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Proposed changes by the Ontario government to allow companies to self-monitor their own transportation of hazardous materials could pose a health risk to residents by potentially contaminating drinking water in the event of a spill, Coun. Chris Malette informed city council Monday.

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Chair of Quinte Conservation, Malette wondered why the province would consider removing longstanding checks and balances conducted by Ontario inspectors to ensure that certain materials don’t end up in drinking water sources.

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The changes are in the pipeline by the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, he said.

Referring to the Walkerton tragedy when residents were impacted by e.coli contaminated municipal water, Malette called the latest move “boneheaded legislation.”

Malette, who also chairs the city’s Green Task Force Committee, told council that Quinte Conservation board received a report Oct. 24 from staff “outlining very serious concerns that the province … seems to have a proclivity to making up regulations on the fly with very little consultation with municipalities or agencies affected.”

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“We now have the province altering the safety guidelines for our source water, drinking water protection to the extent that changes to streamline the permit by rule framework,” he said.

Malette noted, “the Environment Ministry will no longer undertake an up-front detailed review of applications related to the activities, the transport of hazardous materials.”

The move is expected to cut, he said, “red tape that currently requires companies and outfits that transport materials on our highways and roadways to file detailed reports on the materials in those transports if they are a number of waste items and those include asbestos waste, biomedical waste, treated biomedical waste, liquid industrial, hazardous waste, PCB waste, naturally occurring radioactive materials, certain private stormwater management facilities and others.”

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To oppose the changes, Malette as chair of Quinte Conservation, filed a letter to the province asking the province to strike down the proposed amendments.

He also asked that city council endorse the authority’s opposition of allowing companies to do self-regulation.

Council agreed.

Making the changes even more disagreeable and dangerous to the environment, Malette said companies would no longer be penalized if they are found to have not filed self-monitoring reports of transporting materials.

“This new framework takes away any penalities or repercussions for failing to register,” Malette said.

“This is another example of the quiet erosion of the safeguards to our drinking water. Any one of these materials in a spill from a truck near anywhere near our source drinking water is a recipe for disaster for potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.

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