Saturday, January 5, 2002
 
The Halifax Herald Limited
 
Health vs. wealth
 
U.S. firm looks to poor town in northern Ontario as site for $20-million PCB incinerator
 
By James McCarten / The Canadian Press
 
FIRST IT WAS TRASH. Now it's toxins.
 
The debate of health versus wealth is back on in the moribund northern Ontario mining town of Kirkland Lake, a community bound and determined to welcome the world's waste as its economic salvation.
 
This time, wealth seems to be winning.
 
Where a national controversy erupted in 2000 over a scheme to fill the Adams Mine with Toronto's trash, a U.S. company's plans to build a $20-million PCB incinerator are being welcomed with open arms.
 
"This is a town that is wishing this on itself," said Pierre Belanger, a local businessman and one of the principal figures in the tide of protest that washed out the Adams Mine plan more than a year ago.
 
"It's a non-stop, full-court press to get a PCB incinerator in town."
 
Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have long been one of the most vexing of the world's environmental ills. Used for decades as coolants and lubricants in electrical equipment, they're hard to destroy, tricky to store and pose a serious health threat - especially when they burn.
 
Consequently, permanent, high-capacity PCB facilities like Canada's largest - a problem-plagued facility near the northern Alberta town of Swan Hills - are
invariably met with massive public outcry.   Not so in Kirkland Lake, where the plant's capacity to treat 200,000 tonnes of contaminated soil a year would make it the largest in Canada.
 
"You'd think that the town would be up in arms, but not much is being said," said Belanger.
 
"It's as if the town was fighting to get an orphanage built."
 
Kirkland Lake has access to markets, highways and railway lines, skilled labour and a host of abandoned open-pit mines to hold the treated soil, says Bennett Environmental Inc., the company behind the plan.
 
It also has a chronically high unemployment rate, sinking income levels and diminishing property values thanks to the demise of its once-burgeoning gold mining industry.
 
"Over the course of the construction and development period, an estimated 90 full-time equivalent jobs will be created locally and $12.2 million will be injected into the local economy," the company said in an economic impact study released last year.
 
Some 35 people would work there full time, earning wages 20 per cent higher than the average. That would spell an extra $3.3 million in local spending.
 
Property values would also climb, much as they did when a more modest waste incinerator run by Trans-Cycle Industries began operating in the area in 1999, the company reasons.
 
Bennett also plans to donate up to $2 million a year to the town's community development fund to help pay for new projects and business developments.
 
By some standards, the numbers may seem small. But in an economically marooned town of 8,000, they're heaven-sent.
 
Indeed, critics of the plan are finding Bennett's pitch a tough act to follow.
 
"We are very desperate," said Barb Bukowski, a retired teacher who developed a taste for environmental causes when she opposed the Adams Mine proposal.
 
"People are frightened that our town is still on its way down economically, but they're going down the wrong road, making Kirkland Lake a toxic dump for North America."
 
Bukowski points to Bennett's two-year-old Recupere-Sol plant in Saint-Ambroise, Que., a facility half the size of the one proposed for Kirkland Lake, as an indication of what the town can expect.
 
An emissions study commissioned by Quebec's public health authorities found that after just two years, the Saint-Ambroise plant was already giving off "non-negligible" quantities of "persistent" toxins, including lead, mercury, cadmium, dioxins and furans.
 
Kirkland Lake Mayor Bill Enouy, whose wholehearted support of the failed Adams Mine scheme helped him beat out his anti-garbage rivals in 2000's municipal election, has been one of Bennett's biggest boosters.
 
"We can't let a few people who fight every project stand in the way of this thing," he told one town council meeting last year.
 
Then late last year, almost as if on cue, Environment Minister Elizabeth Witmer unveiled a major overhaul of Ontario's rules for handling hazardous waste - the province's first in 15 years.
 
Under the new plan, some 99,000 tonnes of PCBs in storage would be destroyed within three years and hospital bio-waste incinerators would be shut down, Witmer said.
 
The province would also set tough standards for pre-treatment of hazardous waste that will meet or exceed U.S. standards, and put in place specific reduction targets for all wastes.
 
The Environment Ministry has said high-level PCBs would be shipped to Swan Hills, but critics of the Kirkland Lake plan suspect their little town figures prominently in the long-term plan.
 
"I think it dovetails much too well," said Belanger.
 
Meanwhile, Bukowski and her small band of local allies are struggling to win over their friends and neighbours, many of whom she says are privately opposed to the incinerator.
 
But many fear speaking out lest they end up pushing their beloved town more deeply into its economic morass - or offending the business leaders who sign their paycheques.
 
"There are people in the community that are frightened of PCBs, but they're also frightened of the control that the business people have in this community," said a local civil servant who spoke on condition of anonymity.
 
"People feel they have to keep their mouths shut, because they could lose their jobs."