August 28, 2006
Mr. Ian Smith
Environment Ontario
135 St. Clair Avenue West
Toronto, ON M4V 1P5
Dear Ian:
The Salt Institute, representing Ontario’s four salt production facilities and all the salt used in the province, primarily to preserve the wintertime safety and mobility of Ontario’s roadways, is pleased to record our industry’s support for Bill 43. I hope you find these thoughts constructive contributions towards our common goal of protecting Ontario's precious resource of quality drinking water. We understand that improvements have been identified and appreciate this opportunity to share our views on possible changes that could make the current version more effective in its objective of protecting Ontario’s drinking water supply and enhancing the quality of life for all Ontarians.
As I mentioned when we met, we are concerned with both the projected impacts on our production facilities and on the use of road salt by our customers. Obviously, any threat of road salt to drinking water quality is to its aesthetic properties; it is not a risk to life or health as was in the case in Walkerton. Conversely, the risk of impairing public agencies’ capacity to preserve safe winter roadways has lethal consequences.
Obviously, our salt production facilities operate today in compliance with provincial and federal permits governing their environmental discharges including the discharge of contaminants that might imperil drinking water quality. We recommend that the permit process remain the regulatory tool for identified point-source discharges since they are the product of environmental professionals’ deliberations. It would be appropriate for narrow special purpose and generally less-professionally-qualified organisations like the conservation authorities to review permits before they are granted to advise the regulatory body whether they appear consistent with the source water protection plan, but the engineers and environmental professionals on the ministry staff have demonstrated the requisite expertise to make these regulatory decisions. Alternatively, the conservation authorities could be invested with full authority to grant permits, superseding and replacing the current structure. This would entail enhancing their professional capacity by shifting regulatory personnel from a centralized ministry agency to the regional organisations. We feel the professionalism developed by the Ministry has been hard-won and it would make more sense to build on that foundation if additional safeguards are required of dischargers already subject to permit controls.
What would be unfortunate would be for the Province to create a duplicative additional layer of approvals for facilities which have made the needed investments to comply with their environmental permits. The costly and time-consuming duplication would impose competitive costs that would be exacerbated by inconsistent regional standards which might be imposed by the conservation authorities unless they are coordinated centrally with regard to the standards imposed by their controls. Inconsistent regulations would balkanize and politicize the marketplace to the detriment of the public which rightly values economic efficiency to promote international competitiveness. Salt, after all, is a major cash-producing and job-sustaining exporter for Ontario.
Thus, when the government conducts its required economic impact assessment, it will be important not only to assess the costs of remedial investments for industries currently in full compliance with their environmental permits, but to assess the macro-economic impact of a new and inefficient regulatory overlay.
If the conservation authorities are to wield the proposed new powers, they should replace the current regulatory structure, not become a stultifying additional layer of bureaucratic controls.
Our interest in Bill 43, beyond that of generally concerned citizens, centers more on the environmental release of our product by our end customers, primarily municipal, county and provincial agencies with responsibilities to keep roads open and safe in adverse winter weather. Among the activities that conservation authorities are being encouraged to consider in their plans to protect drinking water sources are the storage and application of road salt. In that regard, their work will be greatly assisted by a recent comprehensive environmental assessment of all chloride salts conducted by Environment Canada and, even more particularly, by the intense and widespread response of Ontario municipalities and MTO in crafting and implementing Salt Management Plans to upgrade their salt management practices to correct deficiencies identified in the federal assessment. Indeed, Ontario leads the nation in its progressive activism in identifying shortcomings in its past practices and investing in improvements. Many of these Salt Management Plans have already identified “salt vulnerable areas” of particular environmental sensitivity where non-chloride deicers will be used or specially-engineered runoff controls can prevent environmental insult. By the time the conservation authorities organise and conduct their own surveys, virtually every community should have such a Salt Management Plan on the books and have implementation underway.
Our concern is that the conservation authorities quickly and surely acquire the technical understanding of the nature of chloride discharges since most of the province, according to the federal Road Salts Environmental Assessment, is not experiencing debilitating impacts from road salting practices. These practices have been underway for about 60 years in most areas and local environmental excesses have been identified over many decades and successive engineering solutions (both new technology and improved road salting techniques) have confined significant degradation to local areas. With the new Salt Management Plans, we have every confidence and expectation that even these remaining areas, having been identified, will be remediated under the current federal Road Salt Code of Practice risk management program. While we expect the Salt Management Plans to correct situations that would otherwise be of concern to the conservation authorities, the main point here is that this intensive process will produce voluminous information that will both inform and simplify the work of the conservation authorities.
Still, we are concerned that the conservation authorities acquire the expertise and professionalism to discharge their responsibilities under Bill 43. If they are to be more than citizen advisory boards, if they are to be invested with real-world make-or-break decision authority over permissible activities, they need both training and some mechanism to hold them accountable to the overall mission of the provincial government to better the lives of its citizens. Local officials are elected; they are accountable to their constituents. But two-thirds of the members of the conservation authority boards have no such means of accountability. And the broad geographic scope of each conservation authority acts to undermine the principle of accountability with regard even to locally-elected officials. Clearly the Minister of the Environment must exercise active leadership in ensuring that these officials are selected for their understanding of technical issues and sensitive to the community context of the activities they will oversee. The Minister will need to provide training and ongoing guidance to the conservation authorities so that their decisions, while reflecting local concerns and considerations, remain consistent with overall provincial environmental policy and standards.
The operation of the conservation authority controls is narrowly focused on drinking water source protection. We agree, effective controls are needed to protect this resource. We would stress, however, that there is another set of risks that need attention: the risks to humans on the roadways which are dramatically increased in the absence of effective winter maintenance. We have had instances where Ontario courts have held municipalities and MTO liable when they do not achieve safe winter roads for which road salt is largely responsible. Within four hours of applying salt, vehicle crashes are reduced by 85% and injury crashes by more than 88%. We must ensure that public policy decisions be taken in a manner that preserves and considers the balance of safe roads and healthy drinking water. We believe we can improve both sides of the equation.
High quality water is one of Ontario’s greatest resources and a foundation of its citizens’ quality of life. We must preserve and protect water quality just as we should ensure that citizens enjoy all the blessings in our high quality of life. Was Voltaire an early environmentalist when he incisively reminded us: “Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.” In our zeal to do the very best things we can do to protect the sources of our drinking water, we must recognize that many good things have already been accomplished. Many sources of drinking water contamination have already been identified and controlled. We need to build on that foundation. We need to upgrade our regulatory permits where required. We need to assess and identify other sources of contamination and, where they are or may become a significant threat to drinking water quality, we must respond with early and effective measures to mitigate such a threat. Bill 43 can move us forward on that path if we can keep it from disrupting the progress we’ve made over past decades and ensure that those controlling these significant new authorities have the expertise, vision and understanding of how their role fits into the overall objective of preserving and enhancing the quality of life for every citizen.
We look forward to working with you to protect Ontario’s high quality drinking water.
Sincerely,
Richard L. Hanneman
President
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