Dear editor,
News outlets across NW Ontario have recently carried news about financial contributions from the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) to the Twp. of Ignace. There has been great excitement over the grand but practical assets purchased by the township with these funds in 2023.
A pumper truck purchased by Ignace with NWMO’s contributed funds made an lovely news story this past summer, but do readers realize that by the end of 2022, the Twp. of Ignace had already been given almost $10 million by the NWMO? These contributions were not provided simply to compensate the township for its consulting expenses related to the NWMO’s proposed project – a deep geological repository for highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste, 40 km west of Ignace. Surely such consultation costs certainly don’t approach $10 million. Many feel that the funds the NWMO injects into Ignace are intended to create a dependency and sense of obligation over time.
The NWMO has also given over $4 million to Dryden, and substantial funding to other northern communities – communities that may influence whether all of Canada’s accumulated nuclear fuel waste will be transported, at two or three truckloads a day for 50 years, buried, and abandoned in NW Ontario.
In a recent news stories, Ignace Mayor Kim Baigrie called the assets recently purchased with help from the NWMO “key components of our community and our overall well-being.”
And, similarly, a Dryden Councillor recently wrote on social media that, “it feels unfair to punish taxpayers,” by opposing the project.
Do any other dangerous industries ply communities with millions of dollars, in advance of those communities’ decisions on whether to admit them? There is a big difference between the NWMO’s largesse and, say, a forestry company’s donation to a library or hockey team sponsorship. Such companies (being less controversial) are already in the community when they make these contributions
But the NWMO’s millions? I feel they have a darker purpose: to influence a local decision that will have hundreds of thousands of years of implications, and one that will affect millions of Ontarians in this generation alone. I believe this use of hydro ratepayers’ money by the NWMO, to influence economically vulnerable communities to accept their dangerous project, is unethical.
It should be noted that Fort Frances is in the proposed project’s watershed. The Twp. of Ignace is not.
The NWMO will make its site decision this fall.
Wendy O’Connor
Murillo
We The Nuclear Free North
