Download
this document 20.01KB
The Honourable Dennis R. O’Connor
Commissioner
Walkerton Inquiry
180 Dundas Street West
22nd Floor
Toronto, ON
M5G 1Z8
Attention: Nicole Caron, Town Hall Submissions
Dear Mr. O’Connor
RE: Walkerton Inquiry – Peterborough Town Hall
Meeting on April 10, 2001
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Steve Clancy,
president of Local 308 of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). I
am a correctional officer with the Ministry of Correctional Services at the
Peterborough Jail.
I wish to make a presentation to the Peterborough
Town Hall meeting tonight on behalf of the staff at the Peterborough District
Office of the Ministry of Environment (MOE). They are members of my local.
I am making this presentation on behalf of the
Ministry of Environment staff in Peterborough because they believe,
notwithstanding the whistle blowing legislation, that they might face
repercussions from their employer if they speak out. Since their concerns arose,
the employer has issued clarifications stating that they can participate without
fear of retribution. Regrettably, the employees still feel concerned, so I am
speaking for them.
The Peterborough District Office reports to the
Eastern Region office of the Ministry of Environment in Kingston. The
Peterborough District Office has five senior environmental officers, two junior
environmental officers, two Investigations and Enforcement Branch officers, two
administrative staff, one area supervisor, one district manager and one regional
engineer, for a total of 14 staff. OPSEU represents all staff except for the two
managers and the engineer.
The Peterborough District Office’s geographic
area of responsibility includes the city of Kawartha Lakes (formerly Victoria
County) and Haliburton, Peterborough and Northumberland Counties.
For years Peterborough has been synonymous with
the pilot testing of consumer products given Peterborough’s representative
cross-section of the buying market.
Likewise, the Peterborough District is
compromised of the full gambit of potential environmental polluters, ranging
from private, commercial and industrial to agricultural sources. This spectrum
of potential pollution sources places an unyielding demand upon the Ministry
staff to be current and knowledgeable of all applicable environmental
legislation.
As a rule, most of the larger municipalities in
our area take their drinking water from surface water – lakes and rivers, in
other words. These municipalities include Lindsay, Peterborough, Cobourg, Port
Hope, Brighton, Campbellford, Hastings, Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls.
Smaller municipalities in our area use communal
wells. They include Colborne, Grafton, Woodville and Havelock.
The smaller municipalities don’t have the
expertise to operate their water works. The Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA)
operates their water works. Non-management staff at OCWA are members of OPSEU as
well.
The larger municipalities such as Peterborough,
Campbellford, Port Hope and Cobourg operate their own water works.
Regarding ground water, prior to 2000, the
Ministry of Environment had significant problems resulting from drought. They
received a lot of complaints from the public about their wells running dry and
taking a long time to replenish with water.
One of the problems is that the Ministry of
Environment staff don’t know the size and extent of the aquifers which provide
the ground water.
Agriculture run-off is an issue in our area.
Nitrates migrate off the farm property, get into the aquifer and contaminate
municipal/private well water supplies. The villages of Woodville and Oakwood
have experienced this kind of contamination of their water supply.
Just as the contamination of Walkerton’s
municipal water supply has been attributed to agricultural practices,
Peterborough, too, has experienced the contamination of private well water
supplies, directly attributed to the mismanagement of agricultural waste.
I now want to turn my comments to the challenges
faced by staff at the Peterborough District Office.
The overwhelming challenge is workload.
