The Remedial Action Plan for Hamilton's harbour ignores the cause of issues like Randle Reef
By James Howlett
The Hamilton Spectator
(Feb 19, 2007)
James Quinn's letter (Feb. 13) questioning Stelco's possible participation in Hamilton Harbour's degradation and restoration exposes the dark and ugly side of environmental justice and enforcement within the harbour watershed.
After 15 years of testing and research, resignations and replacements, debates and meetings, success and trumpets, it appears that in one area, the harbour Remedial Action Plan (RAP) process is badly flawed -- in that it has targeted the effect, while ignoring the cause, of serious issues like Randle Reef.
In RAP's defence it can quickly be said that it had the goal of remediating the harbour -- not its environmental regulatory systems. But with the accuracy that hindsight develops, we can see very clearly that a few foxes have been in the henhouse for some time and may have even made their way into the farmers' house by way of the RAP boardroom.
Let me explain. The RAP process is a stakeholders' process that has, quite properly, included Stelco and other industries that degraded the harbour "commons." Also included in the stakeholders' list are the enforcement/ legal representatives of various environmental agencies within the harbour such as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Natural Resources.
These agencies have patiently waited (often with hands tied jurisdictionally and politically) while the other RAP stakeholders worked out the vision and implemented it. But was there a point where the well-meaning RAP board became much like the United Nations General Assembly on Rwanda? Debate decaying into debacle?
The difficulty here appears to be not so much a lack of enforcers but the lack of a clear enforcement co-ordinator, or policy. Let me illustrate.
If you were to catch a fish just one day before its season from the Burlington Pier, the MNR would charge you and possibly confiscate your fishing gear to prevent a reoccurrence. Within the context of environmental crime, this would be similar to petty shoplifting and it does occasionally happen. At the other end of the scale, the judicial dysfunction appears. Without question, someone can -- intentionally -- dump tens of thousands of tons of toxic sludge into the harbour, and no one will even look for them, or declare it a crime. Within the context of environmental crime, this is somewhere between an ecological serial killing and genocide.
How is it that even with the probable offenders participating in the restoration process that justice has been evaded so completely and so long?
Is it simply because the offenders steered the process to their own benefit from within? Slyly insisting , allying, implying, persuading, suggesting, that anyone who looks too hard at this issue is a little off perhaps, or a zealot, a left-winger, maybe a tree-hugger and anti-industry? Playing the environment against the economy, as if jobs were at stake, if you chose the former but health was not at stake when you chose the latter?
Perhaps we need to hear ecological victims' impact statements read by those who can speak for the harbour in much the same way as rape victims speak out of their soul's anguish at the rapist, so the courts and the public can truly digest the reality of the crime.
Simply stated: Society cannot flourish without justice. Justice requires that crime -- whether white-collar, blue-collar or ecological -- be brought before the courts, or the fabric of humanity will become corrupt and devalued.
Reader caution: This is not mere theory. Think of how prevalent environmental cynicism has become. Many people wholeheartedly believe that nothing will change for the better ecologically.
Perhaps when our new, well-meaning and ideological mayor asks for cleanup money for Randle Reef, he should also request that the budgets of several key bureaucracies be increased enough that environmental charges can be laid more often and brought to fruition -- even for "sins of the past."
I must also say I truly believe the majority of RAP stakeholders have done a good job to date, and I understand that they have tried to stay out of the courts so that the public would benefit and the legal fraternity would not.
However, there is a law of diminishing return in this area, and it is perhaps time to do a social cost/benefit analysis on the ethics of not pursuing environmental justice.
James Howlett lives in Hamilton. He is a former adviser to the International Joint Committee on the Great Lakes, and has been a member of the Remedial Action Plan committee and Bay Area Restoration Council.
By James Howlett
The Hamilton Spectator
(Feb 19, 2007)
James Quinn's letter (Feb. 13) questioning Stelco's possible participation in Hamilton Harbour's degradation and restoration exposes the dark and ugly side of environmental justice and enforcement within the harbour watershed.
After 15 years of testing and research, resignations and replacements, debates and meetings, success and trumpets, it appears that in one area, the harbour Remedial Action Plan (RAP) process is badly flawed -- in that it has targeted the effect, while ignoring the cause, of serious issues like Randle Reef.
In RAP's defence it can quickly be said that it had the goal of remediating the harbour -- not its environmental regulatory systems. But with the accuracy that hindsight develops, we can see very clearly that a few foxes have been in the henhouse for some time and may have even made their way into the farmers' house by way of the RAP boardroom.
Let me explain. The RAP process is a stakeholders' process that has, quite properly, included Stelco and other industries that degraded the harbour "commons." Also included in the stakeholders' list are the enforcement/ legal representatives of various environmental agencies within the harbour such as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Natural Resources.
These agencies have patiently waited (often with hands tied jurisdictionally and politically) while the other RAP stakeholders worked out the vision and implemented it. But was there a point where the well-meaning RAP board became much like the United Nations General Assembly on Rwanda? Debate decaying into debacle?
The difficulty here appears to be not so much a lack of enforcers but the lack of a clear enforcement co-ordinator, or policy. Let me illustrate.
If you were to catch a fish just one day before its season from the Burlington Pier, the MNR would charge you and possibly confiscate your fishing gear to prevent a reoccurrence. Within the context of environmental crime, this would be similar to petty shoplifting and it does occasionally happen. At the other end of the scale, the judicial dysfunction appears. Without question, someone can -- intentionally -- dump tens of thousands of tons of toxic sludge into the harbour, and no one will even look for them, or declare it a crime. Within the context of environmental crime, this is somewhere between an ecological serial killing and genocide.
How is it that even with the probable offenders participating in the restoration process that justice has been evaded so completely and so long?
Is it simply because the offenders steered the process to their own benefit from within? Slyly insisting , allying, implying, persuading, suggesting, that anyone who looks too hard at this issue is a little off perhaps, or a zealot, a left-winger, maybe a tree-hugger and anti-industry? Playing the environment against the economy, as if jobs were at stake, if you chose the former but health was not at stake when you chose the latter?
Perhaps we need to hear ecological victims' impact statements read by those who can speak for the harbour in much the same way as rape victims speak out of their soul's anguish at the rapist, so the courts and the public can truly digest the reality of the crime.
Simply stated: Society cannot flourish without justice. Justice requires that crime -- whether white-collar, blue-collar or ecological -- be brought before the courts, or the fabric of humanity will become corrupt and devalued.
Reader caution: This is not mere theory. Think of how prevalent environmental cynicism has become. Many people wholeheartedly believe that nothing will change for the better ecologically.
Perhaps when our new, well-meaning and ideological mayor asks for cleanup money for Randle Reef, he should also request that the budgets of several key bureaucracies be increased enough that environmental charges can be laid more often and brought to fruition -- even for "sins of the past."
I must also say I truly believe the majority of RAP stakeholders have done a good job to date, and I understand that they have tried to stay out of the courts so that the public would benefit and the legal fraternity would not.
However, there is a law of diminishing return in this area, and it is perhaps time to do a social cost/benefit analysis on the ethics of not pursuing environmental justice.
James Howlett lives in Hamilton. He is a former adviser to the International Joint Committee on the Great Lakes, and has been a member of the Remedial Action Plan committee and Bay Area Restoration Council.