PUBLIC HEARING

Margaret Wooster, Great Lakes United

I know I spoke before. I am sorry ... I felt it would be remiss, and I am not speaking for myself, or even GLU right now. But we did do a series of public hearings, 10 of them in 10 cities around the Great Lakes last year. I am going to leave you a copy of this although you have probably all seen it.

We visited 10 cities and the hearings were on water quality. Sort of like taking this public forum on the road. We heard testimony from about 300 citizens. I wanted to read you about maybe six recommendations from the summary at the back. These are addressed both to the International Joint Commission and to the governments.

Under health:

• Local communities should be more meaningfully involved in cleanup plans, including development of design and siting options for disposal facilities, and should have veto power over planned implementation.
• Related to that in terms of health and cleanup, health agencies should initiate and coordinate registries, to better track and protect community health. For example, cancer treatment centres should record information on the occupational and locational histories of their patients. All chemicals used, produced or released in the community should be identified and registered and health effects should be tracked in higher polluted communities, such as Areas of Concern. That was something we heard quite a bit and heard talk about it here as well.
• The International Joint Commission should facilitate planning for just transition to a sustainable economy. Governments, labour and industry, and community members should jointly make these plans.

Under zero discharge, which was by far the biggest thing we heard in terms of number of comments:

• Governments should reaffirm and fulfill their commitment under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to virtual elimination and the philosophy of zero discharge of long-lived toxic substances.

Under cleanup:

• The government should implement the recommendation by the International Joint Commission that the political will must be found. This is a quote from you, from your Ninth Biennial, that the political will must be found and financial resources allocated to dredge and remove contamination sediments.
• The International Joint Commission should recommend that the federal government designate the Serpent River basin as an Area of Concern. The Canadian federal government should develop and fully fund a cleanup plan for the area. Just to comment on that, one of the proposed changes to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement annexes is to have this area of recovery designation as a step toward delisting. There are areas that need to be added to the list, and the Serpent River basin is one of them.

Finally, there are many more. I am just picking so I don't take up too much time. The last one I want to report here that:

• Federal governments should set clear time tables for phasing out and banning persistent toxic substances, and support clean production technology and process changes.

I am going to leave this with you. Thank you very much.