OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Gary Machan, an Oro-Medonte resident who is affiliated with the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition.
Not sure about you, but one drive by the Ministry of Environment and it is a far cry from the hustling centre of activity it once was. You would think its out of business, rather than protecting Ontarians from the excesses of corporate pillage and plunder. And most especially on matters relating to the preservation of our sources of high-quality water, such as is at the top of the Oro Moraine.
Canadians do, after-all, take their water very seriously. Personally, I don’t hold a great deal of confidence that they will have any say on the matter given our
premier and his penchant to construct massive highways nobody wanted, such as the Bradford Bypass.
This $4-billion extravaganza, alone, will demand a never-ending stream of gravel trucks from our local quarries which was also strongly opposed; precisely because of our concern about its impact on our water quality and supply.
No matter, Sargeant has just submitted a recent proposal to take massive amounts of water to wash all the aggregate extracted out of the quarry pits. This is of chief concern since its location in Oro-Medonte is at the top of the Oro Moraine which feeds three major watersheds; including parts of Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. It’s as though they went out of their way to pick the worse possible location for the environment.
Specifically, Sargeant is asking for a permit which will take 454 litres of prime water per minute, 24 hours a day which equates to a volume of 654,624 litres per day, 200 days a year for 10 years!
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, they are applying for a category 3 designation which states “water takings are anticipated to have the highest potential for causing unacceptable impact and interference.” Bear in mind, this last quote is their own and not mine.
Best to think of moraines as giant water filters that remove all impurities so that by the time the water gets down to the water table it is clean and pure for drinking purposes. Hence, taking large amounts of gravel was bad enough; akin to removing the water filter.
But now, what they want to do is to take all the impurities the moraine normally would have removed and make a lake out of them.
Now, will Simcoe County or Oro Medonte Councils speak out on this issue? And if they do, will it even matter? Or to be more cynical is this why there has been talk about ridding our region of municipalities and possibly even the County itself. So that the Ford government can do what it wants, when it wants, to whom it wants, whenever it wants. This being a textbook case of the abuse of provincial power.
Bottom line, the very last thing Oro Medonte and surrounding regions need is the approval of this self- admitted mass scale water taking, along with the highways that the gravel is being shipped to build. As an alternative, might I be so bold as to suggest that a far more appealing option would be for the Ford
government to pony up and construct a new hospital in Orillia, which is something that is sorely needed.
Gary Machan
Oro-Medonte
