That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
That’s a line from Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, released 50 years ago. It’s also the story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank off the Canadian coast of Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 crew members died.
Scientists say it’s a tragedy that risks repeating itself, as Canada sinks millions of dollars into shoring up Great Lakes shipping without equal investment in weather monitoring and data to ensure safe transit — particularly as climate change brings on more extreme weather and the skies of November turn gloomy.
Earlier this fall, the Ontario government announced plans to increase Lake Superior’s commercial shipping capacity by repairing and upgrading Michipicoten Harbour, near Wawa, Ont. Superior Aggregates Corp. received $1 million from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund to resurrect the harbour, which has not been used by vessels since the 1990s, so it can ship granite and other products to global markets. Northern Economic Development Minister George Pirie said revitalizing the “underused port” can help “reinforce northern Ontario’s role as a competitive gateway” for trade.
Farther north on Lake Superior — called Gitchigumi by the Anishinaabe, and in Lightfoot’s song — $2 million in federal funding is going to repurpose unused docks in Marathon, Ont., at the site of a former pulp mill. It will be used to create a terminal for shipping things like forest products and, perhaps someday, critical minerals from the Ring of Fire to southern Ontario and across the globe. The Thunder Bay Port Authority will also receive $800,000 to expand staging and storage capacity at its harbour, so more cargo can flow through the region.
But climate change is altering conditions on the lakes. At the same time, cuts to U.S. scientific agencies have raised questions about the quality and future of data used to understand them. That’s data Canadian agencies like Environment and Climate Change Canada use to supplement their own understanding of the state of Great Lakes water.
“Great Lakes data is essential infrastructure, just like the locks and the shipping channels are. It requires consistent investment in order to gain the most value and to support extended shipping,” Jennifer Boehme said. She is chief executive officer of the Great Lakes Observing System — an organization that collects and provides public real-time data on wind and water conditions to support storm readiness and ensure safe maritime commerce. “More shipping capacity calls for matching investment and observations.”
Earlier this year the Lake Carriers’ Association reported that a third of the shipping season was lost because of delays caused by heavy ice. Around the world, weather delays, backlogs and bottlenecks prevent cargo from getting where it needs to go — such as during the infamous 2021 Suez Canal blockage when a sandstorm and strong winds caused a huge container ship to lose control and get stuck, blocking the crucial trade passage for six long days.
Inaccurate weather prediction has also already led to disasters. In 2015, the U.S. cargo vessel SS El Faro sank when Hurricane Joaquin swept in near the Bahamas. Reports of the incident show the tropical cyclone updates available to the crew were six hours behind, and that all 33 people on board died.
A huge amount of cargo already moves through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway, a waterway that allows ships to travel 3,700 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes, as far as Lake Superior.
Together, these shipments support over $66 billion in economic activity, and 356,858 jobs. However, this August, president of the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation Jim Athanasiou said the seaway operates at only about 50 per cent of its potential capacity.
As the Canadian government invests in expanding its Great Lakes shipping capacity in northern Ontario and beyond, scientists say investments in environment and climate monitoring must keep pace — on both sides of the border.
Getting both Canada and the U.S. on board with Great Lakes weather monitoring
In Canada, weather and climate monitoring on the Great Lakes is done through Environment and Climate Change Canada, by way of federal programs such as the Meteorological Service of Canada and the Canadian Hydrographic Service. The data is shared extensively with the U.S.
Currently, Environment Canada has listed “predicting weather and environmental conditions” as one of its core responsibilities for the year, putting $267 million toward forecasts, warnings and data to help Canadians and “weather-sensitive sectors” make decisions. The departmental plan for 2026-2027 promises to do this by monitoring weather, water quantity, ice, air quality and climate conditions and “collaborating closely” with other countries. An independent report produced for the federal environment department last year noted funding for this monitoring has been largely stagnant in Canada for the last five years, “despite increased damages from extreme events.”
Since the Canada-U.S. border bisects four of the Great Lakes, both countries rely on cross-border collaboration and exchange of data to see the full picture.
Gail Krantzberg echoes Boehme’s desire for greater investment in data, especially when considering shipping in northern Ontario — an area with harsh winters, heavy snowfalls and violent storms. She’s the Canadian lead investigator at the Global Centre for Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters, a cross-border collaboration between multiple universities and Indigenous nations.
“Especially up north, in Lake Superior, if you don’t know ice conditions, how are you going to navigate from port to port? You can’t. It’s too dangerous,” Krantzberg, who is also a professor emeritus at McMaster University, said. “The changing climate is very profoundly changing the Great Lakes. … We need now, more than ever, to better understand how the lakes are functioning.”
Krantzberg called U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “very, very serious,” in an earlier interview with The Narwhal. The organization has lost about 20 per cent of its staff since January 2025, and Krantzberg noted that the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory’s workforce was cut by about 35 per cent.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors weather, precipitation, winds and ice cover and breakup, “all of which is really critical for the shipping industry to understand, so they can forecast their travels,” Krantzberg said.
More cuts are on the table: Trump has proposed to cut the administration’s funding by 26 per cent — or $1.6 billion — for next year’s budget. Industry experts see reason for hope. Trump’s Republicans lost control of Congress in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, but many cuts have already been made.
Jason Card, vice-president of external affairs at the Ottawa-based Chamber of Maritime Commerce said there has been strong bipartisan pushback on the cuts. In an email response to The Narwhal’s questions, he pointed to the Great Lakes and National Weather Service Funding Protection Act as an example. Currently in committee in Congress, the legislation seeks to protect National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funding from being transferred, withheld or reprogrammed without legal justification. “Given this substantive pushback, I believe it would be premature to comment on this matter,” he wrote.
Krantzberg said there are limits to how much enhancing Canada’s monitoring capacities can fill the gap left by U.S. partners, especially in the short-term. “It takes a very long time to build up that capacity and huge monetary investments, and our federal government right now is really caught amongst competing priorities,” Krantzberg said. “Buoys and automatic samplers and underwater cameras and all that kind of stuff is major infrastructure.”
The Great Lakes ‘winter data gap’
In the U.S., the Great Lakes Observing System experienced a close call last spring, when budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration put it at risk of shrinking or vanishing completely, CEO Boehme said. Since then, the organization has been funded through the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was awarded a new five-year co-operative agreement, promising some more certainty for the future.
But, important gaps remain.
“There are areas where the observations are not as numerous as they should be. There’s room for more information on real-time wind, wave, water level data, currents, ice data,” Boehme said. “Observing capacity needs to grow alongside shipping capacity, not lag behind.”
Boehme explained that this information, particularly ice forecasts, are difficult to do in the region because of a lack of year-round observations.
This is due to a “winter data gap.” On the Great Lakes, researchers’ ability to collect observations after freeze-up is limited, as doing it safely requires specialized training and equipment, such as ice-hardened vessels. Other equipment, such as the specialized observational buoys Boehme’s organization uses to collect data on the lakes, have to come out of the water before the ice forms. Boehme said that means losing real-time data during some of the “most dangerous months on the lakes when ships are still moving.”
Currently, the Great Lakes shipping season runs from late-March to mid-January every year. But, data shows, the season has lengthened in the last two decades — gaining an average of 6.5 days annually.
More vessels and potentially longer shipping seasons mean more decisions that depend on accurate real-time information.
“When shipping runs well into the late fall or early winter storm season, that’s a very critical time,” Boehme said. “Part of the reason that we have buoy monitoring in the Great Lakes is to make sure that Edmund Fitzgerald remains a historical event. November gales are why winter data matters.”
