The Trashiad

As fictional organized crime boss Tony Soprano likes to say, “I’m in the waste management business. Everybody immediately assumes you’re mobbed up. It’s a stereotype, and it’s offensive.” Links between the garbage business and mob activity have been well founded, as exposed by Kenneth Prendergast in his history of Cleveland, Ohio, and more famously by Rick Cowan in his undercover sting operation in New York City, to name just a couple of the most celebrated cases in North America. Cowan’s exposé is credited with busting the mob’s hold on garbage and resulting in the big business industry that has since developed.

There is no denying that garbage is big business. According to a January 2013 Conference Board of Canada report, Canada generates 34 million tonnes of waste per year or 777 kilograms per person, well above the average of 17 industrialized countries, with only Australia and the United States generating more waste per capita. Waste disposal companies attempt to achieve economies of scale by buying up their smaller, local counterparts. The larger these companies become the more influence they have on the public policies that attempt to regulate them and the more money they have to fund their fights against city councillors and concerned citizens. Ironically, they are also often the only companies that can afford to comply with new legislation designed to protect the environment.

One of the most vivid illustrations of how large and complex our struggle with garbage has become is given by Charlie Angus in his latest book, Unlikely Radicals: The Story of the Adams Mine Dump War. Located in the Timiskaming region of Northern Ontario, 11 kilometres southeast of Kirkland Lake and 20 kilometres west of the border with Quebec, Adams Mine is a massive site, with five large pits and mounds of waste rock and tailings. From 1964 until it closed in 1990, Adams Mine was an open pit mine, involving almost daily blasting to produce iron ore pellets that were shipped by rail to Pennsylvania, until 1971 when Dofasco purchased the mine and directed the iron ore to its Hamilton factory.

A proposal to ship Toronto’s garbage to these abandoned pits launched a battle of epic proportions. In five separate campaigns over a 14-year period, Angus and hundreds of his fellow community members, along with a dedicated and vocal group in Toronto, fought the battle on many fronts. Their primary environmental concern was water contamination. South Pit is more than 185 meters deep—think of the height of a 60-storey office tower—with a significant proportion below the water table. Central Pit, mined out in the 1980s, began to fill with water as soon as the pumps that kept it open for mining were turned off. Significantly, according to Larry Jensen, the provincial geologist for the region, the water in this pit rose and then levelled off before it became full, indicating that groundwater flowed in through the fractures in the north rock wall and out the other side, forming part of a much larger aquifer, situated below the continental dividing point known as the Arctic watershed. Should leachate, the contaminated liquid running off mounds of garbage, follow the same course, the damage to groundwater would extend far and wide.

In just over 200 pages, Angus relates a gripping tale of high intrigue that extends from meeting rooms in Timiskaming and council chambers in Toronto all the way to a North American Free Trade Agreement hearing, with a cameo appearance in Switzerland as the protestors attempted to scuttle Toronto’s bid for the 2008 Olympics on the grounds that the city did not meet the environmental criterion of the selection committee. The action is fast-paced, almost swashbuckling. Angus takes us through myriad meetings, lobbying efforts, expert testimony, undercover investigations, activist training sessions, media campaigns and civil disobedience protests. If the story is breathtaking for readers, it is hard to imagine what it must have been for those on the front lines, a group of citizens from a remote area finding the stamina and resources to put a protracted campaign into effect.

But epic tales need more than virtuous heroes and their inspired ranks of followers; they benefit from the presence of villains as well. Enter Gordon McGuinty, who can safely be called the driving force behind the effort to create a big business out of garbage at Adams Mine. McGuinty is a truly fascinating character with astounding ambition. Seeing him through Charlie Angus’s eyes in Unlikely Radicals made me curious to learn more about him as well as to hear his arguments in favour of the dump. I tracked down McGuinty’s own book, Trashed: How Political Garbage Made the United States Canada’s Largest Dump, published in 2010, six years after his cousin Dalton brought the Adams Mine war to an abrupt end by passing the Adams Mine Lake Act, prohibiting the dumping of garbage “in any site that was, or had taken on, the attributes of a lake.” That is not a family reunion I would like to attend.

For anyone with an interest in rhetorical theory, the Adams Mine story is rich with examples. Beginning with the metaphor of war that both sides adopt, the language then diverges as the warriors stake out their territory. And while McGuinty is a bad guy in Unlikely Radicals, he is a full-fledged superhero in his own book, with the Adams Mine a mere example of his personal desire to live a life filled with good deeds. Perhaps if his own book had been shorter by half (it is almost 400 pages), his appeal to ethos would have been stronger. As it is, one is left bemused. Take, for example, the many times and many ways that McGuinty asserts that “it was not about the money; it was about a safer environment for the north” and it “would have been a win-win for the environment.”

But then, tired and truncated clichés aside, McGuinty frequently emphasizes the economic benefits to the area, playing to those who have lost jobs in the mining industry, and sells the project based on its financial rewards. He estimates the Adams Mine to be capable of producing more than $3 billion in revenue and attracts a number of investors, including wealthy developer Mario Cortellucci—whom Angus calls the “Daddy Warbucks of the Common Sense Revolution” because of his generous donations to Mike Harris’s Conservatives in Ontario. It is not long before McGuinty’s contradictions are fully blown as he says “remember this was a business” and “my new partners were not afraid to spend the money necessary to make sure Ontario knew that the Adams Mine was still the best new alternative for waste disposal.”

