WHO WILL PAY FOR THE DAMAGE?

Caledon residents are familiar with what happens after infrastructure projects are completed and the talking heads have left.

We have a massive gravel strip mine and its detritus near Caledon Village. You can shoot a dystopian sci-fi movie on the piles of gravel and stinking water, but can't do much else.

If the province wants to push through massive infrastructure projects, like highways, it should not just mitigate the environmental impact on communities like ours, but should also make a responsible declaration about how it plans to manage aggregate mines and their impact on the landscape.

These mines and large projects are a lose-lose situation for us, but apart from some vague ideas about reclaiming wastelands, we have not seen much action on the ground.

The cost of cleaning up after mining should not be undertaken by governments, for two reasons. First, the money used for this is ultimately the taxpayers,' meaning we pay for the losses suffered by us. How is that fair?

Second, we have seen that whenever the onus for corrective action is left to the government, nothing happens. It's better to make the private companies responsible for repairing the damage.

JAKE KLEIN