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Feds nix $50M cleanup for toxic site on the Hill
A contaminated Parliament Hill site that long served as a dumping ground for garbage and toxic chemicals won’t be cleaned up anytime soon.
Public Works announced yesterday it will hold off fixing up the spot that sprawls beyond the banks of the Ottawa River.
Following an earlier report that pegged cleanup costs at nearly $50 million, federal officials said a “formal risk mitigation plan” isn’t warranted because the site poses no immediate risk to human health or the environment.
Bhagwant Sandhu, director of real property for the parliamentary precinct, said the decision has nothing to do with prohibitive costs.
“The science is saying in its current use it’s safe, so keep it as it is,” he said. “If we decide to alter it, that’s the stage you look at what the options are. But for now it’s safe so it doesn’t make any sense to start meddling with it.”
The site, which now serves as a parking lot and visitor site, was used to dump garbage in the late 1800s and construction waste in the early 1900s.
An environmental assessment carried out in 2003, before the planned construction of a new parliamentary building, found the area was laced with heavy metals and carcinogenic chemicals dumped after World War II.
Conservative MP and environment critic Bob Mills said the federal government has a bad record of recognizing contaminated federal sites, and is doing nothing to clean them up.
“I understand there’s some pretty ugly stuff there,” he said. “Given that we have about eight million tourists a year on Parliament Hill, this might be one of the places that you’d least like to have a contaminated site if for no other reason to say we cleaned this one up.”