IT'S NOT ABOUT EITHER "CLEANUP" OR REMEDIATION

What it is about is letting the polluter off the hook as much as possible. In other words the "Polluter Pays" principle is nothing more than a political slogan or political jargon to get the voting public onside. Can you imagine a politician trying to get elected telling the voters that business or commercial investors are too important to be discouraged by being held liable for any collateral damage they inflict either upon the environment or on the health of citizens living in their neighbourhoods?

Politicians know that investment spurs development and economic activity. Hence for every rule, regulation or law insisting upon corporate responsibility and accountability, there are two other ways manufactured to circumvent those rules, regulations or laws. This is exactly why lawyers and environmental consultants are thriving. Far too many are merely intellectual prostitutes bought and paid for by corporate Canada and the corporate U.S.. What the hell, this is business, wealth and influence simply taking care of number one i.e. themselves at the public's expense.

We the general public are merely pawns. We are the vast numbers constantly having business costs externalized upon ourselves to make things rosier for the corporate titans among us. Those externalized business costs particularly include environmental costs. It is so much less directly expensive to industry to be able to legally dump hundreds of tonnes of contaminants into the air, the water and the soil than to have to clean them, detoxify them on-site or send them offsite for commercial detoxification. Our Ministry of Environments simply give then Certificates of Approval for their dumping. Those C. of A.s are now known as Environmental Compliance Agreements (ECA) and no wonder they are agreed to by industry. They are mathematically calculated volumes and weights that allegedly will be diluted by the property line of polluters to the point of not increasing background concentrations of toxic chemicals. What a farce. They aren't compared to the background concentrations that our parents and grandparents grew up in.

No they are constantly increasing concentrations and numbers of chemicals and we look around us in confusion and wonder why 45% of all citizens will now have cancer at least once in their lifetimes. We spend billions of dollars on health care to cure us after the fact instead of going to the sources of air, water and soil pollution and stopping them cold before they cause sickness and death. It is to the point that obvious gross and illegal dumping on a company's property is not stopped or illegal until or unless our authorities (MOE/MECP/Regional governments) can prove beyond a doubt that the dumping has already caused environmental or health impacts offsite to third parties.

We know that pollutants migrate in air, water and soil. We know that most acute effects take considerable lengths of time to occur. Some of our most local blatant dumping and irresponsible behaviour wasn't condemned or confronted until decades later. This includes Uniroyal Chemical, Varnicolor Chemical, Ciba-Geigy, Canadian General Tower, Safety-Kleen, Northstar Aerospace, Borg Warner etc.

There are so many more polluters that have never been confronted even when extensive remediation took place for development purposes many decades later. This would include Kaufaman Rubber, Breithaupt Leather (near St. Leger, Edwin St.), Canbar and Sunar in Waterloo, Voisin Motors (Elmira), the gas station at Arthur and Park St. in Elmira, the downtown Kitchener Gas Works and on and on. Its all about keeping the extent of contamination, environmental damage and human health damage quiet and under the radar. It's all about avoiding the blame game and pretending that this collateral damage is an unavoidable consequence of the standard of living that Canadians and Americans enjoy. Horse manure. It's an entirely avoidable consequence of politicians exempting business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and the wealthy and influential from accountability for their negative, negligent, immoral and even sometimes criminal behaviour.