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Cutbacks Mean Health and Environment in Ontario Put at Risk: Commissioner

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 April 2007, 15:00 CDT

By CHINTA PUXLEY

TORONTO (CP) - Over a decade of cutbacks at Ontario government ministries responsible for the environment have left people's health and the province's ecosystem at serious risk for "catastrophic events," Environment Commissioner Gord Miller warned Tuesday.

Both the Ministry of the Environment and Ministry of Natural Resources are no longer capable of conducting regular inspections of facilities that spew pollutants into the air and water, said Miller. Nor are they ensuring the most "basic public service" - that raw or inadequately treated sewage doesn't pollute Ontario's water, he added.

While both ministries have seen their responsibilities increase since the early nineties, Miller said their budgets have been slashed under New Democrat, Conservative and Liberal governments.

Funding in Ontario falls well behind provinces like British Columbia and Alberta, he noted.

The Ontario environment ministry now spends $22 per capita, down from $39 in 1992. Spending at the natural resources ministry has fallen from $72 per capita in 1992 to $49 last year.

"This is far too little to get the job done," Miller told a press conference in Sudbury, Ont., after releasing his report entitled "Doing Less with Less."

After the Walkerton water tragedy which saw seven people die, and thousands fall ill, after the southern Ontario town's water supply became contaminated with E. coli in May 2000 - Miller said the environment ministry has bolstered its drinking water inspection.

But with an 18 per cent decline in the ministry's budget over the last decade, Miller said that improvement seems to have come at the expense of other programs.

"Where did that money come from?" he said. "What is being denied or constrained in other program sectors besides water? That is where the real problems exist."

The environment ministry only inspects up to four per cent of polluting facilities to ensure they are complying with the law and cutbacks mean the ministry can't even ensure that raw sewage isn't contaminating Ontario's water, he said.

It's time the province saw the connection between people's health and environmental inspection, Miller added.

"Our emergency wards clog with children having asthma attacks," he said. "But the solution is not more emergency wards; it includes giving the Ministry of the Environment the resources to make the air cleaner."

While the blame for the current threat lies with all three political parties, Miller called on the government to rebuild both ministries from the ground up and give them significantly bigger budgets.

New Democrat Peter Tabuns said it's up to the Liberals to start fixing this mess.

"We will pay in our health and in our lives for not investing properly in environmental protection," said Tabuns, former director of Greenpeace. "We didn't learn the essence of the Walkerton lesson which is that environmental degradation has human health impacts."

Source: Canadian Press

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