The Manitoba Government has rejected the appeal of license #2954, issued to the Louisiana Pacific Swan Valley oriented strand board (OBS) plant, allowing the corporation to remove their RTO pollution controls to save money.
“Manitoba is giving the green light to multi-national corporations looking for a way to get around U.S. pollution control laws,” said Susanne McCrea of the Boreal Forest Network (BFN).
BFN and the Concerned Citizens of the Valley submitted a joint appeal of the licence, in April, 2011, when a limited CEC process failed to recommend, or even report on the extensive expert evidence submitted by the groups, at their own considerable expense.
“It’s ironic that the Filman Conservatives put the pollution controls in the original 1994 license for LP, after a considerably more extensive CEC process, that the NDP then heralded as a huge victory,” said McCrea. “We’ve worked hard to protect public health of Manitobans and the NDP have now undone it all, allowing LP to simply report on their own emissions.”
Dr. Charles Simon, who has testified in over 100 cases that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has brought against LP, is convinced that the current license is …“a recipe for tropospheric ozone and smog. It can not and will not be avoided. That is a serious degradation of air quality permitted by this license. VOC + NOx + particulate matter + sunlight = tropospheric ozone, smog, and citizen trips to the ER.”
The huge stack that LP has been ordered to build will be designed to disperse the pollution further instead of using controls to stop much of it at the source.
“That stack will stick out like a sore thumb,” McCrea added. “It will be a monument to remind people of the large volumes of pollution coming out of it that no independent body will ever monitor.”
This decision is certainly not in keeping with the Province of Manitoba’s conservation platform on the east side of Lake Winnipeg, where they are taking every step to promote environmentalism. This whole process has taken over three years, three Conservation Ministers, one election, over $50,000 of our own money to commission independent experts that the province wouldn’t even talk to.
The Boreal Forest Network is seriously unimpressed with this backward step. We suggest you contact your MLA.
I am a Winnipeg resident, and I am very concerned about this regulatory allowance that our NDP government has conceded, & I wanna help! How can I get more involved with the Boreal Forest Network, to get the message out that Manitoban’s need to take action? We need to tell our government what we expect from them so that they have no choice but to reverse this process.
This is disgusting, so sad and disempowering. There is really no discussion, and no one is looking at the potential health impacts. I really believed the NDP would be a political party who would be interested in developing a win-win situation for everyone, however it appears that they too have bought into the ideology that the economy must come before anything else. How many people will die, how many children will become seriously ill, because this legislation is allowed? We will never know, because it is not being evaluated. All we know are that carcinogens and other toxins are being emitted, regularly, into our atmosphere, and although our community will likely get sicker, it’s not ‘significant enough’ to be regarded as a genuine concern.
The experts brought in at personal cost to the citizens’ committee were truly amazing, experienced, and talented individuals, unfortunately it says a lot about our government when experts such as these are not heard because it does not fit in with the regulator’s agenda. How sad for our province. How sad for us.
Shame on governments that are not moving forward to protect the environment but are indeed moving backwards.
And shame on my generation that protested in the 60’s and 70’s and promised a better world when they were in control. Promises broken by the thousands