I'm a retired professional…

I'm a retired professional and live-long resident of Ontario. I can't support a proposal such as this, which is just a knee-jerk reaction to an unsolved problem. Realizing we need to deal with our own garbage due to changes in the US political landscape amounts to getting the right answer for the wrong reasons, but at least it's the right answer. I suppose that's at least something.

As for the methods proposed for dealing with the garbage, well, these are just more garbage. If this proposed solution is in fact the best of the viable alternative solutions, then our environmental legislation, if it was written properly, should agree. The fact that it apparently isn't up to the task of efficiently and effectively guiding us in the best direction by rating one proposal better than another, just reflects poor quality legislation. Bull-headedly taking a certain direction with this proposal over others and clearing the way politically by removing the requirement of an environmental assessment review simply makes a sham of environmental protection in this province.
An environmental assessment should be a fairly quick and straight-forward collection of facts obtained through science-based procedures, leading to clear fact-based conclusions. In the case of land-fills, there's a number of environmental issues, including ground-water protection, species at risk protection, etc. The garbage has to go somewhere, and the question is simply which proposal produces the least damage. There's no need for lengthy and useless public consultations hearing from people with no technical knowledge. There's no need to wade through long public hearings full of NIMBYism, or from special interests with various axes to grind. That's all window-dressing covering up the lack of solid legislation that the public can trust in. In short, fix the legislation so that it works and can be trusted by the public, then allow it to do it's job without exceptions so that the public can trust the government.

One of the reasons for this lack of trust is that the environmental review process is seen as weak and flawed, and that governments can over-ride it as needed to advance political agendas that lack principles of fairness. In this case a key fairness principle is that each area of the province should be disposing of their own garbage. Such a principle raises an obvious weakness, which is that key areas, such as the GTA, produces too much garbage to process within GTA limits, which brings us back to the fundamental flaw in this whole waste management process that is not being addressed.

No waste management proposal should exist in isolation of the underlying source problems which also have been left to rot along with all the garbage produced from these sources. We produce away too much garbage, and away too much toxic garbage because we allow non-recyclable plastics and non-recyclable products and packaging materials etc into the consumption stream in the first place. When are we going to start connecting the dots and producing comprehensive solutions to interrelated problems? Apparently not any time soon according to these proposals.