Kafkaesque: Opposing an industrial wind turbine project in Ontario
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Take a look at what happens when Ontarians try to oppose an industrial wind turbine project.
Laws, regulations, and processes seem to have eliminated every conceivable obstacle for the mad rush of the (economically useless, environmentally destructive) wind industrialization of rural Ontario. At the same time they effectively, undemocratically block wind project opponents at every turn. The Ontario Green Energy Act (GEA) and its quasi-judicial complaints department, the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) pitch opponents headlong into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
An example:
- The government gives the Proponent permission to undertake an industrial wind turbine construction project, which includes granting a special environmental permit that allows the Proponent to kill, harm, and harass a Victim or two.
- Locals launch an appeal on the grounds that the project would, amongst other troublesome consequences, cause serious and irreversible harm to the Victims.
- The appeal is heard by a Tribunal, which issues a very rare decision favouring the Victims, finding that the Proponent’s project will indeed cause serious and irreversible harm to two classes of Victims.
- The Tribunal orders a further hearing to consider the Proponent’s proposed mitigations of this serious and irreversible harm.
- In the meantime, however, the Proponent is legally entitled (and signals the intention) to go ahead and begin the project site pre-construction work, and in the process kill, harm, and harass Victims, without first having to table mitigation plans at the next Tribunal hearing (see 4 above).
- Lawyers for the Victims file a motion to have the Tribunal issue a stay of the Proponent’s pre-construction on-site activity associated with the special permit to kill, harm, and harass.
- The Tribunal dismisses the Victims’ motion, with reasons for its decision to be given at a later time.
- Lawyers for the Victims then appeal to a Divisional Court with a motion for a stay.
- The Divisional Court also dismisses the appeal because the Victims’ lawyers, through no fault of their own, are unable to establish specific grounds for said appeal, given that they are in the dark about the reasons for the Tribunal’s dismissal of the motion (see 7 above).
- The Victims’ lawyers are entitled to renew their Divisional Court motion (see 8 above), if and when they ever receive the reasons for the Tribunal’s dismissal decision (see 7 above).
- Meanwhile, the circle is complete, with the Proponent apparently free to go ahead and kill, harm, and harass the Victims, even though there is to be a future Tribunal hearing (see 4 above) at which the Proponent is supposed to make proposals for mitigating the killing, harming, and harassing that probably will already have taken place by then.
That is the saga thus far with respect to the battle between the Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County and the wind energy company wpd Canada Corporation.
The ERT appears to be nothing more than a Kafkaesque-Potemkin-kangaroo-emperor-with-no-clothes court.
The GEA and its companion, the ERT have allowed wind energy companies, eager to cash in on the Ontario Liberal government’s 20-year-guaranteed, above-market returns, to ride roughshod over democratic rights of people and municipalities. The kleptocratic subsidy scheme is footed by the taxpayers, and consumers’ electricity charges triple as a result.
Wind project opponents are spending inordinate amounts of time and money to fight a losing battle, the contest rigged from the start. For wind project opponents, the ERT appears to be nothing more than a Kafkaesque-Potemkin-kangaroo-emperor-with-no-clothes court.
The ERT gives people the illusion of offering democratic equality and justice before the law. In reality, it forces them to accept the industrialization of rural Ontario against their will, while depleting their wallets and spirit.
What’s at play here is just one aspect of the insidious implementation of the UN’s one-world-government Agenda 21, a blueprint for an anti-prosperity, anti-democratic sustainable development and wealth transfer movement. It uses the cudgel of the massive scientific deception of manmade climate change to clobber and guilt people into phony-green-energy submission. It has them running in circles, looking in vain for democracy and laws to protect their rights.
UPDATES
APRIL 4, 2016 – Wind developer wpd Canada Corporation indeed started clearing trees in preparation for wind turbine construction, despite the fact that the entire project was under appeal.
This work began in areas known to be habitat for the endangered Blandings Turtle; the power developer is continuing even though there are reports that milder weather has resulted in the turtles emerging early from their winter hibernation, and are at great risk.
Vegetation cleared in Prince Edward County Blanding’s Turtle wetland area, while the White Pines project was and still is under appeal. [Photo: APPEC]
…Sylvia Davis, lawyer for the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, cited a ruling from over fifty years ago that only a panel of three judges could hear an appeal of this nature.
It became clear at that point that the motion would not be heard until after the legal matter of whether this was properly before the court had been dealt with, with a potentially unfavourable decision.
Rather than spend considerable time and money on legal wrangling the decision was made to withdraw our motion for a stay on all physical activity at the White Pines project site. The motion was withdrawn on consent of all parties and without costs.
