We have to give credit to Jane Toller for being very clear about her intentions.
When she was running for re-election as warden in 2021, she told us – and we reported on the front page of our September 15 issue of that year – that she had a vision of municipalities throughout the Ottawa Valley bringing their garbage to the Pontiac.
“We have made a claim for ourselves as the only willing host in the Outaouais to take municipal waste from the Outaouais, and Ontario, when it is permitted. This will mean 50 jobs and save us over a million dollars a year,” she said, recalling her happiness at seeing the Le Droit headline ‘Pontiac wants our garbage,’ our article reported.
Last week, the warden took another step in realizing her vision. In two town hall-styled meetings, one in Shawville and the other in Fort Coulonge, she laid out her proposal to build an incinerator at the former Smurfit-Stone industrial site near the Ottawa River in Litchfield, not far from Portage du Fort, that would burn garbage from Ottawa, Renfrew, Pembroke and the Outaouais, as well as our own.
Heat from the fire would be used to generate as much as 45 MW of electricity, probably by boiling water to produce steam that would turn turbines, as is done in the Covanta facility in Durham-York that several Pontiac mayors and directors-general have already visited.
In the vicinity of 400,000 tons of garbage would be required ‘to ensure the project’s economic viability and maximize its environmental impact’, she said. To keep the incinerator running almost non-stop, this would require the importation of some 395,000 tonnes of garbage into the Pontiac each year, to combine with the 5,000 tonnes we produce here and currently send to the landfill in Lachute at a cost of $1.7 million per year.
She estimates that importing this volume of garbage would involve 35 truckloads traveling into the Pontiac per day, most of them crossing over the bridge at the Chenaux dam and the rest traveling up Hwy 148.
The warden says the project would create 800 jobs to build the $450 million facility over three years, followed by 50 permanent jobs to run it, and that she has received expressions of interest in financing the venture to the tune of $180 million from private investors, leaving $270 million to be raised in government grants.
She also reports that all 18 mayors in MRC Pontiac are on-board with the project and that 17 of the municipalities have already passed supportive resolutions.
These are some of the essential facts of the matter presented by the warden last week. Assessing the viability of the proposal will require consideration of much more detailed information than we can provide here.
To help with that, at its meeting last week the MRC struck an Energy from Waste Committee composed of Warden Jane Toller and mayors Alain Gagnon (Bryson), Corey Spence (Allumettes Island) and Lynne Cameron (Portage du Fort) to examine the business case for such a venture.
We look forward to learning the terms of reference for their investigation, the scope of their inquiry and the nature of any opportunities for expert and citizen engagement envisioned in the process.
Numerous questions vital to the future of the Pontiac come to mind of an economic, social and environmental nature that will have to be subjected to thoughtful consideration in order for their report, expected later this year, to go beyond a classic jobs-vs-pollution debate and play a useful role in informing the public on this important matter.
Charles Dickson
