PUBLIC CONSULTATION DOUBLE WHAMMY IN WOOLWICH TOWNSHIP

RAC & TAG as per the rules set down by Woolwich Council will not allow citizens to ask questions at their public meetings. Yes these are the public meetings dealing with our water supply, our creek, our air and the ongoing non-remediation of the Chemtura site which is responsible for all the previous problems. When it came time to appoint local, involved citizens to TAG the mayor was in a pickle of her own making. She had Applications from plenty of citizens namely two from the previous CPAC plus all the CPAC & SWAT members from 2010-2015. Her problem was that she and Mark Bauman wanted to get rid of the old CPAC folks because Chemtura and the Ontario Ministry of Environment were crying the blues about allegedly being treated disrespectfully. Quite frankly I was constantly amazed at how well CPAC members pretended to be respectful towards those professional liars and spin doctors.

The double whammy in the title above relates to the slow degeneration of other aspects of public consultation. This other aspect is in regards to reports and data being kept from both the general public as well as from informed, longterm environmentalists and activists. At one time hard copies of all reports were handed out to any citizens and stakeholders who requested them. For a while yours truly was automatically receiving copies of everything whether or not a formal member of CPAC. Nowadays hard copies are slowly disappearing as more and more lengthy reports from 50 to 400 pages are being sent by e-mail. This is beyond asinine and is simply one more way to discourage citizens from being active participants in the process. Also as per six Attachments I finally received today two of them are in a format which I am unable to print out. All in all this is being done to discourage the reading of reports by citizens and then informed questions or criticisms being heard publicly.

The latest games are courtesy of the M.O.E.C.C. being able to present their Ecological (Risk) Assessment Report by February 28/17 with minimal citizen input and comment. The raw data was sent out on December 30, 2016 and I received the e-mail Attachments this morning. Really classy and impressive and shameful to all guilty parties including the Ontario M.O.E., Chemtura and Woolwich Council.