It was appropriate that this week’s all-day visit to Hamilton by Ontario’s environmental watchdog was hosted by the local watchdog which is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year with a dinner and concert featuring Sarah Harmer. Established in 2001 after a successful legal action against the city over a leaking landfill, Environment Hamilton (EH) has built an enviable reputation as both a trenchant critic of governments and a citizen’s group that achieves real changes.
And unlike many groups that speak primarily for financially well-off people, many of Environment Hamilton’s achievements have improved the lives of lower-income residents living on the industrial north side of Hamilton. The citizen group has forced pollution fines on Arcelor Mittal Dofasco’s black fallout, conducted successful appeals with Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights to impose more stringent operating rules on other corporate polluters, won the addition of a new HSR route through the north end, and gotten restitution payments for residents on Oliver Street whose homes were damaged by demolition and construction activities.
The group has also conducted most of its citizen science initiatives in economically challenged areas such as training residents to watch and report on what’s coming out of industrial stacks and city sewer pipes. Recent additions include Bicycle Air Monitoring that uses volunteer cyclists to collect real-time air quality data and the InHALE project that makes the tracking equipment available to pedestrians and people in wheelchairs or scooters. And EH is now helping north side residents strategically plant more trees to help reduce pollution effects.
Another environmental recruitment area taken up extensively by EH has been faith groups, helping dozens to cut energy bills, and providing their congregants with climate change information and planetary stewardship opportunities. In 2004, the group started a series of community tree inventories just after city council decided it could no longer plant more city trees. Within two years, council reversed position and dedicated one million dollars a year to tree planting.
Environment Hamilton kicked off the local food movement in Hamilton more than a decade ago and continues to be the most vocal defender of the Greenbelt agricultural protection area against city council attempts to help developers remove pieces. It initiated and continues to publish the Hamilton map of farm markets and rural food stands, and operates a Good Food Box program that puts low-cost fresh produce in the hands of over 400 residents a month, and each summer runs a fruit tree project where volunteers collect unused fruit from backyard trees and direct it to local food banks.
Along the way one of its founders (Brian McHattie) and one of its staff (Brenda Johnson) have been elected to city hall – both tossing out incumbents. But the group has also taken the city to the Ontario Municipal Board over the aerotropolis boundary expansion, and exposed the airport as the source of highly toxic flame-retardants polluting the Binbrook Conservation Area and the Welland River. EH also hosted the early years of the CATCH website.
Just about every public event EH organizes is free to everyone. And while it has won funding from various foundations, governments and other sources, most of its advocacy work doesn’t qualify. That’s the reason for the Saturday October 15 fundraising event at the Gasworks on Park Street North that offers a multi-course local food dinner and/or a birthday bash concert headlined by Sarah Harmer (Tickets at 905-549-0900).
The funds are earmarked for ambitious climate campaigns aimed at city council like last year’s cheeky “throw council on the bus” initiative that asked councillors to actually try out the HSR service they control and allowed residents to urge them on by pledging to pay for bus tickets for low-income families. EH staff have also played a major role in this past summer’s town halls to feed public input into the promised federal action plan on climate change.
Currently, EH is pushing for fair stormwater fees (ending the free ride for large commercial parking lots), expansion of the provincial Greenbelt (over council objections) and a loan program to help residents do home energy retrofits and make repayments through their house tax bill.