Comment on the Aggregate…

Comment on the Aggregate Resources Act – Proposed Changes
It is with extreme dismay that I read the proposed changes to the Aggregate Resources Act. Having closely followed the process of a quarry expansion that started in 2005 and was completed by 2016, I have some knowledge of the flaws in the present system.
Looking at these dates one might say that the process is too long and onerous for the aggregate business. In reality, the reason it took so long was that expansion studies were inadequate or severely flawed and had to be redone. Also the community strongly objected to the industrialization of a Class III industry in a rural residential neighbourhood. Also MNRF did not approve the aggregate licence at first.
An Ontario Municipal Board Hearing in 2014 forbid the installation of a permanent asphalt plant but allowed the quarry to expand to four times its current size. In the process a globally rare alvar has been destroyed.
But in 2015 a study was done which concluded that ‘expansion of the Miller Braeside Quarry is not recommended as its high TSP (total suspended particles) concentration levels will pose a severe hazard to human health.’ This study was published after the expansion was granted.
Please see the abstract of the study below:
Air quality assessment for the proposed Miller Braeside quarry
expansion in Canada:
• Sabah A., Abdul-Wuhab, Hedia Fgaier, Ali Elkamel, Keziah Chan, “Air quality assessment for the proposed Miller quarry expansion in Canada: TSP,” Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health (December 2015, Volume 8, Issue 6): 573-589.

Abstract
This study aims to address the potential air quality impact of a proposed expansion of the Miller Braeside quarry in Ontario, Canada. The main focus of this assessment is on the potential impacts of the total suspended particulates (TSP) emissions. The CALPUFF dispersion modeling system was utilized to assess the maximum ground level concentrations of TSP emitted from the proposed quarry site. The emissions for 4 days in the year 2013 were examined, where each day represented a different season. The results of the dispersion models were evaluated against the TSP concentration limits set by the Ontario Ministry of Environment (MOE). All simulated 1-h average TSP concentrations were found to significantly exceed Ontario’s 1-h TSP limit. Similarly, the simulated 24-h average TSP concentrations on the days representing the winter, summer, and autumn seasons were found to be well above Ontario’s 24-h TSP limit. Potential regions nearby the quarry that may be affected by adverse TSP emissions were determined to generally be within the most concentrated region of the TSP plume trajectories. Since the quarry is situated in close proximity to many residential areas, expansion of the Miller Braeside quarry is not recommended as its high TSP concentration levels will pose as a severe hazard to human health. [emphasis added]

In the brief below I would like to point out some of the concerns I have with the proposed changes to the ARA from the point of view of experience of quarry operation and research of the process as well as the checks and balances for that industry.

Flaws in the current system are not going to be addressed:
• The only data that is put forward is that of the proponent of the application for a new quarry or expansion of one. Other scientists merely evaluate what is given; there is no new data! If that data is flawed, it may not be discovered, as no independent studies are done! All comment depends on the proponent’s work. The experts doing the expansion studies are hired by the proponent and they work with one goal in mind. Get this new or expanded quarry approved!
• Experts hired to peer review these studies to confirm veracity frequently work for other aggregate companies or are in some ways conflicted if they give a completely unbiased opinion.
• The proponent has an inordinate amount of time to contact and lobby the Municipal Councillors; the public is told they will have a voice at a public meeting where they are limited to only a few minutes each!
• Rehabilitation: In the majority of cases, the aggregate industry removes all the aggregate and goes on to operate new sites, leaving the old one as an ugly moonscape, an eyesore, a blight on the landscape. Nothing in the new proposed changes makes it mandatory for a company to clean up their mess, to rehabilitate what they have left. Enhanced reporting won’t make it happen.
Proposed changes clearly favour the aggregate companies while leaving the environment, including groundwater resources, air quality, natural habitat, and endangered species, to pay the price.
Wording clearly favours aggregate business:
• Improve access to aggregate;
• Reduce burden on business;
• Easier to apply for road allowances;
• Self-filing for routine site plan amendments;
• Self-filing of site plans for routine activities;
• Allowing some low-risk activities to occur without a licence;
• Streamlining compliance report requirements;
• Reviewing application requirements for new sites.
The wording is frightening. Who gets to determine routine activities or site plan amendments? For example, is blasting a routine activity? Certainly no aggregate can be mined without blasting. A local Quarry had two blasting ‘accidents’, the first in 2005, doing property damage to many homeowners in the neighbourhood. The second was a fly rock accident in 2007. It was a miracle that people were not killed!
Would a routine site plan amendment change a previously protected area to an active extraction zone, destroying hectares of environmentally protected ecosystems? A local quarry expansion destroyed a globally rare alvar.
