After years of standing on the sidelines explaining how she couldn’t intervene, Environment Minister Mary Polak is looking positively eager to get involved in the contaminated-soil landfill near Shawnigan Lake.
A few days after the B.C. Supreme Court revoked an environmental appeal board decision approving the operation and ordering a re-do, Polak stepped up and suspended a waste-discharge permit that allowed the site to operate. She also gave the operators 15 working days to explain themselves or the permit would be cancelled completely.
A lot of momentum has developed recently in government against the operation, and the pace seems to be quickening.
Polak started talking tough last October, writing a letter threatening to rescind the permit over assorted water-management issues and demanding a response in three days. When she got the reply, she said it was unsatisfactory and gave the company until Dec. 20 to “clarify specific intentions to rectify the non-compliances.”
The company responded, but the government is discounting the response, and the Environment Ministry has been mulling over its options since then.
The court decision was on a separate but related matter and seems to have further hardened the ministry’s attitude toward the operation.
The judgment last week found the operators of the site had compromised the integrity of the approval process. A supposedly independent engineering firm retained as a qualified professional to design the landfill turned out be a partner in the enterprise running it. The judge also found that the firm gave false and misleading evidence during the board hearings.
That verdict sent the issue back to the board, but Polak’s moves on Friday suggest the issue could soon be moot. It’s an unusual ministerial order that serves notice on the company the landfill’s permit will be cancelled in short order if it doesn’t comply with several demands.
The Environment Ministry wrote to the company pointing out contravention could be subject to a fine of up to $300,000 or six months imprisonment, or both.
Polak also wrote directly to Cobble Hill Holdings saying the suspension holds until a “closure plan for the site” is approved, or until it’s deemed to be complying with water-management requirements. The government holds a $220,000 financial security on the site and is requiring another $331,000.
There’s one faint indication the site could reopen. Her letter says she expects the firm to implement the new plans once they are approved. But she served notice she’ll again suspend or cancel the permit if it doesn’t, citing a number of problems.
“Failure to maintain compliance has resulted in significant public concern, health concerns and potential environmental impacts,” the ministry stated.
The stance today is completely different from her attitude over the past three years. Polak repeatedly stressed that approving the landfill was the legal responsibility of ministry technicians, not a political matter.
The Shawnigan community was strongly opposed to the site. Polak herself in the legislature last spring cited one estimate that 95 per cent were opposed, and said she didn’t doubt it. She said public input was considered. It didn’t persuade the officials to bar the project.
“The statutory decision-maker is not allowed to consider the relative popularity of a project,” she said.
But the concerns raised by the public did prompt authorities to impose numerous conditions to do with water quality, sampling, additional site-management requirements and public posting of monitoring results.
Polak held to the no-political-interference, let-the-experts-decide position for a long time.
“That [landfill] will not be interfered with by the minister. I can assure this House that we will not be pulling a sudden decision out of our hat that the rest of our team doesn’t know anything about.”
The hands-off position held until October, when she started writing demand letters.
Now she looks to be positioning the ministry to come down hard on an operation that her team had given the seal of approval. After an exhaustive permitting process and a marathon defence of that process before the appeal board, it’s going to take some backtracking to pull this off.
