WDO--some briefing notes for the new minister

by Jay Arthur


Firstly, Ms Dombrowsky, please accept my congratulations on your appointment. You join a long line of Ontario environment ministers during the past few years. It seems Mr. Harris and Mr. Eves were fervent believers in recycling (judging by their recycling of ministers), but they showed little interest in the funding of Ontario's blue box
Municipalities in your province will, therefore, be very hopeful that a change at Queen's Park will mean some actual action--as opposed to words-on the financing of Ontario's recycling programs.
If you look at the In Tray on your desk, you'll find two huge files left over from the previous administration. One is marked Walkerton and another marked Adams Mine. (That's the one with the plain brown envelope attached--don't open it. Send it back to Dalton's cousin.)
Anyway, further down the pile there is another large file. It is marked WDO--Waste Diversion Ontario.
It would be good to look at it fairly quickly, because all it really needs is a signature.
No one expects you to start throwing your name on a document without some knowledge of what it's about, so here are some briefing notes for you.
I have tried to keep it "brief" but this thing has dragged on for so long (since you guys were last in power as a matter of fact), it is not be easy to be succinct.
Back in the old days, the theory was that recycling programs would pay for themselves, using the revenues from the materials collected.
Well it didn't quite work out that way and by the time Bob Rae replaced David Pearson and Ruth Grier replaced Jim Bradley, blue box programs were in big trouble. Mr. Rae's NDP government solved the problem in the short term by using Ontario tax dollars to subsidize recycling while the fledgeling industry matured and stable markets and efficiencies  brought the costs down.
Well it didn't quite work out that way.

Then Mr. Harris came along and pulled the funding from the backs of the provincial taxpayer and placed the entire burden squarely on the backs of the municipal taxpayer.
In the face of grumbling by the beleaguered municipalities, industry folks came up with various responses to the demands for stewardship. They also came up with a number of cash-for-silence initiatives designed to quell short-term crises.
Eventually the grumbling grew so loud that something actually had to be done and the boys in the backroom came up with what is laughingly known as the Waste Diversion Act. It has nothing to do with diversion, of course. Even industry's lobbyists have said 50 per cent diversion is the best you can expect from the current Ontario system. But it does appear to be a way to quiet down the grumbling. Municipalities know all this but they have come to the point where there are so brow-beaten (or just pragmatic) that they figure they will take what they can get--even if it means low diversion and less than half of the funding they need. And this is why they are urging you to sign the Blue Box Program Plan.
So, you might want to do that.
But, you might also want to remind everyone that your job description says environment (you may have to spell it for some folks) not finance, and that you have mandate to divert waste. And I humbly suggest you pay a visit to the folks in British Columbia and have a chat with them.
In BC, there are programs which achieve much higher diversion from landfill and do not act as a drain on the municipal taxpayer. (Believe me, in BC right now, with Mike Harris's alter ego in charge, municipalities need all the help they can get. And they love the current stewardship programs.)
In fact, the BC Government just passed a very handy little document called the Extended Producer Responsibility Regulation. You should get yourself a copy.
With that huge budget deficit, you don't want to be wasting any more money looking at these issues. I'm sure the folks in BC wouldn't mind if you just cut and pasted Ontario for BC.
Then you can tell the producers in Ontario (as they do in BC) that if they don't like it they can come up with their own program.

But in the meantime, if you could just sign the blue box plan...