PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor regarding recent reporting on St. Catharines issues:
Ed Smith is to be commended for his recent reports regarding the appalling threat to both human and wildlife posed by the cocktail of contaminants remaining on the former GM site in St. Catharines.
Did St. Catharines councils and staff of the time, when GM were operating that site, take any steps to ensure that such ongoing contamination was being monitored and dealt with? Or wasn’t that an issue that concerned them at the time?
Also his report about St. Catharines files being kept secret and apparently being administered only by unelected senior staff, should make many alarm bells start ringing for every property owner, taxpayer and voter in Niagara Region.
Anyone who has ever had issues with their own council’s decisions and staff recommendations will know, only too well, how nearly impossible it is to ever receive a satisfactory response from either politician or staff member once any such a policy has been approved by council.
Although municipalities are supposedly non-partisan politically it is a sad fact that many of them have chosen to be so, so there is plenty of blame to go around, not just to politicians but also many bureaucrats who show very partisan views in the recommendations they choose to put before their councils.
As GM opened in 1954 and was only closed in 2010, that’s over 50 years of councils and staff representing every political party and all who will have known at least something of this manufacturing plant in their neighbourhood, both municipal and regional.
And yet, nearly 60 years later, and despite these damning reports only being opened to the public very recently, not a single politician, nor a single member of either regional or municipal government, has even commented on them some weeks after this story first broke.
How utterly shameful.
I can only wish Ed Smith the very best and hope that if he is to continue to follow this ongoing public health disaster, which it is, that one day someone, politician or senior staff, will have the political will and courage to initiate a proper and public enquiry and make anyone aware of this potential contamination over the past many years, and responsible for this cover up, fully accountable.
Regarding the latest report about hidden files, the fact that any municipality allows any city staff to decide they have the authority to keep any files secret, even from politicians, has no place in a democratic society.
I would even question just what is so important to them that they must hide secret documents, particularly if they are files as damning as the GM contamination reports. It becomes even more of a problem when it appears that the politicians we elect to protect our best interests and who are supposed to dictate policy don’t seem to care.
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet