New Brunswick has backlog of 1,046 contaminated sites

The New Brunswick government has a backlog of more than a thousand contaminated sites that should have been cleaned up by now, some of them dating back more than 35 years.

The Environment Department has failed to document, track or enforce timelines at the sites, most of which are contaminated with fuel oil, diesel or gasoline, according to a new report by the province's auditor general. 

"If these issues continue to be unaddressed, there is a risk of contamination spreading, and potential harm to the environment and human health," Paul Martin writes in the audit he presented to the legislature's public accounts committee on Tuesday.

Martin says New Brunswick is the only province in Atlantic Canada with no legislation or regulation applying to its program for environmental cleanup of contamination.

In 86 per cent of cases examined by the auditor general, the lead engineer assigned to a site cleanup did not send a compliance letter within 15 days to whomever was responsible for the contamination, as the department's procedures require.

And 39 per cent of the cases had no compliance letter at all.

"Not sending a compliance letter could lead to delays in remediation of the contamination," the audit says.

The department couldn't explain the lack of letters in those files, it said.

Limited results

The 15-day timeline is critical because with oil and gasoline spills, the department believes contamination must be dealt with by the 30-day mark to prevent further spread into groundwater.

Of the 1,046 known contaminated sites in the province, 438 sites or 42 per cent had fuel oil or diesel contamination and 246 or 23.5 per cent had gasoline contamination. There were 18 listed as contaminated with a carcinogen.

Martin writes that the department launched a plan in 2020 to address the backlog of cases, but so far it hasn't led to results.

The department is still working on listing sites, deciding which ones are priorities and figuring out the steps to clean up or "close" each file.

Of the 809 sites assessed and prioritized, 624 have been open files for more than a decade, and 76 date back to before 1990. 

The department isn't even sure whether the oldest sites are still contaminated, "often due to a lack of documentation for older sites," the audit says.

The department told the auditor general's staff that it doesn't have enough employees to commit to shorter timelines while being able to maintain regular operations, such as processing permits and inspecting facilities. 

"It goes to the point that successive governments have undervalued the regulatory role of the Department of Environment," said Green Party Leader David Coon.

"You watch the budgets over the years and the Department of Environment budget has not kept up with the regulatory responsibilities, with the workload they're faced with."

Coon said the figure of more than a thousand sites "completely surprised me. I had no idea that it was so large." 

Bathurst West-Beresford Liberal MLA René Legacy pointed to the former Smurfit-Stone pulp and paper mill site in Bathurst, a so-called orphan site that has yet to be cleaned up.

The province, which may ultimately take ownership of the site, needs to take the initiative on such cleanups, Legacy said.

"There's a knowledge that it's in existence, but there's no action. … We need to be a lot more proactive. A thousand sites is an impressive amount." 

According to Martin, department staff are also reluctant to send compliance letters to other government entities, "either because of a close working relationship between the two government entities, or because staff assume the government entity understands their remediation responsibilities." 

In many cases they also did not document the progress of a file and missed steps in their standard operating procedures.

Sites that were closed or cleared often lacked site closure checklists that documented what had been done to clean them up. 

Environment fund under scrutiny

The auditor general also audited the Environmental Trust Fund, a decades-old program that collects money from plastic bottle recycling fees and spends it on community projects for environmental conservation, education, protection, beautification and restoration.

Martin concluded the department is not effectively overseeing the program and has no long-term strategy or standardized approach to evaluate funding request.s 

"The department could not demonstrate how over 30 years of funding has positively impacted the environment in the province," he writes.

The audit says the fund had a surplus of $41 million as of March 2022, despite turning down some projects and providing only a part of the requested funding for others. 

Without clear criteria, there's "no evidence-based rationale" for those decisions, Martin said.

Meanwhile, the auditor general's review of the province's overall finances says three consecutive large surpluses, including one projected this year, have improved New Brunswick's fiscal position.

But Martin warned MLAs that the flood of tax revenue — including a forecast of $373 million more in harmonized sales tax and $273 million more in personal and corporate income taxes this year — may be a short-lived phenomenon.

"The revenue this year may not be indicative of future results," he said.

Meanwhile, rising interest rates will likely mean a higher cost to servicing the public debt, given the province less financial leeway if it commits to more spending at the same time.

"Prudence is absolutely necessary here," Martin told the committee.