A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[T.O.'s garbage crisis was an NDP creation
New Democrat hypocrisy was in full bloom at last week's council meeting
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN -- Toronto Sun
October 15, 2000
Of all the boorish behaviour exhibited by protesters at last week's city council meetings on the Adams Mine landfill plan, none was more hypocritical or offensive than that displayed by Ontario's New Democrats.
That Leader Howard Hampton, MPP Marilyn Churley and various others from the Ontario NDP would have the gall to show up and jeer Toronto councillors stuck with cleaning up the mess Ontario's former NDP government helped to create on this issue, is beyond belief.
If there was ever a controversy to illustrate why Ontario's New Democrats are unfit to govern - because they are always happiest being against everything rather than for anything, or at least anything realistic - then their sorry performance last week over the Adams Mine issue was it.
The fact is, the seeds of the divisive battle over the city's plan to send Toronto's trash by rail to an abandoned mine near Kirkland Lake were sown by Ontario's late and unlamented NDP government from 1990 to 1995.
In the spring of 1991, then NDP environment minister Ruth Grier issued a string of edicts over the course of a few days which left Toronto scrambling to find a way to dispose of its garbage for years. Meanwhile, the NDP went on to lurch from crisis to crisis, and inconsistency to inconsistency.
The first blows were struck by Grier in April, 1991, when she declared the NDP was opposed both to incineration ("incineration is not an appropriate option for municipal solid waste") and all but local landfill sites ("waste must be disposed of as close to the source of generation as possible").
In one fell swoop, Grier had completely curtailed one way to get rid of garbage, incineration, and all but eliminated the other for cities like Toronto, where vacant land was at a premium. The immediate impact of Grier's fiat was to kill off the original plan for Toronto to ship its waste to Kirkland Lake which was already in the works 10 years ago. Grier ignored repeated pleas from Kirkland Lake to reconsider.
In or out of power, the NDP's instinctive attitude was to view all garbage and those who produced it as evil, rather than as simply an inevitable byproduct of people living together and a problem to be sensibly managed. Disastrously, as it turned out, the NDP while in power tried to force municipalities like Toronto into increasing garbage diversion programs - reducing, reusing, recycling - by removing incineration as an option and drastically cutting the availability of landfills.
That was bad enough, but what followed was years of chaos as the NDP went on to contradict itself. A year after Grier's garbage fiats, the NDP reversed course, announcing 57 potential dumpsites for Metro, York, Peel and Durham, including one 600 metres from the Rouge Valley.
While these proposals paid lip service to the NDP's politically correct decree that local communities had to dispose of local garbage within their own borders - certainly none of the proposed sites for the Greater Toronto Area were as far away as Kirkland Lake - the NDP's definition of what qualified as a local dump kept expanding as its pie-in-the-sky idealism crashed into the reality that this was simply unrealistic for Toronto. (Even Toronto's soon-to-be-closed Keele Valley dump site, for example, is actually in Vaughan.)
Tory MPP Chris Stockwell (now a cabinet minister) scathingly observed at the time that Grier had addressed the "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) syndrome when it came to garbage dumps by "putting a garbage dump in everybody's backyard." Actually, the NDP had created a new government bureaucracy (surprise!) to winnow the list of 57 potential sites down to three.
However, both before and after these announcements, the NDP kept tossing into the mix what often appeared to be spur of the moment decisions contradicting previous edicts.
No dump site would be opened without a full environmental hearing, the NDP would declare at one point, only to note that in an emergency exceptions might be made.
Toronto could not ship its garbage to Kirkland Lake, but Kingston could ship its garbage to Ottawa in a crisis. Perhaps Toronto could too. At one point, exasperated York-Centre Liberal MPP Greg Sorbara declared of the NDP's confusing policies that it seemed to want Peel to dispose of Peel's garbage and Durham to dispose of Durham's garbage, but York to dispose of Toronto's garbage.
As opposition to the NDP's 57 potential dump sites grew, Grier was vilified across the province. At one point, she was ambushed by 150 demonstrators who rocked her car and screamed at her as she arrived alone at a recycling plant in Georgetown, behaviour every bit as inexcusable as the abuse hurled at Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman last week.
Grier eventually went on to another ministry, but by 1995 the public, fed up with the socialists on many fronts, tossed them from office. The NDP left with their much-hyped search for a Toronto dump in shambles, buried in bureaucracy.
Worse, NDP bumbling had cost five precious years in the search for a new site.
And yet there were the stalwarts of the NDP last week, once again back in the peanut gallery, heaping scorn and abuse on the very politicians left to clean up the mess they helped make. Truly, a party without shame.
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com. Or visit his home page.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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