Kafkaesque: Opposing an industrial wind turbine project in Ontario
(Scroll down for updates)
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.
Health Canada—in spite of itself!—finds a significantly harmful relationship between human health and wind turbine noise
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch
See UPDATE further below.
From Health Canada’s November 6, 2014 news release of its $2.1 million Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study:
…the study did demonstrate a relationship between increasing levels of wind turbine noise and annoyance towards several features (including noise, vibration, shadow flicker, and the aircraft warning lights on top of the turbines) associated with wind turbines.
“Annoyance,” as a criterion within the context of a health study, is a recognized, significant health hazard:
A WHO epidemiology study assessed noise annoyance and documented significantly elevated relative risks exist both in the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, and the musculoskeletal system as well as by depression. The study concluded that for chronically strong annoyance a causal chain exists between the three steps [of] health – strong annoyance – increased morbidity. Other symptoms associated with annoyance from various noise sources include: stress, sleep disturbance, headaches, difficulty concentrating, irritability, fatigue, dizziness or vertigo, tinnitus, anxiety, heart ailments, and palpitation. Chronic severe annoyance induced by noise must be classified as a serious human health risk.
The Health Canada report is only a summary:
A more detailed presentation of the results will be submitted for publication in scientific journals. Results should only be considered final following peer-review and publication in the scientific literature.
The finding of “a relationship between increasing levels of wind turbine noise and annoyance” should have been big, game-changing news and raised serious alarm bells in Ontario, where the Wynne Liberal government is intent on continuing to destroy farmland, rural communities, families, livelihoods, quality of life, wildlife, the environment, beautiful landscapes, and property values with thousands more of the useless industrial monsters, against the will of most of the people and the communities affected, and to the despair of urbanites knowledgeable about the subject. But no—the finding of annoyance, an important health indicator which has an established “causal chain” of “health – strong annoyance – morbidity,” did not make the headlines and was barely mentioned in most media reports, or was dismissed in the “colloquial” sense of the word “annoyance.” Instead, most of the mainstream media dutifully reported a contradictory finding of wind turbine noise (WTN) and human health, which in Health Canada’s summary was detailed first and was helpfully highlighted in a box so as not to be missed:
The following were not found to be associated with WTN exposure:
- self-reported sleep (e.g., general disturbance, use of sleep medication, diagnosed sleep disorders);
- self-reported illnesses (e.g., dizziness, tinnitus, prevalence of frequent migraines and headaches) and chronic health conditions (e.g., heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes); and
- self-reported perceived stress and quality of life.
But further along in the summary, Health Canada does admit that:
- WTN annoyance was found to be statistically related to several self-reported health effects including, but not limited to, blood pressure, migraines, tinnitus, dizziness, scores on the PSQI, and perceived stress.
- WTN annoyance was found to be statistically related to measured hair cortisol, systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Health Canada then qualifies these statistically significant findings of both self-reported health effects and objective, measured health indices with statements about how the same things were observed for road traffic annoyance, that the conditions may have pre-dated industrial wind turbine installations, and that community annoyance activities could play a role over and above WTN. Of course!
Health Canada’s study has been heavily criticized on a variety of aspects having to do with its design, methodology, and its unseemly hasty conclusions that favour the wind energy sector’s efforts to convince us that industrial wind turbines are safe and do not adversely affect human health. Find out how and why Health Canada’s Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study is deeply flawed:
- Denise Wolfe: Review of the Health Canada Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study
- Epidemiologist Joan Morris offers her thoughts on the Health Canada’s wind turbine and noise health study.
- Prof disputes wind turbine report
- Jane Wilson, President of Wind Concerns Ontario, describes her disappointment with the Health Canada report on the health effects of wind turbines.
- Dr. Robert McMurtry, the founding director of Wind Concerns Ontario, comments on the Health Canada Study of industrial wind turbines.
- Turbine health impact
UPDATE
- Get a sense of the extreme intrusion, disruption, and health havoc inflicted on rural people from the gut-wrenching video below of life amidst an industrial wind turbine plant in Ontario.
