Letter to the Globe and Mail about the Walkerton crisis (Summer, 2000)
There has been a fair amount of attention given recently to the question of whether the blame for Walkteron's water tragedy lies with the provincial government, or the municipality in question, or the private labs contracted to assess water quality. Even if much of the blame lies with the provincial government, as is often suggested, it seems nevertheless that too little attention has been paid to the responsibility which the electorate itself bears for the incident. The decisions were, after all, taken on our behalf by the provincial government.
If the provincial government knew that risks were involved in its environmental policy, or rather in its lack of one, it also knew that such a policy was politically safe. And those among us who voted for the Tories knew in turn that they would gut the Ministry of the Environment when they first came to power, and then later that they would continue the pattern of neglect established in their first term.
Now, since even Tories drink water, it is reasonable to assume that steps will be taken to ensure that an incident of this sort does not happen again. But with all due respect to the people who suffered in Walkerton, nine, or eleven, or however many deaths were involved, is rather a small number when compared to the eventual suffering that is likely to result from our present environmental policies.
Both our provincial and federal governments have seen fit to develop environmental policies that are completely inadequate, and which carry eventual consequences moredamaging than the contamination of water in Walkterton. The complete lack of any serious attempt by the federal government to meet our Kyoto commitments—our pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to 94% of their 1990 levels—is only one example. Another is the Ontario provincial government's failure to enforce environmental legislation designed to protect us from dangerous chemical dumping.
These failures are likely to have extremely serious consequences, but the responsibility for them hardly stops with the politicians involved. The electorate has been complicit in this failure, because—as a whole—we lack the maturity to consider the longterm consequences of our environmental policies in a disciplined way, and to assign them any real importance when we vote. Until we demonstrate a genuine concern about the
enviornment, our politicians are unlikely to do it on our behalf.
Chris Young
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