The Right Honourable Bob Bailey Lies About Otter Creek Wind Farm and Water Quality.

Louis Shalako

According to Sarnia-Lambton Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, The Right Honourable Mr. Robert Bailey, he would cancel the Otter Creek wind farm due to groundwater contamination. 

No word on how he would crack down on agricultural runoff, which leads to algae bloom affecting millions.

Letter to the Editor, July 21/16:

“I ran a water treatment company for nearly 25 years. I found it absurd when an article published in the Sarnia Observer had a few disgruntled individuals attempting to tie earthquakes and windmills to turbidity in well water.

Peter Epp then wrote an editorial (Absurdities Abound, 14 July) that appears to be based entirely on this article. He is a wordsmith, not a water well expert. Good editorials are written by good wordsmiths who have done their homework! He totally missed the real problem, which is that poor water wells produce bad water.

A quick call to the local offices of The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and the Health Unit would have flagged the real issue: water quality.

What I believe I see in the original article tells me that these ‘problem wells’ are likely shallow dug or GUDI wells (Groundwater Under the Direct Influence of Surface Water). They are known to be problematic. If an earthquake in Quebec causes turbidity, you have a problem! Get your water tested! The health unit will provide you with directions and materials for bacterial testing. It is free.

Water quality can be a real issue in rural areas. Water quality is important. I am saddened when this real issue is diminished by individuals with hidden agendas. The editorial’s headline is correct. It’s absurd to imply that earthquakes or windmills are causing bad water.

I, for one, am tired of the anti-wind energy neo-Luddites’ fear mongering. They accuse windmills of causing what, at times, seems to be half the world’s problems.”

Dean de Jong

Plympton-Wyoming (a largely agricultural area of Lambton County).

The site, outlined in purple.

That part of southwestern Ontario (the Otter Creek site) is low, it's flat, and the water table lies quite close to the surface. It has been extensively deforested and is intensely farmed using backwards technologies. Groundwater problems are the result of terrain, soil type and a hundred and fifty years of bad environmental practices.

In other words, it is the classic GUDI area, i.e., 'groundwater under direct influence' of surface water. What is even more important to understanding the hydro-geology of the area is that it is farm country and staunchly Conservative.

Wind farms have only come in during the last fifteen years, under a Liberal government.

If it had been their own idea, then that of course would be different.

The terrain.

The elevation of Lake St. Clair is 175 metres. The elevation of Chatham, Ontario, is 198 metres, at a distance of roughly twenty kilometres due east of Lake St. Clair. That isn't much of a gradient for runoff to begin with, and such a flat, treeless plain with minimal elevation above lake levels, is already prone to flooding. That is less than ten metres of drop for every kilometre of distance. It's practically indiscernible. Wallaceburg flooded this spring, and it is at risk of flooding virtually every spring.

There are rivers coming down from London and environs, as well as the rather flat Lambton County to the north. So, in periods of extreme rainfall, or heavy snow-melt, much of that water soaks down, rather than draining to the lake. Any sensible mind can see how this would be a major cause of well-water turbidity, considering the heavy agricultural use and lack of forest cover and natural wetlands. There are no hedgerows or windbreaks, familiar from the Delhi and Norfolk area, which, with sandy soil and deforestation in previous centuries, suffered extensive soil loss and had to be rehabilitated at great time and expense.

Interestingly, if farmers have taken up the practice of using all fields, in other words not (just for example) a four-field, three cash-crop and one cover-crop rotation, but in fact planting all fields with cash crops, each and every year, they are taking out an estimated twenty-five percent of fodder or grass cover, which resists soil erosion and holds water closer to the surface (slowing down surface runoff).  It takes up a good rain and turns it into vegetation quite quickly, (mostly in the growing season). The difference between that and corn, is that there is no bare soil exposed, and little in terms of fertilizers and pest control agents to be sucked down into the water table.

In winter, a field of grass will still hold more water, and more topsoil, than a field of plowed dirt. Rain or snow-melt quickly runs off into ditches and tile drains, taking a measurable portion of soil with it—along with all those pesky chemicals.

So, if they're not leaving anything fallow these days—this may be a contributor to the problem. 

Leaving a quarter of available land in clover for a full season of course takes out one quarter of the potential revenue. Not leaving fallow ground is not an advance in farming technique. It may be an advance in revenue generation, in the short term. Long term, it assumes a constant diet of fertilizers and other chemical agents. This is going to affect water quality, not just downstream in Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, but also right there in your own wells. 

So, why would Mr. Bailey, who has access to all the facts and a responsibility to know and to comprehend them, make such a bone-headed assertion? 