- Read Lawrence Solomon’s article, Ill winds blow from wind turbines, in the Financial Post.
- Read Wind Concerns Ontario’s expert analysis of the Health Canada study: Health Canada Study A Missed Opportunity To Find The Truth
Ridiculous, apocalyptic scaremongering by Canadian Green Party leader
Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May (photo by ItzaFineDay used under CC BY/crop, colour adjust from original)
In a discussion about pipelines and energy policy on the CBC’s radio program The House yesterday, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, spoke of a horror so freaking unspeakable that Canadians haven’t even been told about it yet, so gut-wrenchingly gruesome that she did not want to describe it, so certain-end-of-life doomsday that she couldn’t “go there”:
Energy security for Canada in the context of reducing greenhouse gases….the International Energy Agency has said – and this is very important to know – they have said that of all the fossils fuels we know about, two-thirds of them must remain in the ground ’til at least 2050.
In other words, if we want to avoid levels of climate change and climate crisis that exceed anything that Canadians have been told about yet, that become so disruptive to our economy, disruptive to our lifestyles, we don’t want to describe it because we don’t want to go there.
To avoid those levels of catastrophic, destabilizing climate crisis, two-thirds of all known reserves of fossil fuels of all kinds must remain in the ground ’til at least mid-century.
Needless to say, the premise for Elizabeth May’s baseless, dire warning went, as usual, unchallenged by the CBC, in this case by guest-host Terry Milewski, because it would appear that at our national broadcaster, as with most other mainstream media, the fiction of man-made, CO2-caused climate change (now climate crisis, formerly known as global warming) is accepted as an indisputable, scientific fact. Listen here, at approximately the 11:00 mark.
In case you are not up to speed on the facts of global warming/climate change/climate crisis, check out the following:
As of today, there has been no global warming for 17 years and ten months.
You can verify this yourself: carbon dioxide or CO2, a greenhouse gas, has not been proven to cause global warming, because interestingly, during those 17 years and 10 months with no warming, CO2 levels did rise. Another salient point is that when there was some warming before it stopped more than 17 years ago, CO2 levels were found to have risen AFTER the warming, not before. Ergo, CO2 cannot be, or have been, or will be the cause of any global warming in the past or in Elizabeth May’s doom-laden future.
Of course, as Elizabeth May and the CBC and the International Energy Agency (and Wynne/McGuinty and Suzuki and Gore and Obama, et alia) should know, but maybe they don’t, CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a harmless trace gas that is essential to life on earth as plant food, constituting a mere .038% of the atmosphere.
The demonization of CO2, and everything that follows from that great, deliberate deception, will continue as long as people remain willfully ignorant, or blind, or biased, or corrupt, or just plain evil.
Bitter, cold (Part 2): Predatory pilfering, plundering, and axing an eagle’s nest
The protesters, predominately rural residents of Ontario, who gathered in front of the Ontario Legislative Building at Queen’s Park on a bitterly cold February 24 to protest against the massive proliferation of useless industrial wind factories in the countryside, were cheered by the words of a number of speakers.
Sherri Lange, CEO, NA-PAW, North American Platform Against Wind Power, gave a brief overview of the failure of and waning support for wind power internationally, and commented on the Liberal government’s willful continuation of the billion dollar wind boondoggle here in Ontario:
It amounts to pilfering and plunder in a predatory manner, because they know what they are doing. And this is terrible, when you have a government that knows what it’s doing. Have you not all supplied them with information, about the problems with wind power? Yes, we have supplied them with that information, repeatedly, thousands, if not millions of times. And they persist. They have plans for 4,900 more of these… I don’t think so!
In the video below, a 13-year-old girl spoke with great passion and conviction about “the appalling actions of our provincial government” when it allowed NextEra Energy to cut down an active bald eagle’s nest last year in order to make way for an access road for an industrial wind turbine project:
I cannot believe this happened! This was a cowardly act by our provincial government, the MNR and the members of this huge business – NextEra Energy. They say that this is green energy? How, I ask you, is this green energy? Cutting down an active bald eagle nest? Might I add, on an old cottonwood tree, hundreds of years old and a very important part of our natural history? I don’t buy it! Our voices must be heard and they will be heard! The members of the Liberal government must know that wind energy is a fantasy, at best!
