Environment Minister Mary Polak and Community Minister Coralee Oakes have informed the Capital Regional District that the province will not act to suspend Esquimalt’s McLoughlin Point zoning decisions. This leaves the CRD with no viable plan for sewage treatment, which still must be accomplished under federal and provincial directives.
All in all, however, this is not a bad thing.
After ordering sewage treatment, then-environment minister Barry Penner identified provincial objectives including minimizing taxpayer cost by maximizing beneficial use of resources and generation of offsetting revenues, optimizing the distribution of infrastructure to accomplish this, aggressively pursuing opportunities to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and optimizing “smart growth” results (such as district services, density and Dockside Green-like innovation).
Clearly, Penner’s intent was to insure maximum environmental benefit and value for money. Such objectives are as supportable now as they were then. It is difficult, however, to see how the CRD’s project could have met them.
To begin with, it was not designed around resource recovery. Instead, a basic design was selected and resource recovery became an add-on, hampered by decisions to place major infrastructure remote from recovery opportunities. Consequently, it is unlikely that “maximizing beneficial use of resources and generation of offsetting revenue” could ever have been accomplished.
These failings likely limited value for money and would have been unfortunate from a financial perspective.
From an environmental perspective, they would have been much more critical. Penner was justified in identifying greenhouse-gas reduction as a major objective. Recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports confirm that climate change is a looming catastrophe and greenhouse-gas reduction must be greatly accelerated. Given the challenges we face, it should be an absolute requirement that all major projects maximize greenhouse-gas reduction and climate-change response.
The CRD project did predict greenhouse-gas reductions, but these reductions were likely far from maximal. Optimizing greenhouse-gas reduction means placing infrastructure appropriately and maximizing resource recovery. This simply did not happen. As a result, CRD citizens were left to question whether they were getting sufficient environmental benefit and clear value for money from the enormous sums to be spent. Over time, more and more of them did exactly that.
The decision made by Polak and Oakes took courage, but it provides a new opportunity to create better answers to legitimate questions and concerns. The ministers truly have opened the door to a better outcome. We in the core area must seize this opportunity to rethink the flawed project created the first time around and meet the laudable objectives established some seven years ago by the province.
Ultimately, the core area and its citizens will benefit from the better outcome that could and should emerge and that, most certainly, would be a good thing.
Vic Derman is a Saanich councillor, a CRD director and a member of the Core Area Liquid Waste Committee.