He wants their votes. He wants yours too, my suggestion is that we don't give it to him.

END

Louis has all kinds of books and stories available from Smashwords.

Thank you for reading.

An Open Fuck Off To Kathleen Wynne, Doug Ford, and Andrea Horvath. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Dear Kathleen Wynne, Doug Ford and Andrea Horvath.

Clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program are living on pensions that are thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line. Clients of Ontario Works have a special kind of hell reserved for them as well.

I ask you for bread, and I ask you for lower rents. I ask you for a raise in the allowable earnings levels, I ask you for a reduced rate of clawback for those who do get some work. I ask you for honest social workers, workers who are on our side instead of yours, social workers who don’t lie, and cheat, and steal, and try to rip us off. I ask you for social workers who can answer a simple God-damned question once in a while, and social workers that can give the same answer twice in a row.

No, somehow, you just can’t do it.

And what do you have to offer? Now that you’re all running for election.

Money for mental health outreach programs. Money for pharmacare. Money for the opiate crisis. Money to legalize pot, but then you expect to make a bundle off of it, don’t you. 

Money for front-page nutritionists. Money for child care. Money to reduce wait times in hospitals. Money for roads, and bridges, and sewers. Money for just about anything the electorate desires, only as long as it’s anything, anything, for the love of God, but this—but this.

Hell, there might even be more money for advertising—certainly we can look forward to more touchy-feely, good-news stories about the eight hundred to a thousand fucking food banks in this province.

I realize that a million people, living in poverty, has never been an election issue in this province.

But I would sure like to know, just what the hell your problem is. It’s quite instructive, watching you reaching down your own throats and pulling yourselves inside out. It’s quite interesting, to see how wilfully blind you are, each of you in your own way, to a problem that has gone on long enough. It’s interesting to see you squirm, and wriggle, and twist and turn any which way you can, all in an effort, a very strong effort, to ignore the realities for too many Ontario families.

It is intolerable, it is a disgrace, and may it come back to haunt each and every one of you in your own way, at your own time, and in your own place.

That last item is something none of us will ever know.

Give us a place—a place to stand. A place to grow. A place we call Ontari-ari-fucking-oh.

Oh, one more thing—every God-damned one of you.

Fuck off.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Smashwords.

Thank you for reading.

 

Let A Fucking Kid Drive On A Fucking Road, Ladies and Gentlemen. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

My nephew is eighteen or nineteen years old. He’s in his first year at York University, whose faculty is on strike for wages, job security and working conditions. Which is a bit ironic, as this government has sort of pretended to tackle precarious work and low wages, at least on the front pages of local journalism. They're all about fair wages, right.

<Vomits in unrestrained fashion.>

(He means local journalism, ladies and gentlemen. -- ed.)

When it comes to putting the taxpayer's money where the fucking government's mouth is, they're surprisingly coy--

He’s had driver training, and he’s got his beginner’s license.

Of simple curiosity, I asked him today, when he would be okay to drive on his own.

“Five years, Uncle Louis.”

Five fucking years.

Apparently, he has to go through the G-1, the G-2, and the G-3, and the G-4, and the G-5, all of which demand some fee and some written test, before he can drive on his own, drive without another licensed driver in the passenger seat beside him, drive before dawn or after dark, or drive on a 400-series highway.

Five fucking years, ladies and gentlemen. In the mind of a teenager, this is never going to happen, and I know that very well from previous experience. So why should they even try.

When I was a kid of sixteen, I bought a car for a hundred and fifty bucks, I paid six hundred for the first six months of insurance, while I was just getting on the road.

I got my beginner’s a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday. Back then, you could get your old man to teach you to drive, practicing in a parking lot at a nearby mall or community college.

You could get a ways out of town, and the old man would let a kid drive, all the way from Sarnia to Owen Sound, admittedly at night, and with the instruction to just cruise at eighty or ninety kilometres per hour, while he caught a few zzzs and you learned how to use a manual transmission.

I can’t help thinking that my nephew, whose university education has been disrupted due to this government’s intransigence regarding unionization, collective bargaining, and precarious work of a white-collar nature, is being royally fucked over in terms of his employment prospects, due to the fact that he’s not legally entitled to drive on a fucking road, ladies and gentlemen.

You'd be surprised, just how many higher-paying jobs, demand a simple driver's license. Not every kid is going to work at Tim Horton's or Burger King for the rest of their lives.

You got another thing coming, if that is what you rat-faced fucking pukes believe.

As for the government and the bourgeoisie, what the fuck is wrong with you people.

END

You rat-faced basterds really ought to check out my books and stories on Google Play.

Thank you for fucking reading this.