It's a done deal. Waste management insiders say that unless something drastic happens at the Environmental Assessment hearings being held this month, the plan to build a mega-dump in Northern Ontario will sail through the approvals process like a groupie with a backstage pass. This, despite the fact that the Adams Mine dump proposal has been plagued with controversy from the get-go, both for its unproven technology and the solid opposition of northern residents and farmers.
But the North Bay consortium that is pushing the project isn't sweating the science or the anger of farmers. With another North Bay boy in power at Queen's Park and major changes to the Ministry of the Environment, the task of selling an experimental dump site has never been easier.

"We recommend that the public of the region vigorously oppose the approach being taken by Notre to the development of this landfill as insufficient to protect the community's interest." - Dr. Fred Lee, peer reviewer of Adams Mine Landfill proposal

When the Adams iron ore mine closed down in 1990, North Bay businessman Gordon McGuinty (president of Notre Development) appeared on the scene flogging the idea of using the abandoned open pits as a dump for Toronto's garbage. Toronto's main dump in Keele Valley was quickly filling up and the burgeoning population around the site had put the nix on any site extension. Kirkland Lake, withering under a continuing loss of its mining base, seemed a perfect choice for a mega-dump.
From the beginning, opponents (including many former Adams miners) pointed out that the site was anything but ideal. Normally, landfills are set in clay soil and contact with the water table is limited. The Adams Mine pits are sunk 300 feet into the water table. The ground is fractured hard rock that had suffered 30 years of intensive blasting and disturbance.
Among the most vocal critics of the plan were the farmers living south of the height of land. They are dependent on underground aquifers which they worry could be connected to the water flowing through the Adams Mine pits. If leachate did escape into the goundwater, it would be essentially untreatable.
But these possible drawbacks of the site became its main selling feature as dump proponents tried to sell the notion of hydraulic containment. Basically, the theory runs that as long as water is flowing into the pit, leachate will not be able to flow out. In theory the design is intriguing. But it is only a theory. Nothing of the scope or specifics of the Adams Mine has ever been tried before.
Dr. Fred Lee, a California-based landfill expert, writing in his assessment of the dump scheme said that the "...consultants have overstated the current understanding of the ability of hydraulic containment."
Several years of consultant's reports leave basic questions unanswered. What happens once the pit is full of 20 million tonnes of soggy garbage and the leachate collection sytem gets clogged? How will the site proponents be able to predict the pressure of millions of tonnes of waste building up at the bottom of the pit.
According to Notre Development, the site will have a 20 year life span and pumps will continue to operate for 100 years following closure. Dr. Henk Haitjema is an expert in the issues of groundwater modelling at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington, Indiana. "It is quite a proposal to pump for 100 years. Look at the energy expense. It's one thing to put a landfill in a couple of feet beneath the groundwater table, but it's quite another to have to pump massive amounts of ground water to create a negative gradient."
Haitjema says that if the pit floods, the whole concept falls apart. If the pumps cut out, the site could begin leaking into the groundwater. But Notre doesn't seem worried by such possibilities. They have even shrugged off the need for on-site generators for the landfill gas monitoring system (the system that prevents landfill explosions), saying that power outages are usually only short term (ice storms not withstanding -ed.).
Local residents don't seem to share Notre's dogged optimism. Temiskaming MPP David Ramsay has repeatedly asked who will be liable if something goes wrong at the site. After all, Gordon McGuinty has no previous record in waste management and has been struggling to maintain the funds to even get as far as the EA process.
And yet when it comes to the long-term financial assurances of the site, Notre's proposal demonstrates powers of predictions worthy of fortune teller Jo Jo Savard. According to Notre, once the pumps are shut-off after the 100 year mark, the dump will be flushed and cleaned for the next 200 to 1000 (2198 - 2998 A.D.) years at an annual cost of $5000! Notre also predicts that the cost of labour 600 years from now will be $25/hour.
Barbara Johnson from the Ministry of the Environment admits its all a little "star trekkish" but maintains the closure funds are an important part of the proposal. None of the experts at the Ministry seemed to have raised an eyebrow at Notre's promise to cover these millennial costs by putting $1.30 a tonne away for fifteen years. According to Notre this savings plan will generate so much income that in 1,000 years it will amount to a figure totalling a monumental 43 digits (based on an annual interest rate of 8.3%).
The Ministry of the Environment seems perfectly satisfied in the ability of a small-time North Bay businessman to promise to cover the liability for the next 1,000 years. To put this time frame in perspective, we would have to look back a 1,000 years - before there were Ontario bureaucrats, before the turn of the century when men earned $3 a day, before Columbus, before the black plague, before the Renaissance. Imagine the assuredness of an entrepreneur in the age of Clovis and the Franks to assert what wages and costs would be in 1998.

