Landfill Injunction

Thursday, 27 March 2014 at 11:13

When it comes to the Walker Landfill proposal, the County may be headed to Superior Court.

County Council will be moving forward with a request to seek a Court Injunction to immediately stop the Environmental Assessment process for the Southwestern Landfill proposed by Walker Industries and that it be referred to the CAO for the preparation of a Report following receipt of a legal opinion.

Representatives from several local environmental groups made the ask Wednesday night.

Chair of Oxford Coalition For Social Justice Bryan Smith says he is very happy the motion received unanimous support.

"We see this as a piece of a Sustainability Plan. If you can prevent injury or harm, which is what an injunction would do, that allows you then the time to build for more positive things and that's clearly their intent and we are really glad that is their intent."

Smith says the injunction is a legal way to deal with the proposal quickly and efficiently without continuing to spend lots of money.

Smith says the Minister of Environment had the right to turn down the proposal early on even though we are now far into the process.

"We've been two years on this, they have had two cracks at this, they have had extensions when they shouldn't have extensions and the Minister on the other hand has had over 13000 pieces of correspondence out of this County opposed to it and he has had scientific opinion on it already."

Smith says Warden Don McKay's suggestion to tackle the current air quality is an excellent one.

"I guess what we would need is the Ministry of Environment to gather some data, quite quickly, about what the levels are, to multiply that by the number of years that we have been subjected to that and look at what is the damage, the harm and injury that's already in place for citizens here so I think that's really a valuable thing we should be doing."

Smith says the data currently available is incomplete and corrupted.

No word on when the injunction may make it to Superior Court.