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.
From the "It Goes Without Saying" department comes this gem of a lead paragraph from a recent Winnipeg Free Press article: "Widespread metal contamination in Flin Flon, Man., could have been prevented had provincial and federal regulators enforced tougher emission standards years ago, according to an environmental scientist." Hold on. You mean to say that if the government had established stricter pollution standards years ago, and then enforced said standards, there would have been less pollution in Flin Flon? Wow. Next you're going to tell me that if I had stricter spending standards, I would not own the complete first and second seasons of "Sanford and Son" on DVD. The article continues: "Elaine MacDonald, of Toronto-based Ecojustice, said governments failed to take responsibility and put a cap on toxic emissions they knew were polluting the northern mining town for more than two decades. "MacDonald said scientists studied heavy metal contamination in the area as far back as the 1980s, yet regulators did not push HudBay Minerals Inc. to clean up its act." Actually, regulators did push HudBay to "clean up its act," resulting in the company spending millions to reduce the toxic output from its antiquated copper smelter. The real question is, did our governments Ð whose most basic duty is to protect public safety Ð go far enough, fast enough in regulating the HBMS smelter? Based on the stories I have heard about pre-1974 Flin Flon, I would have to say no. Before the present stack came online 36 years ago, vegetation was regularly killed and the thickness of the toxic smoke had people coughing their lungs out. No one in a country as advanced as Canada should have had to live like that. One could argue that everyone chose to live in Flin Flon and accept the apparent risks, but that's simplistic. What about children who have no say in where they reside? What about those with no means to relocate? What about those who honestly believed breathing in arsenic and lead is no big deal? Of course that was a totally different era. Forty-plus years ago, residents put little thought into air pollution. They just accepted it as part of life in a mining and smelting community. If filling your lungs with toxicity meant jobs for the town, so be it. Yet ever since the present stack was erected, we have become less and less tolerant of all that pollution. Flin Flon, along with western society in general, has abandoned its laissez fare attitude toward the environment. Governments have taken notice and in the early 1990s required HBMS to drastically cut its pollution output. Even stricter limits took effect in 2008, and still-tighter guidelines hit the books in 2015. There was and still is a great deal of uncertainty about the smelter closure's economic impact on our community. No one is pleased about that, but when I talk to residents, I find that a large majority are pleased that the skyline has stopped smoking. For them, the old Flin Flon trade-off Ð breathing in toxins in exchange for jobs Ð was no longer worth it. Call it a sign of the times. Local Angle runs Fridays.
