Pay now or pay more later

It’s a microcosm of almost any environmental debate.

The City of St. John’s isn’t supposed to be dumping snow into St. John’s harbour but has been doing it for years, despite federal laws prohibiting the practice. Now, the city has been told it can’t continue, having been given a year’s notice by the federal government to get ready.

There are clear reasons to stop the practice — all sorts of materials are collected with the snow and get dumped into the ocean, particularly plastics, which are persistent pollutants.

So what’s the city’s message?

Downtown snowclearing is going to be more expensive. In fact, it’s going to be about $600,000 more expensive, as the city will have to contract a private company to haul snow to Robin Hood Bay instead.

But how often is that the equation? Doing something the right way costs money, so we just continue doing it the wrong way for as long as we’re allowed and complain about the price tag, instead of acting in everyone’s best interests from the start.

How is it any different than the problem that municipalities around the province are facing with regard to untreated sewage and wastewater? Cities and towns in this province have known for years that new wastewater regulations had been put in place by the federal government, and that a countdown was on — after a set date, systems that weren’t compliant would face charges and penalties.

Time’s running out — and that means that towns, and their taxpayers, are going to have to take responsibility for their own waste, even if that fix is difficult or expensive. After all, if you can’t pay your municipal taxes, the town doesn’t say, “that’s OK, don’t bother.”

As individuals, we have our governments do it with essential services: we use hospitals and roads, yet only pay a part of the costs involved, instead bulking up the provincial debt so that, eventually, our children and our children’s children will have to pay for the services that we used but weren’t willing to pay for. We dump trash on woods’ roads because we can’t be bothered to take it to proper dumpsites. We voted in politicians who sold us the Muskrat Falls debacle without either us or them doing all the homework first. Now it seems we expect not to have to pay for that decision, keeping our power rates low despite the economic havoc that may create for the future.

We even do it with carbon taxes — economists broadly agree that carbon taxes are the best way to address carbon pollution and its effect on the environment. We bleat and bray and delay, stretching things out for as long as we can.

Doing the right thing costs money. It’s money we may not want to spend, but well, too bad.

It’s worth it in the long run.