CLICK ON PICTURE TO WATCH VIDEO
Continue to Part 3 for text and video of more speakers.
Ontario’s Team Agenda 21, Wynne’s approval from climate huckster Al Gore
On Thursday, November 21, 2013, it was on full public display – Ontario’s Team Agenda 21 (carbon trader Al Gore, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Environmental Defence Executive Director Tim Gray, Minister of the Environment Jim Bradley, Minster of Energy Bob Chiarelli), assembled in Toronto to congratulate itself and celebrate the closing of the last coal plant in Ontario, and to announce a new step further into the disastrous black hole that is the province’s energy program (outlaw the burning of coal altogether), and to be anointed and blessed by the high priest of man-made climate doom-and-gloom, Al Gore, who pronounced, “You’re doing a fantastic job”.
This was clearly not an Ontario government event. There was no Province of Ontario logo – neither on the podium, nor on the backdrop. The event was apparently conceived, organized and hosted by the unelected, unaccountable “green” activist NGO, Environmental Defence, an organization apparently funded in large part by foreign money.
Only Tim Gray, Kathleen Wynne and Al Gore spoke. The Ministers of Energy and the Environment each provided mute support throughout the event, as props perched stiffly on high chairs on the stage.
Tim Gray, Executive Director, Environmental Defence Fund explained the purpose of the gathering:
Today, UN talks in Warsaw enter their final hours. And we all know that…people will have largely lost hope that world leaders are going to…act together to fight climate change. And with that going on at an international level we thought it was even more important to showcase something real, something that’s being done here in Ontario, for proving that it can be done, that bold leadership on climate change is possible, and that today Ontario is poised to kick the coal habit forever…. [Applause]
Kathleen Wynne acknowledged the apparent and unelected leadership role that Environmental Defence enjoys in her government: “Your job is to push us, right? So I appreciate that…I want to thank Tim and everyone at Environmental Defence for putting together this fantastic event.”
As Parker Gallant has asked, who is really setting Ontario’s ruinous energy policies?
Premier Wynne:
Thank you very much, Tim, and thank you so much for your introduction, for the work you that you do. As you were just discussing: your job is to push us, right? So I appreciate that…I want to thank Tim and everyone at Environmental Defence for putting together this fantastic event. And I’m very pleased to be joined by our Minister of Energy, Bob Chiarelli, and our Minister of the Environment, Jim Bradley…Bob has shown tremendous leadership on energy issues in Ontario, and I’m very proud to have him in that role and Tim has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues since the 1980s and is helping to drive our issues in that portfolio…and Tim, it’s wonderful to have you here in that role…and it’s a huge honour to be here with you, Mr. Vice-President, thank you very much for being here.
Both Premier Wynne and Al Gore made sure that they listed every notable weather event they could think of as supposed proof-positive that man-made global warming is an indisputable fact (because the corrupt, disgraced IPCC said so). They also both managed to insult those good people who do not believe that the case for catastrophic man-made global warming has been proven (“their heads very firmly in the sand”, “deniers”), but who also know that climate does change, as it has done throughout the ages. Premier Wynne said:
The IPCC, a group that consists of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned us once again that our climate system is getting warmer. In fact, they say that it is unequivocal that our climate system is heating up. I think that there’s no denying that climate change is happening, even though some still have their heads very firmly in the sand and there is no denying that the urgency of the discussion of infrastructure construction, for example, across the country, is heightened by this reality…
If climate change is left unchecked it will lead to rising sea levels, more sweltering heat waves, more disappearing glaciers, and extreme weather events that could have potentially devastating consequences on our health, on our environment, our economy, and our lives. And, of course, there are aid agencies and global leaders saying that climate change has already contributed to humanitarian disasters like typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
So if we don’t move to reverse climate change now, we can see even more catastrophes around the globe. And we’ll have to deal with the aftermath of more events like the flooding that we experienced here in Toronto and in Calgary over the summer…
Both Wynne and Gore spoke about “our moral duty” (a duty which they themselves may very well have proven to have betrayed, by perpetuating and acting wilfully, opportunistically and recklessly on the basis of the hoax of anthropogenic global warming):
And I would contend it’s our moral duty to take action to protect our children, our grandchildren, and our fellow citizens. We’re lucky today to be in the presence of a man who’s been fighting on these fronts for many years.
