Political garbage stinks: McGuinty.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: North Bay; Gord McGuinty

Gord McGuinty has every confidence his Adams Mine project will be up and operating by the end of 2005. With Michigan's swelling opposition to Toronto exporting truckloads of household garbage to Metro Detroit, and the very real possibility of long border tie-ups, the head of the Adams Mine Rail Haul believes it is inevitable that the City of Toronto and Queen's Park will look north again for a solution.

In fact, he is preparing to proceed with some preliminary groundwork this fall on the former Kirkland Lake open pit mine with an objective to accept 1.3 million tonnes per year of waste as Ontario's only licensed available mega-landfill site.

"We intend to start construction within the month," McGuinty says. "And there is nothing out there that will prohibit us from doing that."

He plans to do some rock scaling and design work on the proposed $50-million plan to rail southern Ontario garbage 590 kilometres north via the Canadian National Railway to North Bay for the Ontario Northland Railway to haul to the pit.

Even if the political will is not there to reconsider Kirkland Lake, McGuinty still holds a provincial conditional Certificate of Approval of his landfill design and ground water containment technology.

He is seeking a permit from the Ministry of Environment to de-water the pit, which he expects to receive, once the ministry has finished its due diligence on his application.

He says it is time for the "politics of garbage" to end.

Tired and frustrated against what he considers a "sham" campaign of alleged misinformation being spread about the Adams Mine, McGuinty is taking legal action against the Temiskaming Federation of Agriculture (TFA) and its president John Vanthoff for allegedly making false statements, which have frustrated the project's development.

The final straw was Vanthoff's claim that their representatives had been on the Adams Mine property and had taken water elevations and discovered levels were dropping, suggesting containment had failed and the pit was leaking.

McGuinty says he offered to grant Ken Howard, a hydrologist retained by the TFA, a tour of the Adams Mine site, but the offer was declined. He further offered to make his Toronto consultants, Golder Associates, available to review all their technical information, and that offer was also refused.

He defends the environmental assessment process conducted in 1996, as well as the technical work conducted by Golder and the findings of the independent peer review...