The Editor
The Napanee Beaver
Napanee, Ontario

Sir

My jaw dropped when I read the large ad in your paper last week from Waste Management. At first I wondered if they were referring to the same Environmental Review Tribunal meeting that I had attended in Deseronto on April 12. My first reaction was followed by a begrudging admiration for the PR office of Waste Management in taking on such a total defeat and trying to spin it as some kind of victory. It reminded me of how the Pentagon would refer to a defeat as a “tactical withdrawal” during the Vietnam War.

So, realizing that Waste Management was trying to claim some kind of “moral victory” (another euphemism for defeat) from essentially “coming out with their hands up” at the ERT meeting, I understood that they were trying to save face and fool our local residents once again. I suspect that WM’s senior management viewed their surrender as more spinable than defeat. But make no mistake about it, the capitulated to most of the demands of the local concerned citizens regarding their landfill. WM has now at long last had to publicly admit that their landfill is leaking off-site. They’ve also had to admit that their leachate monitoring program was inadequate and that they do not have a credible plan for containing the leak.

Despite their admissions of inadequacy at the ERT and “assurances” that “there is no risk to public health or the environment” from their leaking landfill WM continues to try to convince us that it is still a good idea to build a new and much much larger landfill at the same site, on the same fractured limestone bedrock. Of course the bottom line for Waste Management is that they stand to make the huge amounts of money by importing massive amounts of garbage to our community.

Sincerely
Brian Hughes
Napanee, Ontario