The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A drop in lead levels among local children has reaffirmed that industrial-borne metals today pose virtually no health risk to Flin Flon area residents. That was the conclusion of the recently released final portion of the Flin Flon Soils Study into the potential health impacts of Hudbay pollution. It is reassuring news, to be sure. For most, it lays to rest any questions over how lingering contaminants from the now-defunct copper smelter may be getting into our bodies and harming us. But the Flin Flon Soils Study only speaks to the situation today. It makes no comment on the health risks residents may have endured in the 1990s and earlier, when smelter pollution was at its heaviest. I remember being a little boy in the 1980s walking around downtown and tasting smelter smoke so thick that it was like toxic peanut butter on your tongue. It was dismissed as normal. 'That's just smelter smoke' the adults would say. But it wasn't normal. And in hindsight, it probably wasn't acceptable. I was barely a teenager when I began thinking that maybe all of that smoke in the sky wasn't so benign after all. And I have The Reminder to thank. The May 4, 1994 edition of this newspaper detailed a Manitoba Health study showing that Flin Flon residents were 30 per cent more likely to be hospitalized with respiratory disease than other Manitobans. Doctors and health experts who conducted the study said the most likely reason was our exposure to smelter gases. Besides the studies, there were countless anecdotes. A friend who moved to Flin Flon from Winnipeg _ a healthy young man _ told me that the first time he breathed in smelter smoke, he threw up. That was in 2008, when the smoke was mild compared to previous levels, and my friend was at Foster Park _ a fair distance from the smoke stack. Others speak of eczema and asthma symptoms greatly diminishing since the smelter gave off its last puff of smoke three years ago. Justified For decades, many justified the smelter as a tradeoff: polluted air in exchange for jobs. Some went so far as to say that Hudbay would shut down entirely without the smelter and that expressing health concerns should be forbidden. That wasn't true, of course, and although the 2010 smelter closure meant layoffs and fewer jobs, by then there weren't many people left to defend the facility. I still remember the CTV and Global camera crews who came to town to cover the smelter closure. Standing on Main Street, they had no problem finding people to go on camera and essentially say, 'Good riddance.' Anyone concerned about the pollution should not blame Hudbay, by the way. The company merely did what governments allowed via pollution legislation. Interestingly, it was never the supposedly green Liberals or NDP to truly crack down on the smelter. Instead, it was the big-business-loving Progressive Conservatives and Conservatives. PC Prime Minister Brian Mulroney curbed pollution at Canadian smelters with his 1991 Acid Rain Treaty. Now Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Tories will, in 2015, enact even more rigid smelter pollution guidelines. If economics hadn't killed the Flin Flon smelter in 2010, it was already known that the 2015 pollution guidelines would. Ottawa could no longer justify such high levels of toxic emissions. I'm not an ultra environmentalist, but I do believe in reasonably clean air for all Canadians. I'm sorry for how the smelter closure affected the lives of some workers, but I'm still glad the smelter is gone. I'm also pleased with the latest _ and final _ findings of the Flin Flon Soils Study. The health-related question marks that for so long enveloped Flin Flon have officially been erased. Local Angle runs Fridays.
