Posted By JENNIFER PRITCHETT WHIG-STANDARD STAFF WRITER
The Calgary-based company building a $410-million wind plant on Wolfe Island has issued a cease-and-desist letter to a citizen it claims is spreading “false and defamatory statements.”
Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. sent the letter in connection with a statement made by Wolfe Island resident Chris Brown, an outspoken critic of some aspects of the project.
Brown, a local musician, is one of a handful of citizens who sit on a community liaison committee Canadian Hydro set up last year to answer local concerns about the project.
Brown regards the letter as an attempt to gag critics of the project.
“It’s an intimidation tactic,” he said.
Brown said he isn’t against wind power or the Canadian Hydro project on Wolfe Island. He does want to see the 86 turbines that are being erected there placed in areas where they won’t impact wildlife or people.
The cease-and-desist letter goes back to an e-mail Brown sent to former St. Lawrence College president Volker Thomsen and others, following an international wind energy conference at the college in June.
Brown said he hoped “the examples brought to light by the conference can prevent Wolfe Island from becoming an autopsy of grid monopoly and community exclusion.”
Canadian Hydro took exception to his comments, saying they suggest the firm “has no respect for the environmental and regulatory process and fails to consult with the community.
“Canadian Hydro has conducted itself in a responsible manner throughout the approval process,” stated the cease-and-desist letter.
The letter, written by Canadian Hydro’s Toronto-based lawyer Paul B. Schabas, warns Brown of the possibility of future legal action.
“Should you persist in this course of conduct, please be advised that our client will proceed against you and pursue all legal and equitable remedies available to it without further notice being provided to you. Kindly govern yourself accordingly,” Schabas wrote.
When theWhig-Standardrequested an interview with Canadian Hydro about the letter, the firm issued a short statement from Geoff Carnegie, its development manager for the Wolfe Island project.
In it, Carnegie wrote that Brown’s “claim of community exclusion overlooks three and a half years of community consultation by Canadian Hydro, as documented in the Environmental Review Report.
“The purpose of our letter to Mr. Brown was to insist that he act responsibly and utilize the relevant facts in his arguments.” Brown said he refuses to be quieted. “I will continue to exercise my right
to free speech and advocate for a full and transparent public review of this project, just as I will continue to participate in the community liaison group to ensure proper communication between proponent and citizenry,” he wrote in a response to Canadian Hydro.
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The Green File
Filed under: Ontario Wind Farms, Problems Wind Energy, Renewable energy, Truth about wind, Wind farms, environmental fraud, greenwashing, rural communities, wind turbines
These Wind Developers first “gag” the landowners who sign up for the use of their land so that the developer can qualify as a “Community Group” to apply for funding from OPA for it’s Standard Offer Program, then they try and “gag” any individual that speaks openly about their tactics! What’s next? Gagging newspapers for writing about it?………
Despicable! When companies try and stop comments on what they are doing from being made public, then one can only “assume” they are up to “no good”
I’m a summer vacation resident of Wolfe Island. Our family owns a home towards the foot of the island where we have vacationed for years. We just returned from a spring trip to the island. We are in disbelief! Did anyone think about the tourist industry or the summer residents that come to Wolfe Island for the pristine, pastoral and beautiful panoramas and solitude the island represented? I doubt it. I was appalled and upset when I saw the island last weekend. How could anyone be so naive as to think that the wind farm won’t affect the island negatively? Only a few will profit financially. The rest of us get nothing except eye sores, noise pollution and dead bats and birds. Just reading about wind farms for a few minutes on the internet and it’s apparent that present day wind technology is immature and inefficient at best. The windmills they erected are old wind technology and obviously surplus from Europe. Also, other countries recognize that the farms are offensive to people. If wind farms are built at all, other countries build them far away from any population areas. So now the rest of us, including the Kingstonians and the summer residents, have to live with the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. The wind farm is not progress. The wind farm is not green. The wind farm is just plain ugly. My family doesn’t travel 10 hours to vacation at Wolfe Island to live next to an industrial park. If I wanted to do that, I’ll buy a condo in Jersey City, New Jersey and live amongst the oil refineries. When the other summer residents and vacationers start arriving in a month or so, there will be no shortage of upset residents as the island swells by a factor of 3 during the summer. I predict a surplus of vacation homes will become available for sale. And whoever thinks that it won’t affect property values, take a lesson from the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas when the oil rigs appeared off the coast of those once beautiful beaches. Property values WILL drop. Vacationers and the tourist trade WILL drop off dramatically. Who in the world would want to vacation amongst wind-mills? Shame on those responsible for allowing this to happen! My father-in-law used to sit on our dock and look out at the head of Wolfe Island and say, “who needs heaven when you can live in a place like this”. Thank God he died before the wind farm appeared. He would have died of a broken heart.
I can understand your concern about the impact that the wind farm will have on the tourism industry. But to say that wind turbines will have the same impact as oil rigs is like comparing apples to oranges. Oil rigs deal with the extraction of gas and oil, which are both very volatile substances prone to explosions and spreading their pollution to the surrounding areas. Wind does have its issues with sound and shadow and it takes a few seasons before birds slightly alter their migration routes….but does that really compare with putting toxins in the water and air as the oil industry does?
So now it is July… how has the tourism been?
Reports say the cabins are sitting vacant and tourism has dropped off substantially. Read the latest on the Wolfe Island story here: http://windconcernsontairo.org
The wind turbines on Wolfe Island are an industrial development. They were no different than oil rigs from a distance. As industrial wind turbines age they will have oil leaks and mechanical failures as would any mechanical structure with moving parts and friction. To think birds will alter their migration routes is naive at best. The only altering will be the number of birds migrating. Experts in European countries know the impacts to birds are not as small as the wind industry try to make us believe. One of the criticisms is the the prop style technology we are employing is old. Solid vertical axis turbines, like a javex bottle lawn ornament designed and produced in Ontario, have promise. If wind is so important why would we not investigate how best to capture it to be integrated on the existing transmission network? Why not develop the technology ourselves to best meet our needs instead of trying to adapt an archaic technology? It may not answer all the problems, but way better than what is being pushed through at a high cost to the environment, tax payers and businesses.