Ontario should explain what the confusing numbers mean

                      Globe & Mail Editorial
                      Wednesday, July 12, 2000

                      A modern industrial economy is perverse. It spews out great
                      quantities of wondrous things -- light bulbs, Celine Dion CDs,
                      airplane-wing rivets -- and a Niagara of ugly waste nobody wants:
                      heavy metals, alkaline phosphates, cacodylic acid.

                      The wondrous things get sold, and the ugly things. . . what does
                      happen to the ugly things? The Canadian Institute for
                      Environmental Law and Policy has produced an answer, at least in
                      part, with respect to hazardous waste disposal in Ontario.

                      Using government figures that CIELAP estimates capture only
                      about 60 per cent of the waste treated in the province, the
                      institute's new study says hazardous waste generated in Ontario
                      sites grew from 1,280,674 tonnes in 1994 to 1,816,585 in 1998. At
                      the same time, the amount of waste entering the province from the
                      United States increased from 99,972 tonnes to 235,495 tonnes.

                      The environmental group explains the changes with the subhead,
                      "Hazardous waste disposal becomes a growth industry in Ontario."
                      Maybe, but there are less sinister ways of parsing the numbers.

                      Assuredly, those numbers also reflect the general economic
                      expansion in the province as it moved out of the recession of the
                      early 1990s. Simply put, the more good things Ontario started
                      producing, the more bad things it also made. This fundamental
                      yin-and-yang is unfortunate, but it can't be resolved simply. Only
                      the most perverse of environmentalists would say hip hip hooray for
                      recession and high unemployment (the jobless rate was 9.6 per
                      cent in 1994 and is 5.4 per cent today) because an economy in
                      distress keeps the amount of Ontario's hazardous waste low.

                      Non-perversely, CIELAP suggests the waste-disposal numbers
                      don't simply follow the lock step of manufacture and manufacturing
                      waste. It notes that hazardous-waste disposal has grown by 12 per
                      cent a year in Ontario, well above the total increase in the
                      province's gross domestic product of 17 per cent between 1994
                      and 1998.

                      Interesting comparison, but mightn't some heavy waste-producing
                      industries -- say, pulp and paper -- have increased production while
                      contributing only minimally to GDP because paper prices remained
                      relatively low?

                      The growth of U.S. waste exports to Ontario also may be less than
                      demonic. CIELAP says imports grew because Ontario's
                      hazardous-waste disposal legislation was weaker than that in the
                      United States. Maybe. But we also live in the continent of the strong
                      American dollar and the weak Canadian one. Perhaps it was just
                      cheaper to process waste materials here.

                      Or maybe processing waste has become a local growth industry,
                      because Ontario has learned to do it so safely and so well. Think of
                      the Hollywood North phenomenon rewrit in the disposal of industrial
                      guck.

                      Playing the skeptic, however, is not the same as dismissing
                      CIELAP's statistics. It is quite possible that some of the growth in
                      waste is a reflection of less vigilance in regulating the generation of
                      waste. Ontario's Conservative government has scaled back
                      environmental monitoring in a variety of areas, and that may well
                      translate into a social atmosphere where waste management is
                      taken for granted.

                      But beyond that, the production of this kind of report is not
                      something a poor environmental group should be responsible for.
                      In addition to its yearly economic statistics, an environmentally
                      responsible government would answer all our "maybes" by clearly
                      and simply laying out for its citizens the realities of waste production
                      and waste disposal.

                      Anything less is the lesson of Walkerton not learned.