What are low risk activities in a Class III industry? Please name one. Let’s look at the aggregate process and try to find one.
• Blasting includes drilling in the rock to place the charge; then detonating the charge. Drilling is noise pollution; blasting, apart from threats to property and life, pollutes by sending a huge cloud of particle matter into the atmosphere. It is a large noise pollutant and disrupts wildlife. It is a danger to aquifers. (One local blasting accident closed off one farm well, while making the other farm well so murky as to be undrinkable, even for stock. The farmer had to haul water from the river for days for his livestock. Another well had to be drilled.)
• Crushing – the large chunks of rock from blasting are crushed into smaller usable sizes for roads, building etc. The crusher is noisy but chiefly pollutes by producing large quantities of dust harming the air quality, surrounding vegetation and wild life.
• Washing – aggregate is frequently washed to remove fine sediment. Water is removed from the aquifer, pollutants are added. Again, this is a noise pollutant.
• Hauling – huge trucks pollute the air by stirring up roadside dust, by emitting enormous amounts of exhaust emissions, by destroying infrastructure, (roads, bridges, culverts), with their tremendous weight. Again this is a noise pollutant.
• Concrete plants on site – huge pollutant for suspended particles. Again, this is a huge noise pollutant.
• Asphalt plant – a truly dangerous part of the industry, frequently included in a quarry operation. The two areas of most concern are the air and water. The asphalt process emits many carcinogenic toxins into the air. Those who live nearby are subjected to these poisons regularly, depending on the wind direction and velocity. This is a severe health hazard, especially to young children. (A local example: children couldn’t sleep for coughing. Other symptoms include irritated and burning eyes, nose and throat, nausea and shortness of breath. But long term studies have shown a huge increase in brain tumours as a primary cancer, not secondary, in children). The aquifers beneath the asphalt plant are in danger of permanent chemical pollution. Fuel or component spills could enter a crack in what is often karstic geology and groundwater sources are permanently polluted, permanently lost to whole neighbourhoods. Low risk?
Please name a low risk activity that should be allowed without a licence.
Water is a crucial resource:
It is clear that aggregate is important to politicians as it is essential in modern construction industry – for infrastructure, buildings, homes. But it is short-sighted not to acknowledge that water is a much more important resource than aggregate. In Canada, in Ontario, we are blessed with an abundance of clean, sweet, fresh water. Who will buy a home built with aggregate if that home has no water?
The aggregate industry has a huge destructive impact on our water resources. Aquifers are underground sources of fresh water stored in the rock. Remove the rock and the water is gone. Removing the rock drains water from the surrounding water table, water that supports homes, communities, other industries.
Now you wish to allow the aggregate industry to extract within the water table, to remove local municipal restrictions on the depth of the extraction. This greed allows the industry to pump the water out of the aquifer to allow for blasting within the water table, going lower and lower to extra more aggregate.
Water seeks its own level thus draining nearby residential wells, destroying a surrounding community. Extracting within the water table has enormous negative economic repercussions.
Air is essential to life:
All the activities in the aggregate Class III Industry from blasting to asphalt production reduce the quality of the air in the environment in which they exist. Do we really want our rural communities where quarries exist to have the air quality of Detroit or East Montreal? Do we want to hasten climate change by adding more carbon, more toxins to the air?
Self-Filing
What does this entail? Are these huge often multinational aggregate companies going to be able to regulate themselves? Who will police these very dangerous, Class III industries?
I will give you a local example of what a company will try to do if given the opportunity. After the community won an OMB ruling, the OMB chair told the company they had six months to get their site plan in order, complying with his ruling. Changes had to be approved by all members with standing at the Hearing. So we saw the changes they tried to make, changes that would actually reverse aspects of the Board ruling, not comply.
They tried to:
• Extract below the water table whereas it had been expressly forbidden;
• Extract an extra lift, meaning millions more tonnes of aggregate to mine;
• Clear cut an area deemed protected;
• Bring their year round machine shop, major equipment storage and office operation into the quarry without approval;
• Reduce protective berm levels and in some cases eliminate them entirely;
• Deny monitoring of wetlands in conjunction with MOECC;
• Use unqualified people to monitor essential activities.
Allowing a for-profit, private industry the opportunity to police itself is insanity!
Who are the losers with these changes to the Aggregate Resources Act?
It is obvious that the aggregate lobbyists have done their job and the aggregate industry has won, big time. But who has lost?
