FINAL REPORT - International Joint Commission

The Public Interest Advisory Group played a key interactive role throughout the Study process, systematically
engaging various interests to provide their ideas, views, values and preferences to the Study Board and the
Technical Work Groups. Stakeholder collaboration had a decisive role in the formulation and evaluation of
all the options, as well as the final set of candidate plans that are presented in this report.
FINAL REPORT
Plan Screening
The International Joint Commission requested that the Study Board not come forward with only one
recommended plan, but rather that it provide a suite of three or four options. This meant the Study Board
did not have to come to complete agreement on plans, but they did have to narrow the list of numerous
potential regulation plans down to a set of desirable candidates.
The Study Board first tried to use their guidelines for ranking plans at a practice workshop in March 2004.
The guidelines and an associated worksheet helped focus the discussion on evaluating draft plans. But
while the Study Board found the guidelines helpful, they also found that the guidelines alone would not
determine plan rankings, since the plans that were the best in terms of one guideline might be the worst in
terms of another. At the end of this practice decision, the Study Board agreed that it preferred plans that
did better than 1958-DD on each of the first three key guidelines.
1. Support the ecological integrity of the system
2. Maximize net benefits
3. Minimize disproportionate losses
As the practice decision workshops presented the Study Board with more specific, research-based performance
evaluations, the Study Board found it needed to better define its decision guidelines. To do this, individual
Study Board members volunteered to “captain” each guideline, preparing a discussion paper further defining
the guideline and explaining how it would be applied in the decision process. These papers were reviewed by
other Study Board members and debated in a teleconference series during the fall and winter of 2004-05.
Through this process the Study Board agreed that:
• The measure of a plan’s impact on ecological integrity would be represented by the plan’s performance
indicator scores estimated in the Integrated Ecological Response Model;
• Net benefits would include both economic and environmental benefits;
• There would be no rigid mathematical calculation of what constitutes a disproportionate loss, but rather
this would be a qualitative determination, based on the judgment of the individual Study Board members.
As a result of this process, the Study Board also developed new metrics or combinations of metrics that
would make their decision easier or more defensible. For example, in order to make a more sound
determination of what constituted a disproportionate loss, the Study Board asked the Plan Formulation and
Evaluation Group to calculate the percent change in baseline activity under Plan 1958-DD for each plan and
for every performance indicator.
Making Trade-offs
Despite the best efforts of plan formulators, no optimal plan was found that produces benefits to all interests
and all regions, without any losers, when compared with Plan 1958-D with Deviations. As a result, the Study
Board had to consider trade-offs. In doing so, the Study Board needed to ensure that comparisons could
be made between interests. Fungibility is the degree to which performance indicators are measured in the
same units. Early on in the Study process, the Study Board requested the development of an economics
advisory committee to provide an arms-length assessment of the economic work being done within this
Study. One of the issues the economics advisors were to address was that of fungibility. A full summary of
the recommendations provided by the Economics Advisory Committee can be found in a report titled “Issues
and Findings in the Economic Analysis of Water Level Management Plans Consensus Report of the Economics
Advisory Committee” (Thomas et al, 2005). It is useful to note two recommendations in particular that
influenced the format of the evaluation tables seen in this report. The economic advisors concluded that:
Options for Managing Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River Water Levels and Flows
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