PRESENTS

The Wilfrid Bog Issue Personal Comments & Opinions

Anyone who may have a personal opinion on this matter is asked to Email or send via the post your comments to us. If you give us your permission and we accept the submission, it will appear here under your name. The first opinion is the Web-masters, to help lead the way. Personal Opinion of Kevin Tipson (ktipson@millicentorchids.com) Cannington, Ontario The peat on the EP side of the bog must be very tempting to the owners of Pefferlaw Peat Products. The first two meters of peat on this property is of a very high quality, a long fibre brown peat is found here opposed to the more decomposed and shorter fibre black peat found below which the company is forced to mine on the side that has been under extraction now for over 45 years. They have run out of top quality peat. Many persons today have the old world opinion that because of land ownership, you should be able to do what you want, when you want, with your land. Thank goodness that today society realizes that this philosophy does not work in a world of fragmented ecosystems; times have changed from the endless resources we became accustomed to when we first settled this land approximately 200 years ago. It is important to realize that Pefferlaw Peat Products took ownership of this property in 1977, knowing full well the EP status of the property, believing they could arrange a zonal change when needed. This creates a black and white situation, with very little grey involved. You pay your money....you take your chances....Mr. Pefferlaw Peat, your investment on this property will not pay off. How about showing some environmental scruples and rather than appear as you do, offer the property to the NCC (Nature Conservancy of Canada) at a reasonable rate and appear the hero? EP properties are classified as such for long terms, and removing this status after a short term is contrary to such a protection in the first place. Involving ones self in such destructive activities on these EP zoned lands shows a complete disregard of our natural heritage as well as the environmental laws and by-laws set out by our Federal, Provincial and Regional governments. Personal Opinion of Paul Harpley BSc. M.A. President, South Lake Simcoe Naturalists The Wilfrid bog is a special natural place in Canada as so well documented in this web site. Over the last two decades it has been under pressure of destruction by Peat extraction and tree removal. The activities are clandestine and clearly contrary to provincial and regional policy and by-laws and must stop. The South Lake Simcoe Naturalists endorses the information in this web site and hopes it contributes to the immediate cessation of destructive activities in the bog. Personal Opinion of Laurence Johnson (ljohnson@redden.on.ca) Warkworth, ON The problem for Wilfrid Bog is very similar for other special natural heritage places throughout the world. As a microcosm it represents the battlefield for two radically opposing world views in two separate camps. One, the business/right wing community sees very little of the world beyond that which can be translated into money/wealth (the what else is it good for camp?), and the other which appreciates that there is more to the world than materialism. The first is selfish and often mean spirited as a secondary attribute of its philosophical position and the second is frustrated with the first's inability to see beyond the greed. There is often no communication possible between them - and surely little respect. This is the moral flaw of those of which the be all and end all is the business agenda and unfortunately is a wholly engrained element to our collective culture. The present government in Ontario represents a historically extreme form of the right-wing mindset, and has over the past four years done great damage to its own institutions that would protect sensitive areas and has increasingly paid little heed to the cries of those that care about the natural world. It is now in the process of reducing by another 50% the Ministry of the Environment that has already been reduced by 40% during the previous four years. This will surely spell the end of all environmental controls on how business interest interact with our wild lands. It also means an environmental catastrophe that will affect both our shrinking wild lands and our personal health far into the future. During the past four years provincial government downloading and cutbacks have placed inappropriate demands of responsibilities onto municipalities and county jurisdictions that these local governments have neither the means nor experience to handle. In 1999 we now live in a government policy world that only those living early in this century would recognize. The real "cost" to Ontarians will be incalculable and what will be lost will never be seen again. A case in point is Wilfrid Bog. That this government does not have the moral mandate to govern is also indicated by the very "unusual" means by which they came to power in the last election. So our loss is not just in the natural heritage area; it is also in the area of our fundamental and constitutional right to live under a democratic system of government. We no longer have a voice in the direction of our personal destinies through our own government. That this government will attempt to persist through these same efforts in future elections is most likely. An ill-gotten dynasty? Very probably.

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