Ignace committee waits for willingness report
IGNACE – Now that hundreds of Ignace residents have cast ballots for and against the township continuing to pursue a place in a nuclear-waste project, the committee in charge of the process is preparing to receive and analyze a key report in June.
With Chéla Inc., the consulting firm that conducted the April 26-30 community vote, is expected to submit a report to the committee next month on the vote results and information collected in Ignace resident interviews during the months before the online and in-person vote.
The township’s Willingness Ad Hoc Committee is “getting training on communications” while the consulting firm prepares its report, Mayor Kim Baigrie told Newswatch.
Baigrie is co-chair of the willingness committee with Roger Dufault.
Meetings have taken place to begin preparing the parameters of the committee’s work, establishing logistical procedures, and setting schedules for reviewing With Chéla's report, Baigrie said.
The committee will report to township council with a recommendation on whether to proceed or withdraw as a potential host community for an underground nuclear waste repository.
“We are entering an extremely important stage of the willingness process over the course of the next two months in Ignace,” Baigrie said Tuesday, a week after the community vote’s conclusion.
She said “all council and all staff will remove themselves” from the committee’s discussion of With Chéla’s report, which will be left to the committee’s nine community members.
Council and staff’s removal from those proceedings is necessary “to ensure the utmost integrity, accountability and transparency of this process,” she said.
A “hosting agreement” ratified by township council in February commits Ignace to indicate by the end of July whether it wishes to continue to be in the running as a potential host community for a deep geological repository proposed by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization.
A location west of Ignace on Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation’s traditional territory is one of two finalists for siting the underground nuclear-waste facility designed to store spent nuclear fuel from Canadian reactors. The other site is near Lake Huron in southern Ontario.
The repository is projected to begin construction at either location in 2034, take about a decade to complete, and operate for more than 100 years.
Mike Stimpson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Thunder Bay Source
