THE SORRY ENVIRONMENTAL STATE OF AFFAIRS IN ONTARIO

It must truly be depressing working for our Ontario Ministry of the Environment. The big picture is truly disturbing. Literally every city and every community in Canada with either a present or past manufacturing base has some level of contamination in air, groundwater and surface water. Even briefly ignoring industrial contamination think about human sewage alone in cities like Toronto, Hamilton, Vancouver and Montreal. Montreal in fact has just received permission to dump hundreds of thousands of litres of untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence River.

I've been reading a two decades old report on the status of contaminated sites in Ontario and it is appalling. Even at that it is dishonest in that sites that I have studied and researched are understated and minimized. the contamination that is. The so called remediation is of course overstated.

The other disturbing fact is the utter failure of our media to keep us informed regarding neighbouring pollution here in Ontario. Some of the P.C.B. and Dioxin contaminated sites in Ontario I had never heard of and I'm constantly looking and listening for those news stories. While Uniroyal Chemical and Varnicolor Chemical were well covered locally (Kitchener-Waterloo) and indeed nationally back in the early 90s; they are now virtually ignored. Here in Elmira we can't even get our one remaining newspaper to cover public meetings of the so called public advisory committees, past or present.