Dear Editor,
Opponents of TC Energy’s proposed pumped storage project in Meaford have repeatedly voiced concerns about potential harms to the aquatic life of Georgian Bay. The harms include a massive fish kill, as occurred at a similar plant in Ludington, Mich., where only a 12-year lawsuit stopped 1.5 million fish a year dying from being sucked into that plant’s huge pumps.
TC Energy has dismissed such warnings, boasting that it would mitigate any such harm – not prevent, just mitigate, their fancy word for reducing but not eliminating that danger.
Now the Saugeen Ojibway Nation has announced that TC Energy’s own 48.4-per-cent-owned subsidiary, the Bruce Power nuclear plant on the other side of the Bruce Peninsula in Kincardine, has killed between 3.5 million and 4.5 million gizzard shad that have been drawn into that plant’s cooling water system since January.
This is confirmation of just what Save Georgian Bay and others have been raising alarms about.
Are Meaford’s councillors really sure they want this multi-billion dollar construction project and all the environmental destruction it will bring to Georgian Bay, the jewel of our local landscape and this municipality’s principal drawing card?
Just a few weeks ago Green Party leader Mike Schreiner came to Meaford and told a town hall meeting, “You can’t build (electricity) storage systems by blowing holes in the Niagara Escarpment and destroying the aquatic ecosystem of Georgian Bay.” Yet that is exactly what TC Energy proposes to do.
Clair Balfour, Meaford
