LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM WATERLOO REGION'S BIOSOLIDS FIASCO

Yesterday's Waterloo Region Record carrys another story about handling biosolids locally namely "Meeting packed with foes of biosolids facility". The lessons being learned include that doing the right thing environmentally is no guarantee of public acceptance especially if you ignore or take for granted local people's quality of life. Secondly simply throwing some paperwork in amongst all the rest of the junk mail isn't adequate notice. This is similar years ago when CPAC criticized the M.O.E. for not advising them of an upcoming certificate of approval being issued to Uniroyal (Crompton). The M.O.E. defended their inaction by saying Oh we posted it on-line, on the Environmental registry. CPAC then told the M.O.E. what they could do with their registry. We are here, you are here once a month, tell us in person of these upcoming changes.

Another lesson may well be an unintended one by our politicians. We've all been told for decades that our effluent from sewage treatment plants can be safely and properly handled in our local Grand River. That has never been entirely true. Now we are finding out the exact cost of handling the solids from our sewage treatment plants. I shudder to think of the state of the environment in countries like China, India, Africa and or third world countries with large human populations and little infrastructure. Finally we are being faced with ever increasing human populations primarily through immigration and the true social costs involved. We've all been told that these immigrants add to the gross national product and they increase our local market for just about eveything. What we aren't told is that their benefits are accruing to a minority of Canadians and the rest of us are picking up the social and environmental costs of more people in a fixed land mass.

Biosolids aren't a particularily pleasant topic but they are the tip of the iceburg. Is it our local housing developers who pay for increased health care costs? Do they pay for the increased education costs of an ever expanding population? You see the point I'm making. Yesterday's Record advised us that there are 6.5 job applicants for every job opening in Canada. Do the vested interests who make money from new immigrants also contribute appropriately to greater public spending on unemployment insurance? These are the bigger questions that the Canadian public need answers to and the biosolids fiasco may well serve a greater purpose in the long run.