"If this went before an EA hearing it would be laughed out."
-MPP David Ramsay, 1995

Opposition to the site
When Gordon McGuinty first began flogging his Adams Mine plan, opponents took it for granted that when the time came to sell the science before an Environmental Assessment Board, the proposal would have as many leaky holes as the dump.
But with the come from behind victory of Mike Harris' Conservatives everything changed.
The Ministry of Environment has been decimated by cutbacks and the Tories' "Open for Business" policy looked very favourably on the proposal which had such strong backing in the Premier's home town. Getting the garbage to Kirkland Lake was seen as a win-win proposal: a chance to win some votes back in garbage clogged Metro, a fiesta for the North Bay Rail-Haul Consortium and a way to keep the Ontario Northland Railway afloat with continuing to slash its funding.
When Metro Toronto gave McGuinty the thumbs down in late 1995 and voted to send the trash to the United States, the Tories kicked into high gear. They passed legislation forcing Metro to conduct EA's on sites that have already been approved in the United States! Metro managed to squeak past the government's deadline and the Adams Mine continued to linger in limbo.
But changes to the EA Act have given the Adams Mine proposal a second life. One of the first things that the Tories did once they came to power was cut intervenor funding for resident groups. Intervenor funding was brought in by the Davis Tories as a way of protecting property owners from the power of big consortiums who had the resources to hire high-priced consultants.
David Ramsay says that cutting intervenor funding has seriously hampered the ability of people to mount a serious challenge. "One presumed there would be unfettered hearings and there would be intervenor funding. This is not possible now. It makes me angry because we have such an unequal balance between the resources of the proponent and the community."
The second major change was announced just before Christmas, Environment Minister Norm Sterling decided that, lo and behold, the Adams Mine proposal wouldn't be subject to a full hearing after all. Industry insiders say that the Notre proposal has already been given the green light by the ministry and that the hearings (strictly limited to two technical questions) are only a formality.
Wilf Ruland, is a long-time environmental consultant, believes this is unacceptable. He was approached by a coalition opposing the dump to testify but says that in good conscience he could not take part in the process.
"The whole independent review process is being neutralized here. It is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It's like taking a nuclear plant and saying the only thing we are going to look at are traffic issues. I mean I'm sure there are traffic concerns at nuclear plants but there are other important issues here."
Despite the fact that this is potentially the largest project of its kind in Ontario's history, and despite the fact that even small landfills down south are subject to the rigours of a full EA, the Adams Mine looks like it might sail through the scoped hearings without a hitch.
"An environment hearing is supposed to be a full comprehensive and independent review of a project," says Ruland, "and that is not what we have here at all. We've got Environment Ministry people with their jobs on the line working under the gun, and we've got a government that is pushing the proposal for whatever reason, but they are obviously pushing this one."
Ruland sees the handling of the Notre project as a politically driven aberration and predicts that with an election in the offing it will be the "...last big bullying policy initiative on the environmental front.... I think most of the changes that the Harris government has made to the province's environmental legislation will be over-turned as soon as they are voted out of power. They are so short-sighted and destructive I can't see them lasting beyond the government itself."
Ruland says that if residents can stall until the next election, the dump plan could be derailed. No doubt, the Tories don't want to see this happen.

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