Lambton-Kent-Middlesex: Stopping Dresden landfill plan priority for byelection candidates

DRESDEN – As voters head to the polls in Thursday’s Lambton-Kent-Middlesex provincial byelection, a controversial plan for a large waste disposal site near Dresden is a top priority for many candidates.

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Eight candidates are seeking the seat left vacant with the retirement of former Progressive Conservative MPP Monte McNaughton, and five attended Friday’s all-candidates meeting in Dresden, including Liberal candidate Cathy Burghardt-Jesson, New Democrat Kathryn Shailer, New Blue’s Keith Benn, the Ontario Party’s Cynthia Workman and Stephen R. Campbell of the None of the Above Direct Democratic Party.

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Absent were Progressive Conservative candidate Steve Pinsonneault, the Green Party’s Andraena Tilgner and Family Rights hopeful Hilda Walton.

Asked about their top priorities if elected, most cited a plan by Mississauga’s York1 Environmental Waste Solutions Inc., to create an eight-hectare (20-acre) landfill with 1.62 million cubic meters of waste capacity on a long dormant 35-hectare (86 -acre) site with a maximum fill rate of 365,000 tons a year.

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The proposal includes developing a regenerative recycling facility to accept as much as 6,000 tonnes a day of non-hazardous construction and demolition waste along with 30,000 tonnes of unprocessed soils. York1 also wants to operate 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week that would see hundreds of trucks coming to the site daily.

The plan has been fiercely opposed by local residents and municipal officials.

“This has been the one issue that has galvanized all us candidates,” and the community, said Burghardt-Jesson.

If elected, Burghardt-Jesson said she’d be the community’s at Queen’s Park, pushing the environment minister “to put a big ‘X’ through this dump.”

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Shailer said she’d work with Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles to hold Premier Doug Ford’s “feet to the fire about shutting down the dump.”

Benn, a geoscientist, said, “With my technical knowledge of earth sciences, I’m very well placed to be down in Queen’s Park, working directly with and overseeing as best I can or as closely as I can, the Ministry of the Environment . . . to make sure if they do an environmental assessment, that it is properly done.”

Campbell, noting environmental issues and farmland protection rights are his priorities, said current rules allowing landfills within 3.5 kilometers of a community must change. “It needs to be further way, so we need to get new regulations in to get these dumps out of our back yards.”

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Vowing not to let Ford “run roughshod” over the community, Workman said the first will hear about this issue “and we will shut this down for good.”

However, plenty of other issues were raised during the meeting, including:

PRIVATIZATION OF HEALTH CARE

• “We will not be supporting private clinics,” Burghardt-Jesson said. “The money that needs to go into the public system will, so that you can see a doctor in your community, so that wait times will be reduced, so that the backlog in surgeries can be addressed.”
• “The NDP is absolutely against the privatization of our public health-care system,” Shailer said. “We need to bring back health care workers who left because they were demoralized by Bill 124 that capped their wages during COVID.”
• “Publicly funded health care delivered by a privately operated clinic is public health care,” said Benn, adding his party’s position is to “use any innovations of that type. . . to shorten your wait times, get you the treatment that you need faster.”
• Workman said her party believes there is a place for both public and private health care. “We would permit non-profit organizations and private corporations to build, own and manage hospitals,” she said.
• Citing a plan for supplemental private medical insurance, Workman said, “We’re not cutting funding for public health care, but we’re going to give people an option if you can afford it.”
• “We’ve had 2,000 (health-care) workers who have been fired since COVID and haven’t been hired back,” said Campbell, adding Ontario is the only province that hasn’t hired these workers back.

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REPEALING SEX EDUCATION CURRICULUM, ENDING TEACHING OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND GENDER IDEOLOGY

• “I think there is a lot of misinformation about what is taught in our schools,” said Shailer, noting critical race theory and gender ideology are not taught in schools. “We need to let our teachers and specialists to develop the curriculum as they have to reflect the life for our kids,” she said.
• Burghardt-Jesson said a Liberal government would not repeal the sex education curriculum. “We would develop a modern curriculum where every student. . . has education that is accessible to them,” she said. “It would set them up for success. It would be a safe place for learning where all are accepted and it would be an equity-centered approach to education that all students deserve.”
• Benn offered an “emphatic yes” to repealing the sex-ed curriculum. “Schools must provide the knowledge and teach the skills that will allow our children to arrive at adulthood with the intellectual and practical tool kits that will allow them to find work or to be entrepreneurs and create their own work and create work for others,” he said.
• “The Ontario Party stands strong against gender ideology, critical (race) theory and the (former Ontario Premier Kathleen) Wynne sex education curriculum being taught in schools,” said Workman, adding schools need to get back to teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and let parents educate their children about values.
• Campbell said he couldn’t answer the question because of his job with the Thames Valley District School Board, but as an independent, he would go out to the community, listen to opinions and take them to Queen’s Park.

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