Opposition to Pontiac’s engineered landfill site
Mo Laidlaw
Vladimir Tolstoy officially deposed his petition with more than 260 signatures at the special Pontiac council meeting on December 1. This asks for a delay, to look at alternative solutions before signing any contract for a proposed engineered landfill site.
Mr. Tolstoy has several concerns:
The Ministry of the Environment (MoE) has told him that cleaning up existing trench landfills is not part of the new law on Quality of the Environment. But Mayor Bruce Campbell is using the threat that Pontiac’s trench landfill has to be cleaned up, at a cost of $1.5 million, to promote the engineered landfill.
As a neighbour of the trench landfill on Wolf Lake Road, Mr. Tolstoy knows the difficulty of getting the municipality and MoE to enforce existing laws. For example, burning at the dump is against the law. “The smell of burning plastic made me puke, but the municipality claimed that fires started spontaneously - every Wednesday!” Mr. Tolstoy gathered evidence showing that employees set fires, but it took a four-year battle to stop this practice.
There is an illegal dump site in the municipality, where a company used land they owned as a dump. Neither Pontiac, nor MoE have yet been able to make them clean this up. Mr. Tolstoy says we cannot rely on MoE to enforce the law.
Some people feel that the contract should be signed, because environmental assessment and public consultation (BAPE) will be part of the two year certification process. They think that if there’s a problem, no certificate will be granted. Mr. Tolstoy feels that MoE is desperate to give permits, because of the enormous need for getting rid of waste.
The letter from Mr. Campbell to residents on September 18, claims that “an exhaustive evaluation of the options (was) completed.” Mr. Tolstoy has asked for a copy of this evaluation without success. He thinks no evaluation of options was done. The kiosks at the libraries only give one side of the argument.
Mr. Tolstoy feels that people are reassured by Denis Rouleau, the promoter, saying that the project will not take Gatineau’s garbage, meaning residential garbage picked up by the city. Instead he will take commercial, industrial and institutional garbage, from Gatineau, and elsewhere in West Quebec, worth $60 to $90 per tonne, twice the value of residential garbage.
Finally, the trench landfill takes less than 2000 tonnes a year at present. This is miniscule compared to the 900,000 tonnes total in the proposal.
Mr. Tolstoy doesn’t think we can base our decisions entirely on engineers’ expertise, as they don’t always agree with each other. He admits that he is making an emotional appeal - for common sense. Reducing the amount of garbage should be a priority and is not addressed by this project.