TWO QUESTIONS: WHY DOES THE ONTARIO MOE GIVE POLLUTERS INDEMNITIES AND WHY DOES IT TAKE SIXTY YEARS AND MORE TO REMEDIATE CONTAMINATED SITES?

I am aware of Indemnities in Ontario to Uniroyal Chemical, Phillips Environmental, Safety-Kleen, and now Bowater and Weyerhauser. Obviously the MOE hand these out like candy allegedly in exchange for quick cleanups and less litigation. In reality here in Elmira it also has a major cover your butt component for the Ontario Ministry of Environment. The Indemnity to Uniroyal helped end the ongoing Environmental Appeal Board hearing in 1991 when it was Uniroyal's turn to present damaging and embarrassing evidence to the Board about the Ontario MOE.

The second question requires a lengthier answer. In a nutshell it's about money and power. Large multinational companies are willing and able to go toe to toe with the Ontario MOE in court. In fact it's usually cheaper to tie things up in court for years rather than jump into a multi-million dollar cleanup. It'also a result of a lack of strong enforcement powers in the legislation which allows corporate entities with money to appeal everything they don't want in Control Orders, cleanup orders and the like. These companies have already spent millions of dollars lobbying the Liberal and Conservative parties regardless of who is in power. Therefore all environmental legislation is essentially subject to corporate review and modification long before the public ever see it. These companies also donate directly to our two biggest political parties. They expect to keep doing so unless one of the two biggest parties severely step out of line, by corporate standards that is.

It has been my experience that the Ontario MOE will write a strict Control Order today in the heat of public opinion against a polluter only to weaken it progressively over the following decades with amendments and concessions to the polluter. This is a way for the MOE to avoid massive public condemnation during an environmental crisis while still satisfying their corporate clients that they won't be too onerous for very long on the poor darlings.

Last Saturday's Waterloo Region Record carried the following story titled "Companies to pay for mill maintenance". It took the Supreme Court of Canada to override lower court rulings that favoured the corporate owners of a mercury-laced waste disposal site. They had argued that a 1985 Indemnity from the MOE should cover them so that they were not on the financial hook for maintenance, financial assurance and for monitoring ordered in a new 2011 MOE Control Order. The Supreme Court also criticized the lower court judge for "palpable and overriding errors of fact."