Why we can’t save this forest

When MacIntyre joined forces with several other local conservationists, including a long-time trapper in the area and a fly-in fishing camp operator, MOE became more willing to consider a full-scale assessment.

The five-year EA process got under way in 1991 with an MNR-led review of the area’s land-use and logging options and how they would affect local recreation businesses. From the start, MacIntyre says MOE had an obvious conflict of interest: MNR, which issues permits for timber harvesting and was the official proponent of the project, was defending its practices to a sister ministry. Although MOE was supposed to be an impartial referee, it was clear to MacIntyre and her cohort that the EA was shaped by the MNR objective of finding a viable timber supply, not the urgency of saving an ecological treasure. “The stakeholders involved seemed more like window dressing,” she says. “The process became more of a ‘thanks for letting us know about this amazing place before it became a clearcut.’”

MacIntyre’s experience sounds familiar to CELA’s Lindgren. He says public input is often ignored because individuals and grassroots groups usually lack the resources to “provide informed feedback that’s supported by credible experts.” His best advice for someone interested in participating in an EA is to “get organized, coordinate and raise money to hire experts.”

The Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte know how taxing that process can be. They spent $340,000 in community funds to air their concerns about surface and groundwater contamination, as well as air quality, in hopes of stopping a landfill expansion in eastern Ontario’s County of Lennox & Addington, near Napanee. According to Chief R. Donald Maracle, two-thirds of the reserve’s 900 homes rely on groundwater. For nearly 20 years, members of Maracle’s First Nation’s community and residents of neighbouring Tyendinaga Township have worried that leachate from a poorly situated dump could contaminate ground and surface water, threatening people’s health and poisoning area streams that feed into Lake Ontario. So Maracle was shocked to hear in 1997 of plans to expand the landfill to accept waste from much of southern Ontario.

“It didn’t make sense to expand a landfill in the headwaters of a creek,” says Maracle. “Our goal was to simply protect our environment for present and future generations. If the environment of our little land base was ruined, where else would we go?”

The Mohawks and the Tyendinaga Township residents hired independent consultants to conduct peer-reviewed studies and worked closely with Lindgren who represented a local resident’s group. “It helped that we knew what the concerns might be,” says Maracle, “but we needed independent, professional advice from experts if we wanted our claims to be recognized.” They faced tight time frames for public response to proponents’ studies. “You have to really pay attention to what correspondence is being filed from the proponent to the MOE,” says Maracle. Because deadlines are determined by government, it was often difficult for Maracle’s group to coordinate a credible response in time.

In 2006, nine years after the process started, the landfill expansion became one of only two EAs since 1995 to be denied approval by MOE. But Maracle was left disenchanted. “You have to be in it for the long haul,” he says, “and accept that it’s not going to be just a few meetings. Perseverance and commitment is what’s needed most.”

Although MacIntyre’s group was unable to stop logging around Megisan Lake, the silver lining appeared in 1999, when the Province created the 42,745-hectare Algoma Headwaters Provincial Park, the 7,020-hectare Ranger North Conservation Reserve and two waterway parks, which, all told, cover most of the area examined during the environmental assessment. Still, MacIntyre says the patchwork of parks barely does justice to the region’s ecological significance. For her, the ongoing incursion of roads and clearcuts is too heartbreaking to call the EA a success.

According to Paul Glassford, a senior EA adviser at MNR who was involved in the Megisan process as a planning specialist, the conditions of the Megisan Lake EA seemed best satisfied by creating a network of parks in the area. That’s why the EA was never completed. “Basically, the fundamental issues [of interest to the public] were not being addressed by the individual EA process,” says Glassford. “Completing the EA would not have resulted in a decision that would satisfy those involved.”

Despite their relative success, the frustration that MacIntyre and Maracle felt as they fought for their communities is one of the biggest problems with the EA process, according to Commissioner Miller. It breeds conflict, animosity and, ultimately, feelings of helplessness because of what become David-versus-Goliath battles. “Right now, the public feels disenfranchised by the process,” he says. “EA should invite participation, not activism.” Adds Ontario Nature’s Anne Bell: “It shouldn’t be just the proponent checking off a requirement on their to-do list. Good EA is open to changing a project and even saying no because of public input.”

Critics of EA would like MOE to level the playing field by referring more contentious debates to independent review. Lindgren says that outside Ontario, panel-based hearings have rendered significant decisions at both federal and provincial levels, including at a quarry at Digby Neck, Nova Scotia, and the Kemess North Mine in northern British Columbia, both of which were denied, in 2007 and 2008, respectively. In this province, a 1989 proposal to build a landfill in Halton, although approved, established strict guidelines that spearheaded Ontario’s first large-scale waste diversion strategy. “The result was that Halton is the only place in the GTA that has never had a waste problem,” says Miller.

Even the staunchest critics say that the goals of EA are sound. But, as Miller argues, there are “critical and persistent points of failure,” such as minimal post-approval monitoring and the frequent exemption of large government programs (see “Tragic flaws”), which make the act largely ineffectual.

“The fixes the Province has tried to put into the act … are not fixes at all, they’re breaks. By converting and changing EA, we’re destroying its essence and drifting further from its original vision.” An EA is supposed to be “cathartic,” he says, providing for wide consultation with the public. Instead, it’s increasingly just a bureaucratic hoop.

The good news, concludes Miller, is that the few EA success stories clearly demonstrate how effective the process can be. The key to achieving consistent results, he says, is returning EA to its roots, where the proponent is responsible to the public and MOE’s role is one of quality control. “The way to solve it is to start with the full concept of ‘betterment,’” says Miller. “Who would disagree with that?”
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Conor Mihell is a writer based in Sault Ste. Marie. His previous ON Nature features have explored the ecological impacts of mining, the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area and Ontario’s protected areas policy.

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