Health vs capitalism 3

After a decade long struggle, the people of the Kirkland Lake area, a working class community in North Eastern Ontario, have finally defeated an extremely dangerous major waste disposal project. The idea was to convey millions of tons of Toronto garbage and dump it in a lake 600 kilometres north of that city. The lake was formed in what was once the main pit of the now defunct Adams Mine, an iron ore surface extraction operation. Besides the obvious environmental danger and more than doubtful cost effectiveness ⁽¹⁾ of just transporting such an enormous volume of garbage over such a long distance, the project was ridden by many other flaws.

The old pit is 55 stories deep and is sunk 300 feet in the water table and in badly fractured rock on a site overlooking the fertile Temiskaming farming belt to the Southeast. It implied contaminating and then treating 300 million litres of groundwater every year from the dump. Just one of the over-looked "problems" of the scheme was that the heavily fractured pit permits the groundwater to pour through its numerous cracks and fissures. The idea of installing some kind of liner to limit the contact with the water table was no sure bet, but in any case, the promoters did not intend to install one anyway. The result would have been the contamination of the water table and wells by leachates and dangerous chemicals downstream from the old mine pit. Hundreds of square miles of North Eastern Ontario and North Western Quebec were in peril. Motivated by a sense of impending doom the people of this working class area took the lead in resisting the project. And they had to! Local elites had come out in force to support it! If you listened to Mayor Enouy, the three local councils or The Northern Daily News it was a wonderful idea. Since most of the mines had closed down, Kirkland Lake would now be revived as a "waste management centre". The powerful companies that would directly benefit from the project ⁽²⁾ were also putting their considerable weight in the balance.

In the end, the project was permanently (?) flushed by a December 4th 2001 vote of the Toronto City Council. For the predictable future, Toronto waste is to be shipped off to Michigan! ⁽³⁾ Why then was the ten-year project derailed? Despite the sheer stupidity and obvious danger of it in itself, at one point it seemed evident that the Ontario government was going to force it through. It did everything to obstruct a full environmental impact assessment in contradiction with its own Environmental Assessment Act. However the local protests kept growing. There were all kinds of public meetings, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. The dirty little job the State was preparing in the faraway north was going public big time and it was creating quite a stir... The mostly retired miners and their wives had been able to gather support of the small farmers (including francophones from the Quebec provincial side) from the south and even from natives of the Algonquin and Wahgoshig Nations. This kind of internationalist unity is not a given in Canada but it obviously gave some positive results. Of course, a few politicians got on the bandwagon as soon as they felt the mood changing. This was to be expected and in the present political state of the working class, it was an accomplishment in itself that it was the direct action of the people themselves that forced the State to back off.

The struggle continues

But despite this crucial victory, as the papers are being closed on the Adams Mine affair, a new toxic menace threatens the area. A company called Bennett Environmental wants to build a PCB incinerator in Kirkland Lake. The same outfit presently runs a similar operation under a French title: Récupère-Sol in Saint-Ambroise, in the aluminium-producing region of the Quebec Saguenay since 1992. Already stricken by the highest infantile cancer rate in that province due to the level of industrial pollution (mainly from the huge Alcan plants), that region now has to deal with a very important presence of all kinds of new dangerous metals that have started to show up in the forest all around the small town. ⁽⁴⁾

Interestingly, the Quebec nationalist government whose been portraying itself as a solid backer of the Kyoto Agreement in opposition to the nine English-speaking provinces who oppose it, has been bending over backwards to adapt its environmental policies to suit dirty profiteers such as Récupère-Sol. ⁽⁵⁾

Thus it’s sure the workers of Kirkland Lake have another important fight ahead of them. And in this province also, the State has just adopted a new PCB policy designed to cozy-up to the Bennett project (December 2001). In this crossfire of "waste management schemes" and open State intervention in favour of these very toxic nuisances, lots of money is at stake and huge profits can be made. Obviously, this area has been singled out by the State as one of its future toxic hazard dumps. All kinds of politicians and "journalists" will try to poison the hearts and minds of the population while the capitalists prepare to poison their land, their lakes, their air and their bodies. Now more than ever, workers must affirm their political independence and will. Workers organisation is the order of the day. Class-consciousness will be needed to lead a real fight against this new hazard and all those to come. Short-term resistance is needed of course, but if we are to hope to one day live a clean life, it is society itself that must be cleaned up. As long as Capital rules the world, Kirkland Lake, Saint-Ambroise, Rouyn-Noranda and indeed the whole world is in peril.

(1) An estimated one billion dollars over the course of the plan.

(2) To name a few: The Ontario Northland Railway and its rail partner the Canadian National, the Miller Group trucking interest, Notre Development Inc. and Canadian Waste Services.

(3) It’s interesting to see how from the Canadian or Quebec nationalist point of view, Globalization and the Free Trade Accord are always presented as instruments of a U.S. menace to "our" sovereignty, notably in the environmental field. In this case, as with asbestos poisoning it is enlightening to see that health and a better environment are not guaranteed by our protectionism or nationalism. "Canadian" capitalists and their political henchmen, as in any other country, pollute or let pollute when and where they deem it the most profitable. In this case, it is the people of Michigan who will get the raw sewage deal.

(4) A report shows high levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, dioxins, etc.

(5) We refer here to the new policy on the burying of contaminated residues (July 11th, 2001).