Author: The Equity
Published October 23, 2024

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Several members of the recently disbanded MRC Pontiac waste committee are calling for the committee to be reinstated, given an official mandate, and the power to report to the MRC’s council of mayors.

At Wednesday’s MRC council meeting, Otter Lake pro-mayor Jennifer Quaile requested a discussion about the future of the waste committee be added to the evening’s agenda, to which many mayors around the table agreed.

“This follows up on the discussion we had on Wednesday when our warden announced our waste management committee would be abolished,” Quaile said, referring to a conversation that took place in the plenary meeting on Oct. 9.

The committee in question was made up of 18 elected officials representing each of the MRC’s municipalities, most of them the councillors responsible for waste management, but in some cases a mayor would sit in where a councillor was not available.

In an email to THE EQUITY, the MRC’s communications advisor Francis Beausoleil quoted the original email sent out to municipalities inviting them to join the committee.

“The mandate of this committee is to work on improving the management of residual materials (recyclables, composting, construction residues). This will be an opportunity for the 18 municipalities to work together, with MRC staff, to review current procedures, share experiences, identify where services need to be improved, and actively participate in the revision of the Residual Materials Management Plan,” the email said.

Beausoleil emphasized the committee was a “working committee to share ideas between municipalities and to work on updating the PGMR [Pontiac Residual Waste Management Plan], which was then adopted in October 2023.”.

The members would meet sometimes once a month, sometimes less frequently, to share information about their own municipality’s waste practices and discuss strategies for reducing the amount of waste they send to landfill.

After more than two years of meetings, a decision was made to dissolve the committee at the mayors’ Oct. 9 plenary meeting,

“I feel very strongly that that’s a mistake,” Quaile said Wednesday. “I feel that it should be given a clear mandate and be given legitimacy just as other committees that are struck by the table of mayors. [ . . . ] We have unfinished work.”

In response, Warden Jane Toller said the committee was only ever an unofficial working committee, established by herself in 2021, that she decided to dissolve this month because of feedback received from MRC staff involved who felt it had served its purpose.

Following the council meeting, Toller explained she established the unofficial working committee with the view of learning about how each of the MRC’s 18 municipalities were managing their waste.

“The mandate said that the committee, with representatives from the 18 municipalities, [was] to be able to, at one meeting, inform our staff what they were currently doing. That was it. The committee has lasted two years, and now we’re at a point where we know what everybody was doing,” she said.

“It’s really now best handled with the director generals and the mayors, because we’re really trying to move forward at a good pace. And we’ve talked about wanting to reduce what’s going to landfill for seven years, so it’s just nice to finally see some action.”

But Quaile said she believes there is still an important role to be played by a small group of interested elected officials in moving conversations forward at the MRC level around best waste management strategies for the county.

“There are a lot of different pieces to the issue of waste management that are going to be a little bit different in each municipality. That’s our value added,” Quaile said.

Following her comments, Waltham mayor Odette Godin shared she valued being on the committee as discussions gave her ideas of how to reduce the amount of her municipality’s waste sent to landfill, which she said it’s done in recent years.

“The only thing different that I liked about that committee is that I got some ideas that aren’t part of the MRC,” Godin said, inquiring as to whether some form of the committee might be able to continue to meet at the same time as MRC staff are working on a territorial waste management plan.

“I know that they’ve hired a person specifically to handle waste, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t have good ideas. It doesn’t mean that other people don’t have something to offer,” Godin later told THE EQUITY. “It just seemed kind of very heavy-handed to say, ‘That’s it, we don’t need this committee anymore.’”

Sheenboro mayor Doris Ranger also offered her opinion at Wednesday’s council of mayors meeting.

“I do think they were doing good work,” she said, suggesting an alternative model wherein the committee would appoint an elected representative to present its recommendations to mayors at the plenary meetings. “Could that not be done?”

While no decision was made to reinstate the committee at Wednesday’s council meeting, Warden Toller did suggest the conversation could be picked up at the November plenary meeting.

The compost conundrum

One of the questions being discussed at the time the committee was dissolved was how to manage compost waste across the MRC.

In the English summary of the PGMR, available to the public on the MRC’s website, the MRC does state one of its goals for the 2023-2030 period to be to “implement a collection system for organic waste from the municipal sector,” and that one of the steps to achieving this goal is to “propose organic matter management solutions adapted to each municipality.”

While THE EQUITY was not able to obtain an update from MRC staff about what options it is currently considering for compost management, the warden indicated door-to-door pick up was high on the list.

“I think our goal eventually will be to have something similar to what they’re doing in Pontiac municipality under des Collines, where at every door they have recycling, composting and garbage picked up,” Toller said, noting there may be financial support available from the provincial government to support this. “But not if composting is being done in backyards.”

Municipality of Pontiac mayor Roger Larose said the municipality does provide door-to-door collection of recycling and garbage, but not organic compost.

“A big reason is always the cost. Door-to-door is really expensive,” Larose said. “And the other reason is we have 50 per cent farmers. It’s pretty hard to ask a farmer to pay for door-to-door composting when I know they just throw it in their backyard.”

His municipality makes home composting bins available for residents to buy, and is working on a pilot project that would look at best composting practices for residents without a lot of land for doing it in a big bin outside.

Quaile said nine MRC Pontiac municipalities currently use some form of door-to-door collection, while nine use a transfer station, and adopting door-to-door collection in the more rural municipalities like Otter Lake would be a significant financial burden.

In a Letter to the Editor published in the Oct. 16 issue of THE EQUITY, Thorne councillor Robert Wills, also a member of the former waste committee, echoed this idea, writing that door-to-door collection would be “logistically unworkable” and “very costly” in Thorne, and suggesting backyard composting as a better alternative.

Part of the “unfinished work” that Quaile alluded to Wednesday was the analysis of data collected by a survey the committee designed and circulated to all 18 municipalities over the summer to better understand the diversity of waste management practices being used.

Quaile believes the results of this data will offer useful insight into which waste practices are working and could be adopted by other municipalities, and which are not.

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