Environmental Officers (EO’s) in the Abatement Section are considered the
front line of the ministry. They are responsible for ensuring legislative
compliance of the Ontario Water Resources Act, the Environmental Protection Act,
the Pesticides Act, associated regulations, guidelines
and policies. Some of the program areas that they are responsible for include:
Municipal and private communal water
treatment facilities
Municipal and large private sewage treatment
facilities
Solid, non-hazardous waste disposal sites
Utilization of biosolids and septage on
agricultural land
Liquid industrial waste and hazardous waste
storage, transportation and disposal
Pesticide Storage and Application
24 hour spill response (to ensure
satisfactory clean up)
Permits to Take Water – such as water
bottling plants, aquaculture operations
Groundwater and surface water quality and
quantity complaints
Industrial noise and odour complaints
Air quality complaints
Clean up of contaminated sites/abandoned
properties
Industrial wastewater discharges
For example, if there is a spill, environmental
Officers in the Abatement Section are responsible for ensuring prompt and
efficient clean-up through voluntary or
mandatory compliance initiatives. They must also
follow up to ensure the clean-up has happened as required. In instances of
historical contamination on site specific properties, it is the environmental
Officer who is often responsible for ensuring that appropriate remediation or
restoration of the contaminated site is effected.
The Ministry devises annual work plans for each
office. In addition to being responsible for carrying out a heavy workload of
assigned duties, such as inspection programs, Environmental Officers must
respond to and follow up on all calls and complaints of environmental violations
coming into their office.
There is simply not enough staff to do the work.
Ministry of Environment staff initially received
a directive this month that they would be expected to do inspections of sewage
treatment facilities by the end of September. Reconsideration of this decision
was given, undoubtedly due to the lack of available resources and training,
returning to the former prescribed inspection frequency of once every four years
unless non-compliance issues dictate otherwise. This intense frequency of sewage
plant inspections would have been in addition to the next scheduled round of
annual inspections of all the water treatment plants.
Staff continue to wonder how this work is going
to be achieved given its current workload.
The Ministry is hiring 25 Junior Environmental
Officers on a 2 year contract basis across the province to help out with the
water treatment plant inspections. Staff point out that, based on the lack of
previous training opportunities within the ministry, these junior staff are not
likely to receive the level of training necessary to carry out these sensitive
inspections. One cannot help but wonder what is to happen at the end of two
years when the number of staff shrink to the numbers they are experiencing today
at a time when a strong public awareness demands a strong regulatory force to
ensure a totally reliable and healthy water supply.
Another major concern of Ministry of Environment
staff is the fact that the Ministry operates by jumping from crisis to crisis.
Long-term planning efforts, attempting to allow the Ministry to fully and
properly carry out its mandate to protect the sustained quality of the natural
environment and to safeguard the natural ecosystems and human health, have been
unsuccessful due to the limited number of staff to implement the Ministry’s
various programs.
This fact is widely acknowledged and has resulted
with the Ministry having to develop and implement an internal response protocol,
known as "Delivery Strategies". In some circles, this is simply
referred to as downloading and often falls into the responsibilities of lower
tier government and/or private "fee-for-service" companies.
Even with the implementation of the Ministry’s
delivery strategies, programs that were not considered to be a priority in the
past, have now come forward as proof positive that the people of Ontario cannot
become complacent and assume that our quality of life is something that is a god
given right.
ONE ONLY HAS TO LOOK AT THE TRAGEDY OF WALKERTON
TO UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THIS STATEMENT.
Staff at the Peterborough District Office of the
Ministry of Environment say that morale is low. They are committed to their
jobs. They have the experience as evidenced by the fact that three employees in
the Peterborough office each have 25 years of experience within the Ministry.
The Peterborough staff continue to cope with an overwhelming workload. Due to
ever-changing regulations and legislative requirements, proper training and
direction from management is often convoluted and grossly inadequate. The
combination of these elements is a very real source of stress and frustration
for staff who really want to do the right thing. Due to a lack
of resources however, the situation simply
continues to compound itself and the Ministry continues to react to the crisis
of the day.
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to
express the views of the
Ontario Public Service Employees Union members
that work at the Ministry of the Environment Office in the Peterborough Area. I
hope that through the presentations tonight coupled with other presentations
made throughout the Province this will enable the inquiry to make
recommendations that will place preventative measures and safeguard mechanisms
in place so that the unfortunate Tragedy that happened to the residents of
Walkerton never happens to any other community.
Respectfully
Steve Clancy
OPSEU
Local 308
President
Return to
Pipeline Issue 6