In Unlikely Radicals, a parade of experts in the fields of engineering, ecology and health opine on how likely the mine is to be safe as a massive garbage disposal site. Ken Howard from the University of Toronto led the hydro-geological investigation into the Walkerton E. coli tragedy in 2000, where seven people died and more than 2,500 became seriously ill from farm runoff that contaminated a well and the connected groundwater. With impeccable credentials and no funding ties to any corporation, Howard spoke out strongly about the risks of the Adams Mine proposal and blasted Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment for giving any level of approval for the project “based on the findings of two seriously flawed models that should have been rejected without hesitation.”

In Trashed, McGuinty claims Howard is just giving his “personal opinion.” He also says that it is “impossible to find any credible link between the Adams Mine project and the tragic events at Walkerton.” After all there “are no farms anywhere near the Adams Mine.” But he does ponder using an attack on Timiskaming dairy farmers as a diversion tactic and, considering that one of them, John Vanthof, was a key organizer of the opposition, McGuinty says it was tempting. But “after a little thought” he decided against it: “It wasn’t how we treated people … [and] the dairy farmers in Timiskaming, well, they had enough problems making a living without my adding to their burden.” But when, just a few years later, Vanthof was one of a group that exposed a plan to sell 2,000 acres of Crown land adjacent to the Adams Mine for $22 per acre and linked the sale to Cortellucci, Angus tells us that their opponents “followed up with a $10 million lawsuit against both John Vanthof and the Temiskaming Federation of Agriculture.”

When McGuinty is most exasperated with the “Dirty Dozen” or the “political terrorists,” as he calls those who oppose him, reframing the opposition as a small group of criminals, he says “Where did these people find the time? Who the hell was paying them?” He seems blind to what his readers cannot help but notice: McGuinty has made this his full-time business and a source of money while his opposition is made up of citizens who have quite separate livelihoods to juggle as they mount a full-time fight over 14 years. While Angus and his supporters won their environmental battle, McGuinty’s consolation prize amounted to millions of dollars in compensation for expenses that the government allowed when it killed the project.

There is so much more to the story that I will not give away here. Readers will meet the United Nations special rapporteur on toxic trade and human rights, as well as Mel the Moose. And they will follow the course of the cargo ship Wan He sailing from Japan to Canada, bound for Kirkland Lake, with a cargo of 90,000 kilos of PCBs.

Healthy skepticism seems like the right approach to battles over controversial issues like garbage disposal, something all of us need but none of us really want to think about. After all, if garbage does not go to an abandoned mine, where can it go? But the more angles I used to analyze Charlie Angus’s Unlikely Radicals, the more impressed I became. Angus started out as someone who had moved his family to the north where he was born, intending to live peacefully and continue his music—he was leader of the band Grievous Angels at the time, which has since had two Juno nominations. As the Adams Mine war progressed, Angus went from local resident to journalist, to activist, to leader and trainer of other activists, and, finally, to politician in 2004 as the successful New Democratic Party candidate in his home riding of Timmins. He has many other accomplishments to his credit, resulting in his being named to Maclean’s Power list in 2012 as one of the 25 most influential Canadians, while Zoomer Magazine has chosen him the third most influential Canadian over the age of 45. Since the early days of the Adam’s Mine controversy when Angus became aware that “the people who should have been there to protect the public interest had sold us out,” he has stepped up to become exactly one of those protectors—one with the ability to communicate the issues, marshal resistance and protect the average citizen’s right to be heard.

And as for our garbage? It is not all good news, but there is some. In 2007, Toronto purchased the Green Lane Landfill, southwest of London, Ontario. It has been in operation since 1978 and has a proven record of onsite treatment of leachate and a methane gas collection and flaring system. And there does seem to be some heartening evidence that without a big hole to fill, we might actually start reducing the amount we produce. According to the City of Toronto website, the 2012 audit measuring litter at 298 street locations noted that “large” litter items were reduced by almost 21 percent and “small” litter items decreased by 67 percent in comparison with 2006 data. However, Toronto Council rescinded the plastic bag fee as of July 1, 2012, leaving it to businesses to charge for them as they see fit. And now we have started tossing massive numbers of coffee pods, those wasteful little inserts that produce one cup of coffee without us ever having to get anywhere near ground coffee or actual beans. Recycling machinery cannot sort them out and the grounds left behind contaminate everything else. As well, so much of our fruit now comes in benign-sounding “clams,” adding to the problem of how to dispose of plastics. A group of scientists, writing in the journal Nature, has come up with a proposal to stop the huge proportion of plastic we produce from ending up in our rivers and oceans: reclassify the most harmful plastic waste as hazardous material. That simple adjustment could trigger sweeping changes in how environmental agencies clean up plastic waste, spur innovation in polymer research and replace problematic plastics with safer ones.

Like most epics, the story of the Adams Mine dump war may be in media res with lots yet to come. After all, in 2006, two years after it was supposed to be over once and for all, more high intrigue developed as one Vito Gallo, an American citizen, launched a NAFTA challenge, claiming to be sole owner of the Adams Mine property and entitled to $355 million in lost investments. No one had heard of Gallo during the Adams Mine war. When the tribunal heard the case in 2011, he could not produce any evidence of his claim. The case was thrown out and Gallo ordered to pay $450,000 in costs. According to a Globe and Mail report, Toronto lawyer Lawrence Herman, a partner with Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP and an expert in international arbitration, said the decision shows that “arbitration panels will not put up with attempts by domestic investors to manufacture a NAFTA challenge.” Angus, both in his book and in the House of Commons, called for an explanation to be demanded of “super Mario” since it turned out that Vito Gallo is a cousin of Mario Cortellucci’s business partner.

As the saying goes, when it comes to the environment, successes are always temporary and losses always permanent. So how should we approach such major problems? Canada’s management guru Henry Mintzberg says: