In the battle against invasive species phrag, Ontario is arming itself with money, herbicides and helicopters

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Standing on a rural stretch of McCowan Road north of Toronto, Dayna Laxton, York Region’s invasive species specialist, takes a good look at the frontline in her battle against a relentless occupying force.

The federal government long ago labelled phrag Canada’s worst invasive species. You’ll find the enemy lining almost any country road or highway in Southern Ontario, and flourishing in wetlands and coastal marshes. It’s called the European common reed, but its full scientific name is Phragmites australis, and its known as Phragmites, or just phrag.

Along this part of McCowan in Whitchurch-Stouffville, the phrag clogged the drainage ditch, leaving the roadway flooded after rainstorms. The plants were so tall, residents couldn’t see oncoming traffic as they tried to exit their driveways.

“Both sides of this road were infested,” Ms. Laxton says, surveying the straw-like dead phrag nearby. “It was like a wall.”

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In June, Ontario unveiled plans to spend $16-million over the next three years on invasive species, much of it to set up a province-wide strategy to fight phrag and better co-ordinate efforts against it.

Phrag can grow more than five metres high. It quickly forms dense phalanxes that crowd out native plants – including Ontario’s once-ubiquitous common cattails, named for their long brown seed heads – creating what biologists call monocultures and wrecking habitat for threatened turtles, frogs, fish and birds. Sixty per cent of phrag’s biomass is actually lurking unseen underground in its tangled roots, like a botanical iceberg.

The plant has been here for 200 years, brought over from Europe, where a set of natural predators and competitors had co-evolved to keep it in check. Lately, invasive phrag has been on the march.

Long common in American states along the Great Lakes and the Eastern Seaboard, it spread rapidly in the 1990s, particularly in Southwestern Ontario. It is in Quebec and the Maritimes, and has recently made its way as far north as Thunder Bay and Kenora, and as far west as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

For years, a patchwork of municipalities, non-governmental organizations and government agencies in Ontario have been fighting this virulent plant – phragging, in the lingo – with scythes, shovels, amphibious tank-like vehicles and herbicides sprayed from backpacks, helicopters and, potentially, drones. Scientists are also testing the results of the release of specially selected breeds of moths that eat only phrag.

Given the scale of the problem, the new influx of cash from the Ontario government is not enough for some critics.

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The Opposition NDP’s agriculture critic, John Vanthof, says Ontario’s new cash is a drop in the bucket. He notes the government was already spending $5-million a year to combat all invasive species. And driving the six hours from his Northeastern Ontario riding of Timiskaming-Cochrane to the Ontario Legislature, he says he sees phrag everywhere.

“Once you know what it is, you can’t unsee it,” Mr. Vanthof said. “Now you have to look for cattails. You know, before, every marsh was cattails. Now a lot of the marshes are Phragmites.”

A 2021 report commissioned by the Green Shovels Collaborative, a coalition of major conservation groups, estimated the total cost for just the first year of an effective provincewide phrag control program at more than $90-million. In 2019, the report said, municipalities spent just $3.2-million a year on phragging efforts.

Ontario’s Minister of Natural Resources, Graydon Smith, said the recent provincial money comes on top of $6-million a year that the Ministry of Transportation is spending to attack phrag along the province’s highways.

“In some cases it’s not eradication, it’s mitigation,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s a matter of targeting the areas of greatest importance and working in those areas where you can get the most bang for the buck.”

The $16-million from the Ontario government, as well as the strategy, will be administered by the non-profit Invasive Species Centre and the Nature Conservancy of Canada, both already deep in the trenches of the war on phrag.

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A key difference-maker in Canada was an herbicide-spraying campaign that began in 2016. At first, emergency approval was granted to use a glyphosate-based herbicide over water, which is not normally allowed.

The product, known under the brand name Roundup and developed by U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto, which was bought by Germany’s Bayer in 2016, has long been a concern for environmental groups for potential risks to humans and other wildlife. In 2021, Health Canada approved a new herbicide from Germany’s BASF called Habitat Aqua, designed for use in wetland areas, which made more phrag spraying feasible. It knocked out the plants along McCowan.

Experts with the Nature Conservancy and the Invasive Species Centre say that, with the right kind of treatment, significant progress against phrag can be made. The proof, they say, is in Norfolk County, on the shores of Lake Erie, a two-hour drive southwest of Toronto.

There, phrag had spread exponentially, choking immense swaths of ecologically sensitive Long Point, which juts into Lake Erie, and other wetlands. Years of local citizen activism prompted a concerted effort to fight back, involving an array of local groups. Crews and volunteers have used a variety of methods, including cutting phrag stalks in marshes below the waterline – known as “cut-to-drown” – and even burning large patches of it.

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But now more than 2,200 hectares of phrag – the equivalent of about 5,500 football fields – has been treated successfully at Long Point, says Kyle Borrowman, a manager of habitat restoration with the Nature Conservancy. Endangered Fowler’s toads have been spotted in areas where they have not been seen for years, as a more balanced ecosystem regenerates.

Back on McCowan Road, Ms. Laxton, who steers York Region’s phragging efforts, says herbicides are a necessary evil when fighting phrag, which her municipality first vowed to do in 2020.

The ditches here, two years after a spraying with glyphosate, are now a colourful garden of more than a dozens other species: native grasses and flowers and prickly purple thistle (also invasive, but not as damaging.) But on the opposite side of the road, on a private landowner’s farm, a large curtain of green Phragmites towers over a fence, swaying menacingly in the summer wind.