À Bâbord ! : Why and how was this coalition formed ?

Brennain Lloyd : In the Fall of 2020 there was a conversation among people who were newly organizing around nuclear waste management with organizations who had been long working on it like Northwatch, Environment North, or Citizens United for a Sustainable Planet. We reached out, we held a networking meeting, and those who were interested founded WTNFN.

A lot of the focus on the last years over transportation and burial has been on Northwestern Ontario. But initially the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) investigated 13 different areas, mostly in northern Ontario, with four in the northwest and nine in the northeast. But they shortlisted in 2020 to just one site in northwestern Ontario and one site in southwestern Ontario. So, we tend to talk about it in terms of Northwestern Ontario, because that’s where the NWMO’s candidate site is. But the transportation impacts will be greater in the northeast, in terms of kilometres travelled.

ÀB ! : Could you describe Northern Ontario’s relationship with the issue of waste and pollution ?

B.L : By provincial law, there are different environmental standards for Northern Ontario than for Southern Ontario. The government uses the French river as the dividing line. A few years ago, there was an improvement in the air quality regulations. Cameco is a uranium company who operates a mine in Saskatchewan and owns a refinery in Blind River (in the north) and a conversion and fuel manufacturing facility in Port Hope (in the south). Rather than meet those new standards, Cameco closed their incinerator in Port Hope and began sending their waste by truck to Blind River. It’s an example of how Northern Ontario bears the double burden. We have lower standards, so we’re less protected by law and companies in Southern Ontario send their waste to our region.

We also have a long history of companies looking for waste disposal sites in Northern Ontario for PCBs, medical waste, low-level and high-level radioactive waste. For solid waste (i.e. household, commercial and industrial garbage), we had a 14-year fight against the city of Toronto dumping in a site in Temiskaming district. On radioactive waste, it began in the 1970s when Atomic Energy of Canada Limited did their first site search for a site for the burial of all of Canada’s high-level waste. Until the 1990s, the assumption was that it would go to Northern Ontario. We were depicted as being a remote and wild place, as if that is makes us available for the disposal of these wastes. There was also a separate process for the dumping of low-level waste that was located at Port Hope and Port Granby into Northern Ontario. 19 communities were investigated, and in the end all of them rejected it.

Then the NWMO is created in 2002, and they began the whole exercise again. In 2010, they launched their site investigation. The approach that the NWMO took in soliciting that interest was they went to municipal conferences and economic development conferences for Northern Ontario municipalities, and they pitched it. “Are you interested in learning how your community could benefit from a 16 to 24 billion dollars national infrastructure project ?”. They didn’t highlight that it was 50 years of having nuclear waste transported to and then buried in your community and the wastes being lethal into perpetuity. 13 communities in Northern Ontario said they would like to “learn more”. They were almost without exception communities that were in economic difficulty, in most cases the mill or the mine had gone out and they were having a lot of trouble paying their bills. So Northern Ontario got drawn in this most recent round through the economic disparities and difficulties that those boom-and-bust towns experience which isn’t different from some towns in Quebec and New Brunswick.

ÀB    ! : What are the main issues regarding Indigenous people and the NWMO ?

B.L : We have a lot of indigenous people participating in and directing the alliance, but we don’t speak for indigenous people, they speak for themselves and for their communities.

In November 28, the NWMO announced that it had selected a deep geological repository site between Ignace and Dryden, right in the heart of Treaty 3 territory. There are some tensions because Wabigoon Lake Ojibwe Nation (WLON) is the community immediately downstream from the site and the closest to the site. And it is that First Nation that the NWMO has focused on and has deemed to be the host community. But there are many other First Nations who also have traditional land uses in that area and so their treaty rights need to be upheld too. While the NWMO has approached many of them and has provided some funding to some of them through this “learn-more” agreement so that the communities could learn about the project and respond to it, none of the communities have expressed any support for the project, including WLON. The NWMO has been saying for more than 10 years that they will only proceed if they have an informed and willing host community, and there must be a compelling demonstration of willingness made by that host community but never clarified what that was. What WLON has said is, they are willing to proceed to the next step of site investigation, and they will undertake their own review assessment and approval process [1]. Their vote to move to the next step is not an expression of support for the project.

So, in terms of free prior and informed consent, which is necessary under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it’s not there, not even in the case of Wabigoon Lake Ojibwe Nation. But the opposite is there in the case of the other 27 First Nations in Treaty 3. And Eagle Lake First Nation which is the next community downstream, have actually initiated legal action because they say that they should have been considered as a host community able to say yes or no.

ÀB    ! : What have been the challenges through your campaign ?

B.L : The biggest challenge is that we are so seriously out resourced by the nuclear industry. The NWMO has many full-time staff in multiple locations in Ontario. They are constantly in funding mode. For example, Ignace is a community which they consider to be the host community. We disagree with it as Ignace is 45 kilometers east of the site. They’re in a different watershed, but they were desperate. You know, there’s a couple of motels and gas stations, a tavern, couple of convenience stores, but there’s no actual industry other than those service jobs or the school. They had a mine decades ago and they’ve never recovered from the mine closure. So, they’re stuck in this mode of waiting for the next mine. They think that the NWMO project is going to make it like it was when the Matabbi Mine was open and operating. But this project is not going to do that.

