Found this BEL story; not sure of the date. I like the tone and directness the CEO appears to have. I remember the impressions I had when I listened to him speak on last Q's con call.....steady, impressive, confident, level-headed.
"What upsets me is that nobody wants a solution...
"They’ve been saying things which they know to be totally untrue. We are going to take them to task on that.
"When you’re right, you’re right, and I know this is not a problem."
Times & Transcript | Provincial News
Firm’s CEO defends toxic soil incinerator in Bathurst
John Bennett delivers hard-hitting speech to Chamber of Commerce
BATHURST - For someone whose name is spoken with such venom in northern New Brunswick, John Bennett comes across as a pretty level-headed man.
The chairman and CEO of Bennett Environmental Inc., the company building a soil treatment plant in Belledune’s Renviro Park, delivered an address yesterday at the Greater Bathurst Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
His speech, entitled "The Other Side of The Story," was well-received by an audience comprising about 150 business and community leaders.
Bennett revealed the results of a report by Quebec’s Ministry of the Environment which took its own soil samples from the area around the Saint-Ambroise plant in November 2002. It found that the level of dioxins and furans in the samples were all below or well below nine parts per trillion.
"Environment Canada considers nine parts per trillion to be background and we are consistently below that, so what we are measuring is background noise," says Danny Ponn, vice-president and chief operations officer at Bennett Environmental. "From that, the Department of Health concluded we are not adding to the background levels with our facility," he said.
"I think, if there is any opposition left after this news is out, it’s because they don’t want to listen," Bennett says. "This is quite significant because it confirms what we’ve been saying for a long time, that we’re no threat to public health."
Bennett answered many questions people have been asking, including why the company chose to build its plant in Belledune. "We didn’t," Bennett says. "We were invited to come here. I received a letter from the Port Authority to come and see if this was suitable. They sold me on coming to Belledune and New Brunswick, and I haven’t regretted it yet," he said, considering how much opposition there has been to the plant.
Bennett also explained why the company chose to build the plant in New Brunswick when the soil they will treat comes from New Jersey. "Another question that comes up is if most of your business seems to be in the U.S. why don’t you build your plant in the U.S. where the problem is? Well, that’s not quite true," he says. "We’ll probably be running this year 50-50 on Canadian and U.S. business. There are other facilities similar to ours in the States, except we are very competitive. We are proud of the fact that we are Canadian and we don’t see why we would want to give jobs to Americans."
Several expressed their support for the project, but some in the audience remained unconvinced. Reg Killoran, a science teacher at Bathurst High School, said he was worried about his health and asked whether the amount of dioxins being emitted would be continually measured. Ponn told him there is no equipment in existence that could perform such testing.
Bennett addressed opposition to the plant, saying that is why he decided to speak in Bathurst yesterday. "This uprising was rather surprising to us, and I felt I should come here and address people myself," he said.
Environmental groups like the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, one of the main opponents to the plant, have repeatedly refused to meet with them or to visit the Quebec facility, but they do have a meeting scheduled for 2 p.m. today in Fredericton.
"I want to discuss their problems and I just hope they’re going to listen. I hope they will be receptive, and I won’t just be talking to a wall," Bennett says. "They don’t have an argument. They just say all our reports are trash, Jacques Whitford are useless, the government don’t know what they are doing, nobody else knows what they are doing but them. They’ve only got one biologist amongst them and she’s hardly qualified to criticize the work of PhDs in toxicology."
He says he doubts anything he says will convince the group that the project is safe. "They are in a serious mess. They’ve been saying things which they know to be totally untrue. We are going to take them to task on that. They have to give a retraction or else we’ll take them to court and they’ll be paying heavy fines. If we can quiet them, the rest will go away. We went through this in Saint-Ambroise several years ago, and nobody there has anything bad to say about us now."
Bennett says a review currently being carried out by the federal government should satisfy the Conservation Council. "They don’t trust us, they don’t trust your government, they don’t trust Jacques Whitford (the company that carried out the Human Health Risk Assessment), so they are getting their review. And we are co-operating with the federal government because we’re not afraid of anybody reviewing the data. They are all going to come to the same conclusion: we are clean, we are the solution, not the problem," he says.
Acadie-Bathurst MP Yvon Godin asked Bennett about conducting a full environmental impact assessment. "Why not, if you are so sure . . . let’s do it once and for all, and then go ahead with it?"
"We are not a large project," Bennett replied. "They have rules of what requires a full EIA and we don’t fall into that category. We’ve studied. I don’t understand what else you will find out doing a full EIA for one thing. We have been through this now in Quebec, and . . . have seven years of history (at the plant in St. Ambroise). Even the people who wrote that report that came out last night and said there was no risk to health, they were against this three or four years ago."
He says a full EIA would delay the project by at least two years.
"What upsets me is that nobody wants a solution, they just want to keep studying. Further studies wouldn’t add anything. That’s what we’ve already done. I just think it would be a total waste of everybody’s money and time," he said.
The plant is 50 per cent complete. It expects to start doing test burns in May and June and plans are to have it up and running by the end of the summer.
Bennett says all the opposition to the project hasn’t discouraged him from settling in the village.
"When you’re right, you’re right, and I know this is not a problem. So I knew as long as New Brunswick stuck behind their word, we would build the plant," he says. |
