DAVID RAMSAY, TEMISKAMING-COCHRANE MPP, SPELLS IT OUT

KEEP TELLING THEM DAVID...SOME FOLK ARE JUST SLOW
I'll tell you, we're going to stop that effing garbage; we're going to be stopping it. My folks, the farmers, were on the tracks last week, and I'll be with them. That garbage ain't coming to my riding

 Bill 86 Professional Geoscientists Act 2000 - Second Reading

TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 2000

Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming-Cochrane): I very much appreciate the member for Sudbury, Mr Bartolucci, giving some of his time up to me tonight. I actually had planned a very different speech tonight, to talk about many of the same concerns that the member for Sudbury has been working hard on, as I am, with the unequal treatment of cancer care in this province and the assistance that the government gives to patients in northern Ontario versus those in the south who have to travel out of their regions for cancer care.

As you know, events turn very quickly in this business, and a very innocuous government member's question, from Thornhill, actually, this afternoon to the Minister of the Environment I think is going to light a firestorm in northern Ontario, especially in my part of the world, and also in the city of Toronto tomorrow. The minister said that if the city of Toronto wishes to extend the life of the Keele Valley landfill beyond 2002, when it initially felt it would be in a position to complete that dump and close it, with the brand new proposal that they came out with Monday this Harris government would now get back into the business of municipal waste and pass legislation forbidding the city of Toronto to extend the life of that dump.

This is with the city of Toronto-owned dump in Vaughan, which has a certificate of approval to accept a certain quantity, so many millions of tonnes more garbage. What they want to do is just extend the length of time of that dump; not put any more garbage in than they have been licensed to, but to extend the time so that Toronto can embrace a 21st century solution for garbage disposal, get into some of the wet-dry separation diversion programs that are very progressive and that other progressive cities in North America are getting into. Guelph is one of the leaders in North America in that; then for residual waste, what's left at the end of all these diversion programs, to get into some of these new high-tech solutions to getting rid of that so that we never again would have to put residual waste into the ground, with the resulting contamination of groundwater as has happened in every landfill that exists today.

It's really ironic that the same people who have engineered the Adams mine proposal south of Kirkland Lake are the very same people who engineered North Bay--two years ago, a brand new state-of-the-art landfill and, lo and behold, it's leaking like a sieve. It's leaking much faster than anybody believed. The communities around North Bay in the Premier's riding are very upset about that. Toronto wants to find a good solution for that, and they've been working very hard and they're looking at trying to buy some time because maybe they haven't made some progressive decisions in the past and they realize they've got to really find a good, permanent, high-tech solution for this that's environmentally sustainable.

For this government to state today--and that's going to be in an article in the Globe and Mail tomorrow morning--that it is going to block the city of Toronto's plan to extend the life of Keele Valley, not to extend the tonnage that goes in there but to extend it chronologically for a few more years, and interfere with that municipal process when Mike Harris killed a bill from the previous government to say that it's a municipal issue--they have let Toronto go this far, but now the city of Toronto is not choosing Mike Harris's best friend's proposal so this best friend will get rich. The biggest patronage program you'd ever want to see in this province is the Adams mine, because it's Mike Harris's friends, it's Tories all the way through this, with a whole consortium of companies, and they're now going to step into this.

I am absolutely flabbergasted with the about-face of this government, that they're going to step in and overrule Toronto in managing its own dump within its certificate of approval because they don't want the garbage to go for a few more years in the 905 region, in Thornhill and Vaughan, because of the power of Al Palladini in this government and the other people in the 905 areas north of Toronto, and he's going to interfere with this.

I hope Toronto gets their hackles up on this. They're thinking of separating anyway. If there was ever a cause they've given to Toronto, this may be it. There are a hundred quotes of Harris saying: "Garbage is a municipal issue. We're going to scrap the process the former Liberal government brought in and that the NDP government legislated. We'll let the municipalities decide." They're that close to the decision now, and this government as of today has said--and it's in the Globe and Mail tomorrow--"We're jumping into this and we're going to forbid Toronto to extend the life of that dump," just so the garbage comes to my riding and benefits Mike Harris's best friend, whose name is Mr Gordon McGuinty, from North Bay. They have been golfing buddies for years and years. It's a scheme to make that guy rich. I'll tell you, we're going to stop that effing garbage; we're going to be stopping it. My folks, the farmers, were on the tracks last week, and I'll be with them. That garbage ain't coming to my riding.