We will immediately be going to the Tribunal to once again request a stay.
APRIL 8, 2016 – And then, mirabile dictu, the ERT granted a temporary stay!
Late this afternoon the Environmental Review Tribunal granted a temporary stay of WPD’s Renewable Energy Approval (REA). As a result of the stay all construction work at the project site has been brought to a halt. The Tribunal will schedule a written hearing at a later date to decide on the merits of a more permanent stay.
There will be blood on the ground: permission to kill and do serious, irreversible harm
An Ontario Divisional Court overturned last year’s decision by the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal that stopped the construction of nine industrial wind turbines that would despoil the environmentally sensitive Ostrander Point, situated on provincially-owned Crown land in Prince Edward County. Last year, the Tribunal had revoked the approval, given by the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) in December 2012, on the basis that the Blanding’s turtle would suffer serious and irreversible harm if the development went ahead.
The MOE joined the project proponent, Gilead Power, in an appeal of the Tribunal’s ruling to the Ontario Divisional Court. “Three lawyers from the Ministry of Environment and the Attorney General’s office argued that their own MOE-appointed panel had erred,” said the Wellington Times.
With the Divisional Court’s decision on February 20, 2014, Gilead Power Corporation is presumably once again entitled, according to the permit it was originally granted on July 23, 2012 by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) under the Endangered Species Act, 2007 (ESA), “to ‘damage and destroy the habitat of Eastern Whip-poor-will’, as well as to ‘kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport’ both Blanding‟s turtle and Whip-poor-will, resulting from the development and operation of the Project” (from the Tribunal’s ruling, see Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County v. July 3, 2013).
Permits to kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport a species at risk or to damage and destroy its habitat are no longer issued to industrial wind turbine developers, but not for the reasons you may think.
Seven months ago the Ontario government almost completely undid its leash on the marauding weasels of wind. It gave up its power to monitor and regulate what the industrial wind turbine developers do to wildlife and the environment, making it even easier for the wind companies to do their dirty work, and harder than ever for concerned citizens and communities to assert their rights. New regulations granting more special rights to wind companies state in part:
Under the amended regulation, eligible proponents are automatically given an exemption provided they follow the prescribed rules. MNR has given up its power to say “no” to any project, regardless of the ecological importance of the area or the possibility there will be damaging cumulative impacts on the species at risk or its habitat.
Although proponents are generally required to document the measures they will take to minimize “adverse effects” on species, proponents almost never have to submit the documentation to MNR. MNR will therefore have no ability to know whether the permit-by-rule system is actually protecting species at risk.
The government’s own Environmental Commissioner has stated:
“By eliminating the permit process, the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) has shed its ability to say ‘no’ to a proposed activity, no matter how harmful it may be to an imperilled species,” says Commissioner Miller. “And since proponents don’t have to file any monitoring reports with the ministry, MNR will be blind to the effectiveness of its new rules.”
The Ontario Liberal government is wilfully enabling the destruction of the environment (not to mention people’s health, communities, property values, quality of life) for a fake-green technology that has proven to be useless and has already wasted billions of dollars. It’s enough to make you scream at the insanity, the government’s dereliction of fiduciary duty to the people, and the perversion of democracy in Ontario.
Victims of a massive global warming fraud
So the Blanding’s Turtle must once again prove that it is in sufficient danger to warrant protection against industrial wind turbines from bestriding and destroying its unique, fragile habitat at Ostrander Point in Prince Edward County. Not only that, the proponents of the proposed wind factory, (Gilead Power) claim in their appeal of the recent decision of the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) protecting the turtle, that the reptile’s advocates, Prince Edward County Field Naturalists (PECFN), must “prove that the project would cause serious and irreversible harm to the turtle population province wide.” (Our emphasis.)
This is an interesting tack to take considering that the original decision of the ERT rejected such extrapolations, insisting on case-by-case assessment, when it came to previous Tribunal findings about the harmful effects of industrial wind turbine operations on human health!
But Gilead, and the Ministry of the Environment (MOE), which is also appealing the ERT decision, know they have the upper hand. Laws and rules, specially written so that all kinds of inconvenient obstacles have been swept aside to facilitate the wind industry’s free rein, are heavily weighted in favour of allowing industrial wind factories to be built practically anywhere, over the objections of unwilling hosts, damn the consequences. Two things worth considering here:
1. Let’s stop calling industrial wind factories ‘farms’ or ‘parks’ or ‘projects’ as if they complement a rural setting, as if they are benign, productive or beneficial. Make no mistake: these are sprawling industrial factories, useless ones, plonked ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly into the middle of working farms, and right beside homes, schools, and airports, and in pastoral landscapes and environmentally sensitive natural beauty.
