The intergovernmental buck-passing in British Columbia over where to dump millions of tonnes of Metro Vancouver’s garbage is a modern version of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns. The delays have dragged on for 10 years, and have embroiled the B.C. government and Metro Vancouver, not to mention First Nations and local governments in the B.C. Interior. But there’s been little more than a lot of wheel-spinning, while a very big garbage problem goes unresolved.

How big? For starters, Metro Vancouver now produces approximately 3.6 million tonnes of garbage annually. While some of this is recycled or disposed of within Metro Vancouver’s regional district — at a landfill in Delta or burned in a small waste-to-energy plant in Burnaby — roughly 500,000 tonnes of the trash is hauled annually by tractor-trailer trucks to a landfill 345 kilometres away, at Cache Creek in the B.C. Interior.

But the Cache Creek landfill is almost full and is scheduled to close sometime in 2010. This deadline has been well known for a decade, but like Nero, the politicians who should have had a viable alternative in place by now have squandered the opportunity.

Metro Vancouver had one solution several years ago, when it purchased the 4,200-hectare Ashcroft Ranch in the Interior for $4.5 million. But local First Nations objected to having a garbage dump in their backyard. The B.C. government, already mired in highly sensitive treaty and land claims negotiations, put the kibosh on that proposal.

Instead, the province ordered Metro to find alternatives. The regional district subsequently put out a call for other proposals: one response came from a private landfill company in Roosevelt, Wash., which is near the Oregon border and about 780 kilometres from Metro Vancouver. It proposed transporting Metro’s garbage by rail to its site at a cost of about $65 a tonne starting in 2010. By then, the total to be shipped was likely to reach 600,000 tonnes. As a result, Metro would be looking at almost $40 million annually to dispose of its excess garbage.

But B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner has made it very clear he doesn’t like the idea of B.C. shipping garbage out of the country — even if the arrangement is only temporary, as Metro says. It will only export the trash until it can open six waste-to-energy plants within the regional district, with the goal of consuming the excess garbage.

But Penner is peeved that Metro Vancouver disqualified most of the 23 proposals it received. And the Metro politicians were annoyed that Victoria bowed to pressures from First Nations for political reasons. Penner holds the trump card on exporting trash, as that solution requires a provincial permit.

While Metro and B.C. blame each other for the stalemate, the Fraser Valley Regional District, directly east of Vancouver, is worried about potential pollution problems from the six proposed waste-to-energy plants. They fear any emissions from these plants will be carried on prevailing westerly winds into the Fraser Valley’s highly sensitive air, which already absorbs much of Metro’s bad air.

To make matters even more complex, some of the First Nations in the Cache Creek area and that town’s mayor are having second thoughts about rejecting Metro Vancouver’s garbage. It’s finally sunk in that city garbage means business for Cache Creek and the landfill, which employs 120 full-time, is also the town’s largest employer. Now an option to expand the Cache Creek landfill that had previously been dismissed, hands down, is suddenly looking better. The clock is ticking. It’s time for everyone to stop fiddling around and work together. IE