A combination of witless NIMBYism, blinkered environmentalism and political cowardice is making it next to impossible for Ontario to solve what should be a simple problem.
The province has been struggling for years to cope with its garbage. Its existing landfills are running out of space. They could be entirely full in less than a decade.
Ontario already exports 40 per cent of its commercial waste to Michigan and New York, an absurd thing for a sophisticated modern place to do. Now, trash tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump threaten to choke off that safety valve.
The solution is plain as day. Build more landfills and incinerators. Modern landfill sites have little, if any, impact on the environment. Special lining systems keep groundwater from being polluted. Gases emitted by decaying waste are burned to generate electricity. Once full, sites are carefully covered and sealed. Many become parks and nature reserves.
Modern incinerators use a complex of scrubbers, filters and chemical processes to purify their emissions. They, too, produce electricity for the power grid. Many parts of Europe and Asia rely on incineration to cope with their waste.
Despite all this technological progress, most of Ontario is allergic to both systems. Whenever a landfill or an incinerator is proposed, local residents and politicians take up their torches and pitchforks, acting as if nothing had changed since garbage was simply tipped into smelly dumps or set ablaze in a smoky old-school incinerator. Not in my backyard, they say.
Environmentalists, too, are locked in a time warp. Most oppose both solutions. They insist that more recycling is the answer, even though just about all Ontario communities already have extensive programs for the sorts of waste it makes sense to recycle. Recycling programs have even expanded since the provincial government started making companies pay for processing the stuff that goes in the blue box every week.
This is the situation Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy finds himself in. Mr. McCarthy has been warning that with landfills filling and tariffs biting, Ontario has to do something decisive about its waste problem. He is surely right about that. But the government he represents, led by Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, has fumbled the issue.
A few years ago, when rural communities were squawking about the deadly threat of having landfills built in their vicinity, the Ford government caved and gave them a veto over any such new projects. But now, Mr. McCarthy says Ontario must build more landfills or incinerators to avoid a trash crisis.
As part of its Building Ontario Faster Act, the government is proposing to accelerate approvals for both. It is also talking about removing, or at least weakening, the veto power.
Naturally, that has led to more squawking from environmentalists and politicians, both local and provincial. So Mr. McCarthy has been hedging and waffling.
Last month, he said that “municipalities will hold the pen on whether or not they want a landfill site, but there are benefits, obviously, economic benefits, to having a landfill site, an expansion to a landfill or energy from waste site in a community.”
This week he told Globe and Mail reporter Jeff Gray that he is willing to entertain changes – “tweaks,” as he called them – to the legislation getting rid of the local veto. Though “technically, that veto is being removed,” he said, “some consideration will be given to different alternatives.”
Seen through a political lens, his hesitation is understandable. The last thing the PC government wants is a battle with the cities and towns in Ontario’s heartland that form the bedrock of its support. But Mr. McCarthy was on the right path when he started warning about the fix the province is in.
It was bad even before Mr. Trump got involved, but at least his tariffs underline how ridiculous it is for Ontario to export its garbage.
We need to find a better way. We have the space, plenty of it – in empty gravel pits, in underused farmland, in old industrial sites. We have the technology. Landfill and incineration systems are getting cleaner and more efficient every year.
Let’s not let woolly-headed thinking and silly quarrels stand in the way.