BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via our website. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Gary Machan, an Oro-Medonte resident who is affiliated with the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition.
On Dec. 13, the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks approved Sarjeant Company’s proposal to take water from one well for industrial aggregate-washing purposes in the Township of Oro-Medonte.
It should be noted that this was a Category 3 proposal where, by its own admission, there will be significant adverse effects to the environment. None of which gets into the scale of the operation, which, to put it into perspective, is the equivalent of 524 Olympic-sized swimming pools through its duration.
Equally troubling is the complete disregard that the ministry has towards the members of Oro-Medonte council, who let it be known in no uncertain terms that the people it is there to represent did not want this mass water taking to be approved. One would think that after all Premier Doug Ford has been through, his government would be a lot more receptive to the wishes of people living in rural ridings.
Clearly, not so. About the only thing one can infer is there was a fair bit of discussion with this proposal for the simple fact it took close to three months from the time when comments were closed on Aug. 31 to the decision made on Dec. 13. Was this another case of the minister overriding his own staff’s decision? I mean, it wouldn’t be a first for this government; more like their modus operandi.
But the bigger question is why the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks was involved in the approval process at all. I say this because the auditor general just issued a scathing report titled Value for Money: Management of Aggregate Resources in what reads like a ‘how not to run a proper industry,’ all of which was directed to the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry. In fact, they didn’t have one section devoted to protecting water.
All of which would be OK if the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks lived up to its own hype of “leading to healthier communities and economic prosperity through protecting Ontario’s air, land and water.” Not my words, but their own.
Does this approval make Oro-Medonte, or even Lake Simcoe, healthier? No.
Does it result in more money for Sarjeant Company? Yep.
Does it protect Ontario’s water? On the contrary, it makes it worse by their own admission.
And so, what are we to make of this latest episode of gaslighting where we are being told one reality by the conservatives and meanwhile see another as evidenced by the auditor general’s report about the management of aggregate resources? Read this report and tell me you can trust the government’s management of the aggregate resource industry.
Finally, given that Lake Simcoe falls under the jurisdiction of the newly created Canada Water Agency, might the feds be willing to show up? Nowhere that I can see are Indigenous people consulted by the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks on these massive water takeoffs (1.2 billion litres over 10 years), which is in direct opposition to the agreement arrived at with the Williams Treaties. That alone should be reason enough to pause.
Gary Machan
Oro-Medonte