Anyone who doubts this characterization of what’s going on should take a drive through Melanchton Township or the Chatham-Kent area, or any one of the locations marked on this map, and spend some time looking at and contemplating the uglification and utter ruination of the scenic countryside. The sight is unnerving. At times you’re surrounded 360˚ by the un-green white and grey monsters. You know that you’re in a vast industrial area that was once bucolic countryside. The eye tries in vain to focus on the fields, the trees, the sky, the clouds, but the constant, dizzying motion of the industrial behemoths engenders a disorienting, nervous tension. Your anxiety mounts as you see herons, raptors, the August flocks of gathering starlings flying perilously close to the turbines. You just want to get out of there. You flee even though you haven’t experienced the noise, the vibrations, the infrasound, the light flicker and other deleterious side effects of turbine operations relentlessly torturing rural residents whose homes are under seige by the monster machines.
2. How did we arrive at this crazy, insane situation where different ministries and arms of the Ontario government are fighting each other, reversing or trying to reverse each other’s decisions, each side’s lawyers and experts funded out of the same taxpayer purse? Where the Ministry of the Environment belies its name and grants permits for wind factories to be placed at designated Important Bird Areas, when the MOE knows they slice and dice birds and bats? Where Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health sticks her head in the sand and pretends that rural residents’ complaints of ill health caused by turbines are all in their heads? Where, despite overwhelming evidence that wind turbines are an environmental and billions-of-your-dollars economic disaster, the current Wynne government recklessly, heedlessly perpetuates the so-called ‘green‘ energy policies of her discredited, cowardly-slunk-away McGuinty predecessor? Where wind companies get a guaranteed, free-ride sinecure for a mind-boggling 20 years, paid for by you and your children, and in the process are free to blight the landscape, trample on property rights, and rob us of our democratic heritage, as allowed by the pernicious Green Energy Act?
Who and what is behind the forced imposition of useless industrial wind turbines on the people and their land, made possible by an unprecedented, legislated abrogation of democratic rights, resulting in the callous ruination of quality of life, homes, and property, wasting billions of our dollars, and hobbling the economy with sky-rocketing electricity costs and job losses?
.…one of the greatest scientific scandals in the history of the world on which billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money…squandered. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
The shocking answer is that the Liberal government of Ontario is hell-bent on sacrificing the province’s people, land, wildlife, treasure, democracy and economic future on the altar of a false global warming god, brought to you courtesy of the United Nations (UN), the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s Agenda 21, the UN’s International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), propagandists like carbon trader Al Gore and name-caller David Suzuki, and many other dishonest, even disgraced-but-still-influential players in the ‘green’ and environmental movement – Climategate scientists, lobbyists, politicians, NGOs, charities, and not-for-profit organizations.
Man-made global warming has to this day not been scientifically proven, notwithstanding what the mass media take as a given, and what proselytizers and profiteers like Al Gore and David Suzuki and many others of their ilk want you to believe.
‘Climate change’…It’s not a genuine problem to be solved, but a handy excuse – with a fashionable green patina – to advance a particular social and political agenda under the cloak of ecological righteousness and scientific authority. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
The UN’s ICLEI, for example, has probably infiltrated and signed up your community and provided your leaders with its cookie cutter blueprint for eroding your property rights, most likely without your knowledge or your vote. The UN’s Agenda 21, a master plan for a world government to control every aspect of your life under the guise of ‘saving the planet’, has been implemented under our noses for the last 21 years and has influenced, even bound our governments and nibbled away at our sovereignty. Scary stuff, and most of us are completely unaware of what is really going on. The fix is in, Big Money is being made and spent, a good part of it coming out of your pocket. The Blanding’s Turtle is not the only one in danger.
Increasingly when you read what is said and done by our governments in the name of ‘combatting climate change’, you have to pinch yourself in disbelief…wishful thinking and economically suicidal lunacy has managed to worm its way into twenty-first-century representative democracy. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
Follow the links in this post, but also do your own research. Find out exactly how it has come to pass that Ontario has been invaded by useless, dangerous wind turbines that have wreaked economic, environmental and social disaster, and why the Wynne government is wilfully blind to the carnage, promising more of the same. If you want to trace the dots from the costly, destructive industrial wind turbines in your backyard back to the workings of a UN-led sinister, international web of global warming fraud and the malevolent, venal grab for money and domination, start with the very readable Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future, by James Delingpole.
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