The Municipality
• The municipality is the most basic level of government in our democratic system, made up of representatives of those who live in the community. The Municipal Council has the ear of the local people. The ability to protect their constituents, to do what the people who own the land and live on it want, has gone. The municipality is the homeowner, the taxpayer; ultimately the buck stops here.
• The municipality now will have no control over the depth of the quarry; water to neighbourhoods will be lost. No one will develop an area anywhere near a quarry. Existing communities will become ghost towns.
• Municipalities will have lost control over local haul routes. For example, if it is deemed more cost efficient for a haul route to go past a local school, thus increasing the danger to our children, the municipality can do nothing. Ditto hospitals, nursing homes, seniors’ residences.
• No change to aggregate fees. Already municipalities subsidize aggregate industries hugely. Present paltry fees in no way pay for damage to roads and infrastructure caused by huge truck traffic. When water resources are inevitably destroyed, once again it will be the municipality, meaning the local taxpayer who will pay. An accidental chemical spill could destroy the water in an instant. Aggregate industry will say they are innocent and tie the process up in the courts, bankrupting the local municipality.
The MNRF:
• The Ministry is supposed to protect and conserve our natural resources, such as our rare ecosystems, flora that is rare and important, wild animals which need their habitat protected from encroaching development, forests that contribute to the economy as well as giving oxygen to our atmosphere and removing polluting carbon dioxide.
• In our local quarry example a deer yard was destroyed; a globally rare ecosystem, an alvar virtually gone when the rock was denuded to make berms; rare and endangered plant species destroyed, perhaps forever lost.
The MOECC:
• This government body must protect the most important resources of water and air by monitoring quality and, with water, quantity.
• Depth of extraction and extracting within the water table certainly are in the control of the MOECC’s Permit To Take Water, the PTTW. This tool is supposed to protect the water table, the aquifers, essential groundwater resources. These new changes will allow carte blanche to the aggregate companies to pump water out of the water table to allow them to quarry deeper and deeper.
• In a local case the MOECC was concerned that the quarry floor might be too close to the aquifers causing pop ups or fractures in the rock, allowing the quarry to fill with water and drain all the surrounding wells. In the new scenario there is no ‘too close’ as that safety buffer has been breached!
• Air quality will be much worse as all the sources of air pollution, which I have previously mentioned, will increase.
The Provincial Government:
Yes, the provincial Government is a loser – big time! It is now controlled by the aggregate industry. Many of these companies are multinationals with enormous financial resources. The Ontario government is simply shipping that wealth out of our province.
• Why does the government not control and administer such an important resource, using that money for the benefit of the taxpayer, the owners of Ontario?
• Why does the government not charge much larger fees to be used to subsidize green growth, green industry?
• Instead of increasing the effects of climate change, why isn’t this government looking for ways to minimize it?
• Why is the government not looking for ways to conserve for future generations, not exploit for private corporate gains?
• Why is our government not forward-thinking rather than being like an ostrich with its head in the sand?
Changes are proposed to the Aggregate Resources Act to reduce burdens for business while maintaining strong protection for the environment and managing impacts to communities.
All the specific proposals are to reduce burdens for business, there is nothing specific to maintain strong protection for the environment and managing impact to communities. For example, why are none of these set up to protect the environment?
• Studies to monitor wildlife species and effects of aggregate extraction on them, with consequences if they are being harmed;
• Regular counts of endangered plant species with the same control as above;
Water Protection
• Evaluation of the water balance of any community where a quarry will operate to see if the community needs can be reconciled with the huge needs of an aggregate PTTW when the company wishes to extract within the water table;
• Ongoing monitoring of the joint community and aggregate company’s water needs and if the community is negatively affected in any way then the aggregate PTTW is reduced;
• No proposal for continuous monitoring of water quality is suggested;
• If quality is impaired there must be a clear process where the aggregate company pays for loss;
• No proposal for monitoring streams affected by the quarry operation, their flow and temperature studied with real protocols if changes occur.
Air Quality protection:
Nowhere have I seen how TSP (Total Suspended Particles), which will be increased from increased and easier extraction, will be monitored and reduced.
Do the words ‘managing impact to communities’ simply mean the government ministries will develop a policy to manage the continuous complaints, court cases and citizen rights actions?
It is so blatantly clear from the language of these proposals that all the benefit will be for business, all the costs and negative effects will be for the homeowner and taxpayer.
Conclusion:
It is time for the Ontario Government to protect the people who elected it, not exploit them. Ontario is covered with the ugly mess left by aggregate companies who have taken our precious resources, with government blessing. We need a government that can give us sustainable growth, not indeterminate pilfering of our non-renewable resources. The Ontario Government has taken a step in the wrong direction.