Then, there are certain people who are employees or former employees of the nuclear industry running very negative attack campaigns online. So, when local people ask a question or express an opinion online, they are attacked. It’s social media at its worst. There’s no local newspaper in Ignace or Dryden so social media is a main communication tool.

When we went door to door, we didn’t ask whether they support or oppose the project. We ask people whether they felt they were getting enough independent information about the project and the proponent, and who they thought should make the decision. Overwhelmingly, even the people who told us that they support the project, people said there should be a referendum.

Around 2021, Ignace hired some consultants who have worked for the nuclear industry for decades and they had tables at vaccination clinics during covid and distributed a survey that had a very low response rate and came to the conclusion that the residents wanted council to make the decision on nuclear waste coming to the region. Different consultants came in. In 2023 the town hired a different group of consultants who held events, fun nights at the tavern and such, Mayor’s breakfast at the senior center, did some interview and made an online poll. The question wasn’t “do you support nuclear waste being truck to your town and buried 45 kilometers down the road ?”. The question was “do you support Ignace continuing the NWMO process ?”. And for the people of Ignace that means continuing to get funding. So, the majority of people who participated in the poll said, yes. It was not the majority of people in Ignace. And it was not a clear question about support for the NWMO project. But that’s how Ignace came to declare that they were willing. And then Ignace went to sign the hosting agreement which commits them to supporting the project into perpetuity. Even if the project changes, they have to support the project. Ignace is locked in.

ÀB    ! : It can be very difficult for towns who lost prosperity with mine or mill closure. Extractive industries often deeply transform local culture and expectations of what is possible to achieve a sustainable and thriving community.

B.L : Yes. But if you take for instance, Wawa [2]. They had economic difficulties, there are some mines in the area, but the most local one had closed. Here we are, 2025, NWMO has given 12 million dollars to Ignace and when you drive through Ignace it looks just the same as it did in 2010. The only visible change is NWMO paved the parking lot of the mall, where their offices are. Other buildings are still closed. On the other hand, in the same period of time and without NWMO money, Wawa has started a huge blueberry facility, including a winery. There are few differences between Ignace and Wawa. The population is almost the same size, they were both post-mine communities, they’re both on the same transportation route even though Ignace has better rail access than Wawa does. But overall, Wawa has moved forward. Wawa now got a large employer which is not dependent on mining or forestry, which for a Northern Ontario town it really important.

ÀB    ! : How about the other surrounding communities ?

B.L : NWMO are working to get what they call a significant neighbor agreement with the city of Dryden, which is downstream from the site. There is a lot of opposition in Dryden, and there’s a lot of concern from Dryden residents about what might be in that agreement. If the project goes through, Dryden will have an increase in demand for services, their housing shortages will worsen, there will be more demand for you know all the basic services, like medical services, social services, and so on. NWMO says their employees will move to Ignace. I don’t believe that. In Dryden you can get an optometrist and a doctor, and your kid can play on a hockey team, there’s music lessons, and that doesn’t exist in Ignace. So, Dryden is in a tough spot, because they didn’t invite NWMO in the area, but they could be stuck with the impacts. Some of the businesses in town will have more customers, they’ll sell more lumber, sure. But it’s the city that’s going to manage the increase in services and infrastructure strains.

Then there are a number of communities that are much closer to the site. Borups Corners, Dyment, Dinorwic, Wabigoon… But they are all unorganized townships. Some of them have service boards but they don’t have municipal government, so they’re just shut out of the process. It’s another way that this willing host story is misleading because those communities very close to the site are not only downstream, but they’re in the same air shed.

ÀB    ! : What’s the way forward ?

B.L : The first step is we need to stop producing the waste. We need to make that shift. Quebec has done that ; Ontario could do that. There are studies showing that Ontario could make the transition to a renewable grid as storage options become available. We’re not saying shut down all the reactors tomorrow. We understand that it will have to be a phased approach. In 2023 in Ontario, the two last units of Pickering (A) were shut down. But unfortunately, they’re planning to build more. Most immediately about the waste that’s at the reactor stations, we need extended on-site storage but with a more robust storage system, and in the reactors on Lake Ontario’s case (Pickering and Darlington) the waste has to be moved back from the lake shore. And then focus on moving to different energy sources. The current push on electric is based on large platitudes. We need a thoughtful strategy to meet our energy needs that’s based on energy services, not on energy source.

The reactors communities are being told the waste will go away but the waste will not go away. It’s going to be the end of the century till the waste is moved, even if we stop producing it. That’s irresponsible. We could avoid contaminating another site as we would with the deep geological repository, avoid the risk of transportation, and make the waste more secure in its current location.

For more information, feel free to consult the website of We the Nuclear Free North