It was about eight years ago in August 2016 that I took this somewhat goofy photo standing knee deep in Little Albro Lake holding a pile of Yellow Floating Heart. My wife snapped the picture and found the whole spectacle of me standing in the lake trying to look tough pretty funny. I took the photo for a neighbourhood specific post card that I delivered to all the streets in and around Little Albro Lake. I was doing a somewhat risky thing for a politician, I was making a very specific and very measurable promise that, if elected, I would tackle the invasive weed that had completely taken over Little Albro Lake. I’m very pleased and proud to say that on Friday, HRM released the news that the final piece of work for fulfilling that promise is in place: HRM now has approval from the Province to deploy the herbicide Procella in Little Albro Lake.
Yellow Floating Heart is an invasive species that out competes native plants and was first identified in Little Albro Lake in 2006. The message at the time from the Province and HRM was “too bad about your lake, don’t spread it around please.” There was no real serious interest in addressing the issue. Hearing from residents in 2016 about how access to the lake for swimming and boating had basically ended because of the thick mat of Yellow Floating Heart was convincing to me that this was a problem we needed to tackle. Learning how Yellow Floating Heart could potentially spread out of Little Albro Lake to other lakes by seeds attaching to wildlife or by pieces of the plant getting moved accidentally by boats made the situation downright scary. Yellow Floating Heart is a much bigger danger and a threat to one of the very things that makes Dartmouth, Dartmouth: our lakes!
I took the issue to Council and thanks to some very dedicated staff in our Environment and Climate Change group who wanted to tackle this issue as much as I did, Council approved a positive staff recommendation to try benthic mats. The idea behind the mats was to smother the Yellow Floating Heart by covering it, just like people sometimes do for weeds on land with landscape fabric. HRM launched the mat pilot project in 2021, which revealed that mats could be effective, but not without harming life on the bottom of the lake that lives in the sediments. Deploying and maintaining mats would also be extremely labour intensive. Scaling the mat effort up would be hard to do.
Luckily, a new herbicide, Procella, was just coming onto the market as HRM was concluding that mats weren’t a great fit. Procella had been successfully tested in a drinking water reservoir in Oklahoma where it killed 95% of the Yellow Floating Heart with no ill effects. Staff recommended that HRM proceed with Procella, but we first had to wait for Health Canada to approve the herbicide for use in Canada (products approved in the US typically get Canadian approval a few months or years later). Our MP Darren Fisher looked into this a few times for us and in 2023, Health Canada approved the use of Procella, paving the way for HRM’s application.
The last few months has seen HRM gearing up for the project and getting Provincial Department of Environment approval to use Procella in Little Albro Lake. With the granting of Provincial approval last week and notifications now going out to neighbours around Little Albro Lake, the last stumbling block has been removed. There will likely be some minor touch-up along the shoreline in 2025 where some pockets of Yellow Floating Heart might survive, but we’re expecting most of it to die, just like in the reservoir in Oklahoma. To help repair the ecosystem, HRM is planning to reintroduce native species to Little Albro Lake that are currently found in Big Albro Lake. The only thing that could still go wrong with the timeline is a really rainy September since Procella needs a few dry days in a row to be effective.
I’m very proud of this project and all the work that went into it. I’m glad that HRM is going to solve this issue and make life better for everyone around Little Albro Lake and in the neighbourhood. I’m proud that this will not only restore Little Albro, but also eliminate a threat to all Dartmouth’s lakes. I’m very grateful to the HRM staff and Council colleagues who supported this project, and to our MP, Darren Fisher, and MLAs Sue LeBlanc and Tim Halman who helped in various ways. Most of all, I’m thankful for the sustained and ongoing engagement and commitment by area residents in the area to get this problem fixed. I have heard from many of you over the years and I’m delighted that all that work is now coming to fruition. I’m glad I took those steps into the lake back in 2016!
Dartmouth, we do great things together!