What a hypocritical country we live in. Minority rights my butkus. This country like every other has been built upon the rich and powerful taking from those who aren't. It's been about the concentration of wealth with the powerful lobbying for the laws and rules that help mostly themselves often at the expense of others. Man made laws are primarily for the purpose of reinforcing the status quo as in making it easier for the rich to get richer usually at the expense of those who already have very little.
Pollution laws are mostly vote getters. Politicians then make sure that whatever inadequate laws there are will not be properly enforced. Blatant pollution is ignored while selective enforcement sometimes occurs on a complaints driven basis only. In Elmira, Ontario the owner of tiny Varnicolor Chemical, albeit a large polluter, went to jail. Nobody from the larger polluter Uniroyal Chemical ever came close to going to jail.
Gravel pits are another sore point. Snyder Rd. west of Kitchener and near the village of Petersburg is an example. Apparently there are seven gravel pits along Snyder Rd. One or two pits could probably easily handle the volume of gravel being extracted and used each year from all those pits but oh no various aggregate users and developers all want a piece of the action and to hell with the noise, dust and disruption to a few nearby rural neighbours. Here's where minority rights come in. Maybe you are harming the quality of life of only 30-40 people with each new gravel pit along that road. Do either the provincial government or the aggregate companies care if it's 30-40 in total or even if it's 30-40 people per pit as in 35x7 pits= 245 people. Either way it's a tiny total of the whole population of either the village, the Region or the province. That is how they get away with that crap. Although they personally are pocketing 100% of the profits their claim is that the whole province are benefiting from cheap gravel close to the end use of it. Nonsense! It's all about a small group of already well off people with outsize political influence getting laws made to harm unorganized, non wealthy minorities in order to milk the country's natural resources for their personal benefit.
That folks describes a democratic, capitolist country: wealthy minorities ensuring the laws, rules and regulations permit them to exploit natural resources for their sole advantage with non wealthy minorities living with all the negatives from it. i.e. just like pollution they externalize their costs upon everyone else. (today's Waterloo Region Record: Paige Desmond: "You're all a bunch of cowards" - residents decry pit approval)
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