BY IAN ROSS
Pierre Belanger has stood on the tracks of the Ontario Northland Railway (ONR) three years ago as a protester, symbolically ready to repel any attempts to dump southern Ontario garbage in his Timiskaming backyard.
Only a few years before, the prominent Earlton businessman had been the scourge of environmentally-conscious residents for wanting to bring Toronto’s household waste to Northern Ontario.
In the early 1980s, Belanger was part of a group of south Temiskaming investors investigating the potential of handling southern Ontario municipal waste as a means to offset job losses stemming from the closure of the Adams and Sherman Mine.
Though their proposal had nothing to do with using the abandoned open pits to dump garbage, they teamed up with ONR to investigate the possibility of establishing a locally-controlled development corporation with dreams of creating a full range of spin-off industries engaged in separating and recycling household waste into usable consumer and industrial goods.
“I was the target of protesters myself,” remembers Belanger, 56, who runs an RV dealership and a 500-acre buffalo ranch in the Timiskaming region. When it became evident Toronto wanted to keep their more profitable recyclable materials home and only send their unusable waste north, “we backed out as a development alternative.
“I cannot accept that we are only good enough to be Toronto’s dump,” says Belanger, who believes developing the Adams Mine as a landfill sets a dangerous precedent for every abandoned open pit to be converted into a future dumping ground for southern Ontario waste.
The controversy over using the Adams Mine for Toronto’s garbage, which has flared for 13 years, threatened to burn again in mid-November when the numbered company planning to develop the Adams Mine landfill was granted preliminary approval by the Ministry of Environment to begin pumping millions of litres of water a day over the next two years to pave the way for construction preparation on the site next spring.
Belanger believes the Adams Mine landfill proposal is a high risk, low reward venture that could pollute the area’s ground water and adversely impact the area’s only growth engine, its multimillion-dollar dairy industry.
“Being in development myself, I know what happens to pumping and drainage systems and the absolute unpredictably of water flows and rock formation,” says Belanger, who served as a past chair on the former Crown-run Northern Ontario Development Corp. and still remains involved in regional economic initiatives. “This is asking for more faith than any experienced developer should have.”
He says Kirkland Lake has been portrayed in the media as an economic welfare case, “so down on its luck that it would take anything” to revive economic prosperity.
Belanger says Kirkland Lake has tremendous assets in Northern College, the nearby Haileybury School of Mines and local mining expertise to establish itself as an international centre for deep hard-rock mining. But the challenge of sustaining one-industry towns is “hard slogging work,” he says, and business people must re-invest in their communities by creating development corporations and establishing local foundations.
Belanger has been working on some agri-food developments in Timiskaming and believes northeastern Ontario holds potential to boost its production of grains, beef and dairy products, and open up more land for cultivation.
He also takes offence to comments made by Adams Mine Rail Haul president Gord McGuinty in the October issue of Northern Ontario Business that the ground swell of opposition is limited to a handful of New Liskeard activists. Belanger says critics of the project include the entire agricultural community, tourist operators and outfitters, First Nation communities, virtually every professional organization in the region and almost every area municipality around Kirkland Lake.
Though the Adams Mine fight has been a galvanizing force in breaking down cultural, political and socio-economic solitudes in both sides of the Ontario-Quebec border, Belanger says it has come at the expense of alienating Kirkland Lake.
John Vanthof, a dairy farmer, president of the 400-member Temiskaming Federation of Agriculture and a known Adams Mine critic, agrees the region’s agriculture potential has “nowhere to go but up” and could easily double its production over the next decade.
His group is preparing a soon-to-be-released economic impact study showing that the farming sector creates about $500 million in economic spinoffs to the region. The government’s decision to grant a tentative de-watering permit caught farmers off guard, leaving them to ponder their next move.
“We were promised by (Premier) Dalton McGuinty to have a full (environmental) review of the process,” says Vanthof, who called the premier’s comments to leave the matter up to area residents to decide as “damage control.”
Algonquin natives in northwestern Quebec and northeastern Ontario, who have a land claim against the Adams Mine, were contemplating whether to take legal action to prevent the de-watering. Last July, the legal counsel of the Algonquins of the Timiskaming (Que.) First Nation issued a warning to the Ministry of Environment not to allow the dewatering of the pit, says band councillor Arden McBride.
The band has health and environmental concerns over the project.
“We’re getting all the advice possible, but I can tell you the de-watering is not going to happen.
“We will put the minister on notice that’s for sure.”
