Stop the excuses

The Wynne government appears to have found yet another way to delay cleaning up the mercury-polluted waters that have poisoned generations of people living on the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog reserves in northern Ontario.

Now, instead of focusing on an important task the government repeatedly promised to take on, Environment Minister Glen Murray is engaging in a legal dust-up with the new owners of the pulp and paper mill where the mercury pollution first originated back in 1962.

It appears to be one more tactic to put off paying for the promised cleanup of the English-Wabigoon River system, something the chief scientist for Grassy Narrows estimates will cost $85.7 million over 10 years. The repeated holdups have got to stop. As the Star’s David Bruser and Jayme Poisson reported this week, Ontario’s environment ministry says it intends to order Domtar Corp., a pulp and paper manufacturer several owners removed from the polluter, Reed Paper, to find out whether mercury is still leaking from the property into the river system.

The legal machinations are underway even though there is no suggestion that Domtar is responsible for any source of mercury and has already given permission for ministry officials to test its site.

Understandably, Domtar says it is concerned the province is seeking to transfer its responsibilities to an “innocent bystander” and vows to fight the order.

Worse, as Domtar and Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister point out, the case will distract the government from finding out what is causing the elevated mercury levels and cleaning up the contaminated river sediments. That is inexcusable in light of what the government already knows. Consider that a study by Japanese scientists indicates that 90 per cent of residents from the two reserves tested in 2014 had a symptom of mercury poisoning. Those can include loss of muscle co-ordination, slurred speech and tunnel vision.

It’s no wonder residents are still suffering more than half a century after the pollution first occurred. As the Star reported, soil samples this paper took from the old paper mill in January contained as much as 80 times more mercury than is normal. And provincial data indicates the walleye that people in Grassy Narrows are eating are the most mercury-contaminated in Ontario.

All of this is information the provincial government should have been investigating on its own, and acting on.

Instead, until last November the government put its head in the sand and argued that the river system would clean itself up.

That’s something government after government has wrongly argued since 1984, when the government ignored the advice of its own environment minister to clean up the water.

Now that Murray has promised to do just that, the government needs to stop its dithering and get on with the necessary work. Yet more delay is unacceptable.

Despite promising to clean up contaminated water that the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog reserves depend on, the Ontario government is once again delaying