buddy? And where are all these golf balls coming from?
Granted, the golf ball question might be unique to Nagaraja after all, but it’s the kind of prosaic duty he shoulders to keep Lake Ontario clean. He once retrieved more than a hundred golf balls from the water in a year, the result of some local residents using the shore as their personal 18th hole. He sent a snapshot of those golf balls to municipal authorities, successfully advocating for change: in 2013, Oakville passed a bylaw against golfing in municipal parks. “These are simple things, small things that we can do to take care of your local water bodies,” he says. Nagaraja describes the process of working with his municipality to be “fantastic,” and says, “They have embraced it, doing a lot of work with us, and they’ve installed buoys and are going to install a water temperature monitor and eventually, an E. coli monitor.”
Lake Ontario is ringed with urban beaches, but many residents prefer to swim at the smaller lakes in cottage country. Great Lakes Open Water Adventures in Oakville, Ont., is working to change the way people think about the beaches closer to home. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal
However, creating a swimmable city requires more than a positive relationship with the municipality. For Nagaraja, there’s no urban swimming without a relationship with the urban ecosystems, and he wants Oakville residents to reconnect with their lake. While Oakville is an affluent city, many residents seem to have an indifferent relationship to the nature around them. “Nobody embraces Lake Ontario,” he says. People “We need to build this community and start making people owners of Lake Ontario.”
Swimming education key to promoting access
In order for people to connect with their lakes, rivers and shores — and to one day envision swimming in them — it certainly helps if they can swim. In 2022, there were 308 deaths in Canada due to accidental drowning and submersion. New Canadians are especially vulnerable; the Lifesaving Society reports that they are four times less likely to be able to swim than those born in Canada. But an innovative idea from an American Swimmable Cities signatory might just provide Canadian organizations with a bit of inspiration for addressing swimming education.
Investigating problems. Exploring solutions
The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for a weekly dose of independent journalism.
Investigating problems. Exploring solutions
The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for a weekly dose of independent journalism.
Nora Cronin is the program director of +POOL, a New York City initiative to bring a floating swimming pool to the East River. As they make their way through each step of this complex project, they’re keeping swimming top of mind for New Yorkers. Their Bluefish program offers free swim lessons to youth ages five to 18 who would otherwise not have the opportunity to learn to swim and even includes swimsuits, goggles and towels.
“Eighty to 90 per cent of students have been children of colour, which traditionally has been a very underrepresented group in swimming lessons because of generational racial disparities and who gets access to swimming pools,” Cronin says. “Ninety per cent of our students are from families with an annual household income that’s under $26,000 a year. Given that income, the idea of having swim lessons, especially swim lessons for an entire family, would be completely out of reach if it wasn’t for this program.” +POOL also subsidizes learn-to-swim classes for adults.
The work of organizations like Swimmable Cities and Great Lakes Open Water Adventures is about much more than making sure people can have fun and splash around; it’s also about ensuring our environments are healthy. “Despite what we might tell ourselves, waterways are a really good mirror of the people and the cities that they support and it’s not the other way around,” Matthew Sykes, a founder of Swimmable Cities, says. “Waterways support the cities, as you know, we’ve got to learn that reciprocity story.”
Sykes is based in Melbourne, where urban swimming is popular, and he sees the same potential for Canada. “I think that healthy waterways remind us of our interdependency with nature, but it also reminds us of our identity,” he says. “And for a place like Canada, where would you be without your forests? And the orca? Who are we, where are we going in the world and what do we stand for?”
Another year of keeping a close watch
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in legislatures across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in legislatures across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Since the election of Prime Minister Mark Carney in April, Alberta and the federal government have been talking about a “grand bargain” to balance rapid...
Your access to our journalism is free — always. Sign up for our weekly newsletter for investigative reporting on the natural world in Canada you won’t find anywhere else.
Your access to our journalism is free — always. Sign up for our weekly newsletter for investigative reporting on the natural world in Canada you won’t find anywhere else.
7 min. read
