Environmental warnings ignored, report alleges
Leaked document says province dismissed its own engineers’ concerns about Chemical Valley
Ontario’s Environment Ministry ignored warnings raised by its own engineers about public safety at petrochemical plants in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, alleges a report leaked after a joint investigation by media outlets, including the Star.
The report was presented to the staff of Environment Minister Chris Ballard on Sept. 20. It alleges the ministry has for years ignored concerns from the First Nations community of Aamjiwnaang — surrounded on three sides by petrochemical plants — and dismissed engineers’ worries about the risk of industrial leaks with possibly irreversible health impacts.
The engineers have been raising concerns about public safety in the communities surrounding Ontario petrochemical plants since 2009, says the report, prepared by their union, the Professional Engineers Government of Ontario (PEGO).
The report comes to light after an investigation by the Star, Global News, the National Observer, the Michener Awards Foundation and journalism schools at Ryerson and Concordia universities revealed a troubling pattern of secrecy and potentially toxic leaks in the area known as Chemical Valley. There are 57 industrial polluters registered with the Canadian and U.S. governments within 25 kilometres of Sarnia. The investigation also raised questions about whether companies and the provincial government are properly warning residents of Sarnia and the Aamjiwnaang First Nation when potentially toxic substances — including benzene, known to cause cancer at high levels of long-term exposure — are leaked.
More than 500 Ministry of the Environment incident reports, obtained for the investigation through freedom of information requests, detail industrial leaks in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley that released a range of emissions — from a 2014 benzene spill that experts said should have triggered alarms, to a valve left open for three months venting hydrocarbons that year, to a two-hour leak of hydrogen sulphide from tanks in 2015.
The PEGO also claims ministry managers are “muzzling and excluding key engineers that raise concerns with respect to public safety,” saying the government “refused” to publish a 2014 report detailing the issues.
The report didn’t include details of the muzzling claim, and it wasn’t clear why the 2014 report wasn’t published or what it contained. PEGO didn’t immediately respond to requests for clarification.
Ballard said Tuesday that he’s “open to input” and will discuss the September report with the union. He said he hadn’t seen it yet, but that his staff are reviewing the information.
“I look forward to taking seriously what they’re talking about,” he said. “I encourage everyone to speak their mind and to bring their issues forward.”
On Monday, Ballard announced the province would fund a study into the health effects of air pollution on the residents of Aamjiwnaang and Chemical Valley, but didn’t commit to a timeline or detail a process. The community has sought funding from provincial and federal governments for such a study since 2007, to no avail.
Though benzene levels in Sarnia have dropped significantly in the past 25 years, documents obtained in the investigation revealed how refineries in the area release three to 10 times the annual limit of the carcinogen, exceeding stricter targets put in place in 2016. The public health data that exists is inconclusive, but critics have said the information, collected at the county level, misses the impact on people living in the immediate vicinity of so-called Chemical Valley.
Pressed on a timeline for the health study in question period at Queen’s Park on Tuesday, Premier Kathleen Wynne said the province is committed to beginning “immediately,” but didn’t specify when or how that would happen.
Federal Green party Leader Elizabeth May said the situation in Chemical Valley — and Aamjiwnaang in particular — is “one of Canada’s top examples of environmental racism,” and officials don’t need to wait for a study to start exploring options to reduce harmful spills and emissions, including moving the First Nations community.
“It’s going to be very hard to imagine with the number of plants that currently ring Aamjiwaang First Nation, how do you make that right,” she said. Though community members have floated the idea of relocation in the past, Aamjiwnaang resident Ada Lockridge previously told the investigation there’s nowhere for them to go.
“My roots are here, my grandfather lived here,” she said. “All our relatives are buried here.”
Aamjiwnaang Chief Joanne Rogers, however, said concerns go back much further than the ones detailed in the leaked report.
“We’ve always had concerns about our health and safety,” she said.
“I believe (the health study is) just going to probably document what we already believe, and that is that pollution has an effect on our community’s health.”
On Monday, federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor said she’s asked her department to look into the decision it made in 2014 under the previous Conservative government not to fully fund the health survey. However, federal NDP environment critic Linda Duncan slammed the federal government’s response, saying it “dropped the ball” and should intervene immediately.
“This should be a wake-up call,” Duncan said. With files from Carolyn Jarvis, Global News and National Observer.