COMMUNITY UPDATE (BISHOP STREET COMMUNITY INFORMATION CENTRE) CAMBRIDGE

This update is Issue #7 dated November 2019. I'm a little behind on this posting. The update consists of four separate updates namely the "Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks Update", the "Region of Waterloo Public Health Update", GE Canada Update", and the "CIC (Community Information Centre) Update". The level of puffery (i.e. world class bullshit) is highest with the MECP, next with the Region (Public Health) and decreasing with GE Canada and the CIC.

The MECP start their update with the following : "This is to ensure that the community remains protected." Wow! That is just an incredible sense of arrogance and self-aggrandizement coupled with a total lack of empathy for the victims of the Ministry of Environment's negligence, incompetence and corporate bias. People died on their "watch" and others have life long damage to their health and yet the MECP suggest that the Bishop St. community were ever "protected". Senior MOE/MECP staff should be in jail over the failures in Cambridge, Elmira, and Walkerton not to mention Grassy Narrows and so many other locations in Ontario.

We are advised by the Region (Public Health) that Trichloroethylene (TCE) concentrations due to mitigation efforts are below 5 ug/m3 (5 micrograms per cubic metre of air) in the large majority of homes. We are also advised that the long-term goal is to reduce all indoor concentrations in homes to .5 ug/m3 or less.This crisis was discovered in 2005. Almost fifteen years later and there are still human beings living in homes contaminated with TCE at greater than 5ug/m3. That is not a success story. Precisely how many MECP/Public Health, GE Canada, and AET (consulting co.) employees are living in those conditions? I would hazard a guess of zero.

For six years (2009-2015) GE Canada and their consultants used potassium permanganate to destroy TCE in soil and groundwater around the 610 Bishop St. site. This site is one of two contributors of TCE and TCA with the other being 679 Bishop St. (Northstar Aerospace). Here in Elmira we have been emphatically advised that Lanxess/GHD will not use potassium permanganate to destroy chlorobenzene in our groundwater. The explanation/rationale to date has been inadequate.

In a real democracy and in a country whose politicians sincerely wanted to do the best for ALL citizens no one from the Bishop St. community would have been left breathing in TCE contaminated air at any concentration in their homes for fifteen seconds after discovery much less for fifteen to seventeen more years. I believe the plan has always been to minimize costs on the back of the health of residents. People will die of old age along with cancers and respiratory diseases which can not be directly attributed to TCE, TCA or other industry contributed contaminants to their homes. That plan has worked everywhere else so why not in Cambridge?