__GoogleDataMapContainering TopicTextSearch textsearch InnerHarbour _Whig2007-03-08
 _ Whig 2007-03-08(Updated: 2007.03.08 12:30:33 AM) |
A fight over fish habitat
The Whig Standard
Local News - Thursday, March 08, 2007 Updated @ 11:53:53 PM
By Jennifer Pritchett
Whig Standard Staff Writer
The federal Fisheries Act once enabled Janet Fletcher to launch a legal fight that saw the City of Kingston convicted for polluting the Cataraqui River with garbage juice from an old dump.
But now, the former Kingston resident and other environmentalists fear the legislation designed to protect fish habitat is going to be watered down.
They say proposed changes to the 139-year-old law that are before Parliament may mean that concerned citizens such as Fletcher won’t be able to take polluters to court as readily as they once could.
The Conservative government introduced the new version of the law last month. Its opponents hope that a recent Liberal motion in the House of Commons will keep the government bill from going ahead.
The Liberal motion, if passed, would delay debate on the bill for six months and require that it be substantially revised before coming back to the Commons.
Environmental groups are hopeful there will be more time for public debate.
The Conservatives’ proposed changes have been controversial.
The existing Fisheries Act says that no one can put toxic substances into waters where there are fish and no one can destroy fish habitat without approval from the government. Polluters can be brought before a criminal court and face fines of up to $1 million a day or jail time if convicted.
The law applies to every polluter on every waterway in the country.
To level a charge against the City of Kingston for the garbage leachate that was leaking into the Cataraqui River, Fletcher used a section of the law that permits private citizens to bring forward prosecutions.
Her fight was based on the act’s definition of “deleterious substance” and how the City of Kingston’s old dump underneath Belle Park leaked toxic garbage leachate into the Cataraqui River, a fish habitat.
It took nearly nine years, but in the end, she won.
In December 2005, the City of Kingston was fined $60,000 for three convictions under the federal Fisheries Act. The charges all related to the city unlawfully depositing or allowing the deposit of a “deleterious substance” in waters inhabited by fish.
The revised act would remove the key definitions that prohibit the deposit of deleterious substances into Canadian waters.
Fletcher can’t believe it.
She said it’s as if the government is tossing out the case she built against the City of Kingston, a case she said resulted in the municipality putting better controls in place to mitigate the leachate going into the river.
“From my perspective, the city never had any intention of doing anything about that site except collect money for the golf course” at Belle Park, she said.
The dump opened in 1952 when local businesses and the municipality started dumping trash on the marsh land between Montreal Street and Bell Island in the Cataraqui River. It closed in 1974 and years later turned into a municipal golf course.
But Patrice LeBlanc, acting director general for the habitat management directorate with the department of Fisheries and Oceans, said the sections of the act that have been revised were changed for additional protection of fish habitat.
As far as the definition of “deleterious substance” goes, he said, the proposed change in the law is slight and is meant to make it easier for polluters to be held accountable.
“The change is that the deleterious substance has to be deleterious at the end of the pipe, rather than in the water,” he said.
LeBlanc said the change was prompted by court decisions.
“It’s much easier to monitor,” he said.
Mark Mattson of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper said, however, that rewriting one of the strongest pieces of environmental law will make it less effective and will make fish habitat more vulnerable to polluters.
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper is one of 29 groups, including the Sierra Club, that say the proposed changes will dilute the government’s commitment to protect fish habitats.
“There are some sections of the act that need updating, but they shouldn’t be using that as an excuse to overhaul the whole act and change sections of the act that are integral to a national standard for environmental law to protect water regardless of what province or community,” said Mattson.
The planned changes would also allow Ottawa to transfer responsibility for administering the law to the province’s, territories or unspecified “other groups.”
That would leave the provinces with the ability to establish standards and rules of practice. Ultimately, it might mean that provincial regulations could replace federal ones if they were deemed to be “equivalent.”
“They’re really opening it up to creating different standards across the country,” said Mattson.
But LeBlanc disagrees. He said the changes will still uphold standards across the country because provinces will either have to meet or beat the existing federal rules before they will be permitted to take over responsibility.
“We’re not delegating the decision-making authority, we’re just deeming a standard being equivalent,” he said.
As well, before a province would be able to take over any responsibility, it would have to go through a public review process, said LeBlanc.