Remember when the catchphrase of the provincial Conservatives used to be “Fiberals” when talking about the Liberal governments under Dalton McGuinty and later Kathleen Wynne?
Well, here in Chatham-Kent, there should be a contest for what to call Conservative Premier Doug Ford these days.
We expect many suggestions won’t be fit to print.
Let’s review.
Just last March, Ford spoke to reporters at an unrelated press conference in Windsor and one of the attending journalists asked him about plans by Mississauga-based York1 to expand landfill capacity at Irish School Road and build a regenerative recycling facility.
He said he’d never heard about it, but pledged to support the residents.
“If the people like something, we do it,” Ford said. “If they don’t, we don’t do it. It’s about as simple as that.”
It’s so simple, apparently, that his government passed Bill 5, which included eliminating the need for an environmental assessment on the property.
After all, those assessments only provide detailed potential environmental impacts such a project might have on the area. The property is all but adjacent to waterways that flow into the Sydenham River, which is rife with species at risk.
The Sydenham also flows right through Dresden and Wallaceburg.
But Ford doesn’t seem to believe in just one lie. Remember when he was campaigning here seven years ago, and he considered wind turbines a pox on the landscape? In April of 2018, Water Wells First members confronted the future-premier over health concerns for dark sediment in a number of water wells in North Kent. Residents asked for a health-hazard investigation.
Ford declined to detail support he would pledge to the residents if elected, but he dropped what at the time sounded like sincere concern.
“This a serious issue here and I give you my word, we’re going to address it,” Ford said. “I can’t stand wind turbines; I can’t stand how they are destroying areas and communities and I’m going to do everything I can to halt any other wind turbine farms and I’m going to address the ones that are going in,” he said to the citizens. “We’re going to address it. It will be my number one issue. And what I say I’m going to do, I do… I’m giving you my word.”
Ask North Kent homeowners with fouled wells, or residents in and around Dresden what the premier’s word is worth.
Probably nothing more than a glass of either sediment-choked or polluted water.
