Ontario beats U.S. in curbing smog, clean-air forum told

OTTAWA, ONTARIO - Ontario is doing far more than U.S. jurisdictions to curb smog caused by coal-fired plants, even if it's not closing them down as quickly as promised, a New York state official says.

"If anybody in the United States would do anything half as good I'd be very happy," Peter Lehner, bureau chief of the Environmental Protection Office of the New York attorney general's office, said recently.

Lehner was one of a very few American officials attending the first Shared Air Summit to discuss cross-boundary pollution, a gathering that comes on the heels of a disturbing number of smog days here.

Ontario has issued smog advisories covering 23 days this year, tying the record set in 2001.

The provincial Liberal government has come under fire for delaying by 15 months the closure of Nanticoke, the giant coal-fired plant on Lake Erie, which is the largest single polluter in Canada. It was supposed to close by the end of 2007, but that has been pushed back to 2009.

"The commitments of the government of Ontario to close the biggest polluting sources in the province, from the United States perspective, are really terrific," Lehner told reporters after a taped message from New York Governor George Pataki was played.

"In the Midwest there is really nothing comparable to what is being done here," Lehner said.

New York state is embroiled in a number of lawsuits against several midwestern states known for their coal-fired power plants, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"New York is really similarly situated to Ontario in the sense that 80 per cent of our pollution comes from out of state," Lehner said.

"We have been using litigation to try and get more aggressive action by the federal government to deal with the interstate pollution as well as suing the polluters themselves," he said.

The province issued a report last week showing that smog from the United States contributes to 2,700 deaths a year in Ontario and puts about 12,000 people in hospitals, resulting in some $5 billion damage to the provincial economy.

On high smog days, more than half of the ground-level ozone pollutants found in smog that affect Toronto's air originates in the U.S. Premier Dalton McGuinty said at best the border is an invisible barrier and that Canadians and Americans share the same air.

"On a typical bad air day, we know that more than 50 per cent of the smog hovering over Ontario originates in the U.S. Midwest and the Ohio Valley.

"But thanks to those prevailing winds, Ontario also contributes to smog over New York state, New Hampshire, Vermont, Quebec and Atlantic Canada," McGuinty told the gathering.

"We are truly all in this together," he said.

Among other things, the Premier called for the formation of a shared-air roundtable of Canadian and U.S. experts to advise him on cleaning up the air. McGuinty said he would also ask Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant to probe what Ontario can do to assist the U.S. states currently in legal battles with Washington on clean air.