Nunavut’s not a guinea pig

About three weeks ago, Iqaluit city councillors discovered, once again, that their municipal government and their community have suffered because of a failed experiment in new-fangled environmental gimcrackery.

The first time this happened, of course, was in 1999, when the city’s $7.1 million sewage treatment plant was supposed to open. It didn’t. And work to replace it won’t start until this summer, when the city will likely begin constructing only the first phase. They’re doing the work in phases, by the way, because the city can’t afford to build a replacement plant in one shot. That would cost another $8.3 million, and right now, they only have $6 million in their capital plan budget.

That’s the kind of price the public ends up paying when governments allow themselves to be victimized by environmental carnival-barkers selling faddish technologies that don’t work in the Arctic.

The plant, designed and built by a now-bankrupt company called Hill Murray and Associates, once described as “innovative,” and “cutting-edge,” would have been no ordinary sewage plant. Besides performing the normal work of cleaning the unhealthy stuff out of our sewage, it was also supposed to turn sewage back into fresh water. Effluent would flow in, pass through a series of special screens called “membranes,” and useable water would flow back into the city’s water supply.

Iqaluit thought it was getting a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. What it got was one for the price of two.

In 2001, another enviro-tech huckster, Creative Communities Research Ltd. of Toronto, showed up in Iqaluit to flog yet another system for turning sewage into water, this time within individual houses. Officials from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. came along to shill for them.

Some years before, this system had been used in a demonstration show in Toronto called the “healthy house project.” The basic idea was to experiment with ways of making houses that are healthier for people and healthier for the environment.

There’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

But when this fancy technology was transferred to the Arctic, it turned out to be useless. In the summer of 2003, CCR’s devices were installed in six Apex houses. None made it through the winter. By the end of the winter, CCR told the city they were facing bankruptcy, and they never showed up to install two more devices included in its agreement with the city, and to fix the six others that didn’t work.

The City of Iqaluit has thus paid $200,000 for the privilege of taking part in a failed experiment urged upon them by an unscrupulous federal government agency. Six unlucky Apex homeowners now have only bad smells under their houses and holes in their walls.

Trendy new green technologies are all the rage these days. To meet this increasing demand, environmental entrepreneurs are springing up all over the place to develop and sell them. Most of these people sell legitimate products and services. It’s in the public interest for governments to invest in them.

And there’s nothing wrong with conducting pilot projects in Nunavut or anywhere else. But it’s the proponents who should pay for them, not the people of Nunavut through their governments. It’s not in the public interest for governments to buy technologies that don’t work, least of all in the Arctic, where infrastructure dollars are scarce.

Our governments and organizations, at all levels, must make it known that Nunavut is not a guinea pig to be experimented upon, even when the highly fashionable “green” label is attached to the experiment. JB