Premier Wynne went on to announce that her government would be introducing legislation to make the burning of coal illegal. By closing all coal plants in Ontario, and by planning to enact a law to ban burning of coal, Premier Wynne is placing Ontario in grave danger, according to energy analyst and expert Tom Adams. He cites the example of Japan, which moved away from coal but kept its coal plants in good working order, so that they could be used if needed. Following the Fukishima disaster, they have now have proven to be critically important back-up sources of energy, and “are the reason that the lights are on in Japan.”
Al Gore spoke next, and took it upon himself, as the some sort of self-proclaimed global governance potentate, to thank Premier Wynne “on behalf of all around the world,” and, in so doing, reminding the investors in the room of “the nature the climate challenge and the opportunity it presents” (i.e. as enabled by the Green Energy Act, to fleece taxpayers/ratepayers with 20-year guaranteed above-market returns for useless industrial wind turbines). He said:
Thank you all for coming. And may I say, first of all Premier Kathleen Wynne, congratulations on your vision and leadership, thank you for the steps that you have taken and have announced today. I will elaborate in a moment as to why they are so significant for our world as a whole, but I have to say on behalf of all around the world – to understand the nature of the climate challenge and the opportunity it presents, ah, thank you, you’re doing a fantastic job. [Applause]
Then Gore, described by Ezra Levant as a “jet-setting, multiple-mansion-owning, twenty-times-normal-electrical-bill-consuming, oil and gas gazillionaire”, went on to play the moral courage card, with words that may very well prove to be his own undoing when more people begin to understand that he was a major force in helping to lead the world astray with the massive fraud of a fake planetary emergency – designed as rationale for a UN-directed breaching of national sovereignty, erosion of democracy, and a bid for world governance and enrichment – and that he profited enormously by doing it:
Years from now, depending upon the circumstances that we allow to unfold, the next generation will ask one of two questions. If they see the continuation of super storms, and deadly droughts, and tropical diseases ravaging temperate zones, and sea level rise, and the collapse of governance in places where the storms are too powerful and too frequent for people to recover and adapt to survive – if they do not have hope, if they look at their children and feel a sense of despair, they would be well-justified in asking of us, what were you thinking? Why did you not act?
But if they look around them and see a world in renewal…if they feel hope in their hearts and look at their children and feel definitely their future is going to be brighter still, they’ll look back and ask of us, how did you find the moral courage to change, to rise up, to act – and part of the answer will be: Ontario, Canada, led the way. [Applause]
If you have ever wondered what Agenda 21 looks like in a government, it was on full display at this event with all its hallmark features:
– an unelected, unaccountable, well-funded, extreme-eco NGO lobby group that is for all intents and purposes calling the shots, having played an important role in influencing the creation of draconian, anti-democratic, subsidy-heavy legislation, in this case the Green Energy Act, giving free rein to useless, supposedly “green” alternative energy sources such as industrial wind turbines that have cost Ontarians billions and untold grief to those forced to live with them;
– the invocation of the UN’s dishonest IPCC as a credible climate science authority;
– a government in such hopeless thrall to the fake premise of man-made global warming as the cause of climate change that it has lost all integrity, reason and duty of care to do what’s right for its people and the economy;
– and a venal, corrupt, profiteering, mendacious, self-righteous, manipulative celebrity to put his creepy brand of approval on the whole catastrophe.
FAUXGREEN 
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