Some 1.2 million cubic metres of contaminated soil — enough for 500 Olympic-size pools — will be entombed in a storage facility. A waste-water treatment plant at the site is close to completion, said Judy Herod of Port Hope Area Initiative, the agency in charge of the cleanup.
“We are still on schedule to complete (cleanup) by 2022,” she said.
The 450-plus homeowners whose properties were tested have yet to receive the results. Radon gas levels were measured inside their homes while bore hole drilling outside yielded soil samples.
More than 5,000 private and public properties will undergo such testing to identify places which need remediation, said Herod.
[. . .]
When Ottawa approved the cleanup 13 years ago, the cost was pegged at $260 million. It has since ballooned to $1.28 billion.
“It was understood that estimates made at that time would need to be reviewed after the planning phase was completed,” said Joshua Kirkey, a spokesman for the Natural Resources ministry, adding the cleanup cost is “in line with similar cleanups that have taken place internationally.”
Now that Latvia has joined the euro zone, legislators in Riga can return to the delicate issue of residency permits for foreign nationals. Lenient rules have allowed thousands of über-rich Russians, Chinese and Central Asians to use Latvia as a backdoor to Europe. Critics want to tighten legal loopholes, while defenders warn that too much tinkering could have economic consequences.
Since 2010, foreigners have been able to obtain Latvian residency under comparatively easy financial conditions. For example, foreigners who purchase real estate worth between 70,000 and 140,000 euros (roughly $96,000-$191,000), depending on the location of the property, can obtain Latvian residency. Once in possession of a residency permit, foreigners are eligible for a Schengen visa, enabling holders to travel freely to most EU states.
Since the residency program’s inception, more than 7,000 foreigners have obtained Latvian residency via real estate purchases or other investments. The overwhelming majority are Russians, mostly from Moscow. But hundreds of Kazakhstanis, Ukrainians, Uzbeks and Chinese have also taken advantage of the loophole. In addition, dozens of Kyrgyz and Azerbaijani citizens have become “real estate” residents in Latvia.
Nationalist politicians oppose the loopholes, arguing that big-spending foreigners are pricing Latvian citizens out of desirable residential areas, in particular Riga’s Old Town and the seaside resort of Jurmala. Opponents also contend that the program has had only a minimal economic benefit because many foreigners who purchase homes in Latvia don’t spend much time or money in the country.
On January 1, Latvia became the 18th EU member state to adopt the euro as its currency. In connection with the euro-zone accession process, nationalist MPs engineered the adoption of amendments last October designed to restrict real-estate-residency, including capping the number of eligible foreigners at 800 annually. Legislators also raised the minimum real estate investment to 150,000 euros.
President Andris Berzins, however, declined to sign the amendments into law, voicing opposition to a separate provision that would have allowed foreigners simply to purchase temporary residency, valid for up to five years, for 50,000 euros. The bill was returned to parliament for further consideration. MPs are expected to discuss revisions in late January.
Proponents of the current framework, in particular those working in Latvia’s real estate sector, have cautioned against making drastic changes. Yegeniya Markova, a managing director at Nira Fonds, a real estate firm with offices in Riga and St. Petersburg, claimed that the influx of foreign buyers is a significant catalyst of economic activity, especially in the construction sector.
“Firstly we need to understand what we mean by parties. Talking about one party or multiple party systems is not the real crisis at hand, when we talk of China. You can, like in Russia, create lots of political parties, monopolised by the powerful and the wealthy. In Iran, the levels of mobilization in elections are higher than in any European country, but people still call it a religious authoritarian regime. I recently returned from India, where there is deep disappointment with party politics. There you have very strong social movements, but with very little voice in Parliament. And it is easy to see how, if you announced that China would have a multi-party system with elections tomorrow, Parliament would immediately be taken over by China’s big capitalists. In the multiparty system, all illegal poverty, now through ‘democratisation’, will be made legal.”
Wang extends this vision into what he sees as the universal decline of the political party, whereby both China and the west’s parliamentary democracies exist in a deep state of depoliticization. In the latter, amidst macroeconomic consensus, parliament is merely a tool for enforcing stability: “There has been a tendency in the last few decades, of political parties becoming state parties. Here, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer the Communist Party in its twentieth century sense. It is a state party. It is almost completely integrated into the framework of the state, and functions as such, rather than as a political organization. And this has occurred across the world. What we witness is the political system detaching itself from the social form.”
Wang does not relinquish his democratic aspirations. “We need to think of a different kind of politics. Democracy is a very positive value, but it is for everybody. In this sense, I do not align myself with liberal democrats, nor traditional socialism. Many might believe that the Communist Party still recognises socialism as positive, and that we can convert the Party back to its earlier tradition. This is impossible, because there are so many different interest groups within the Party.” In Wang’s vision of Chinese constitutional reform, “when the Party is no longer their representative, we need autonomous organisations of workers and peasants and other social organisations to express their voice in policy-making in the public sphere, and we need all policy to be passed not only by the Party but also by Congress.” Subjecting the bureaucracy to democratic checks and opening space for democratic debate is, of course, pure anathema to the Party, which is otherwise content to deliver economic compromises from time to time, under threat of protest.
Wang Hui’s intellectual vision, led by a deep commitment to labour movements, is an important guiding force for China’s nascent new leftists. “Socialism’s legacy in China was a failed effort to find a logic for the socialist state to overcome its contradictions. That’s why the Cultural Revolution happened, in the search for a flexible division of labour,” Wang says. “For the leftwing, we need to seriously recognise and reflect on the failure to overcome inherited legacies of hierarchy and bureaucracy. But if we say all socialism’s twentieth century experiments were ‘wrong’, or that historic socialism is not actually socialism, we are simply giving up,” Wang tells me. “There is a certain political correctness among the left that implies that talking about this history links you to its disasters. This is a cheap way of doing history.”
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