ENVIRONMENT UNDER THREAT FROM BILL 66

Bill 66, cutely named "Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act", is being described as "...the biggest and most significant environmental rollback to occur in a generation in Ontario" by the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA).It will rollback protections in the Clean Water Act passed after the 2000 Walkerton tragedy as well as the Great Lakes Protection Act and the Greenbelt Act. It is essentially a way of selling relief from appropriate and necessary environmental safeguards in exchange for jobs being allegedly produced. Of course as with most legislation passed by our corrupt and partisan lawmakers it will have little to no followup or accountability afterwards to determine if the jobs promised actually were permanent or produced at all. Welcome to Doug Ford's version of Conservatism.

There have been a number of articles published in the last couple of days in the Waterloo Region Record. They include "Proposed bill allows cities to bypass environmental laws", "Victims, advocates fear for Bill 66" and an Opinion piece by Geoffrey Stevens titled "Ford's hypocrisy on the Greenbelt". This legislation has been introduced with zero public consultation and witj exactly zero public request for it. It is all about Doug Ford playing politics and solidifying his base support and doing the really dirty work early in his mandate. We will all suffer in the long run but politics is rarely about the long run. And unfortunately citizens memories are terribly short. Walkerton you say. What about Walkerton? What happened there?