Back on December 19th of 1996, The Honorable Minister Don Downs of the Nova Scotia Assembly announced
that he would table a report.
The Honorable Minister said;
This report is the result of cooperative efforts by the Five Island Lake Citizens Liaison Committee, residents of the Five Island Lake area, the Department of Transportation and Public Works and the Department of the Environment. The Citizens Liaison Committee was formed two years ago to plan a clean-up strategy for PCB oils that had been released into the residential community. This committee has met 28 times and informed the community through public meetings, newsletters and smaller group discussions.
Mr. Downs continued with mentioning that he would:
… like to commend the efforts of the community liaison committee and all involved in the process. It has been a model of how public consultation works. The people who live around Five Island Lake brought together people from all circles to look at the broad scope of this serious environmental problem. They have taken a strong leadership role in moving this process forward and it is our job in government to see that the voice of this community is heard.
From these comments, a strategy was implemented to clean up the spill caused from the dumping of PCB tainted oil on the ground to recover the copper wire in old transformers. The electronics salvage company was known locally as Junky Jim’s.
A group was formed to look at other environmental items in the entire watershed area. Yet another public meeting was called to talk about this new development. An ad was placed about this meeting in the Bay News, a local community newspaper. The meeting was called for the ‘Two Gulls Restaurant’, and I attended that meeting. One of the committees that was set up included the ‘Hunting and Fishing Committee’, and I immediately signed up and have been going to the meetings ever since.
Tim McGee has over 10,000 hours experience in Sales and Marketing and about 28 years ago started working with Wang Computer Labs, a company that invented Word Processing Software. He has worked with various Computer companies over the years and finally with First Data, the largest processor of Visa and MasterCard transactions in the world. The division that he worked for in Canada was acquired by the TD Bank and he went into retirement.