DEMAND A MORATORIUM NOW!
For decades, the gravel mining industry has blasted, dug, crushed and trucked across Ontario with apparent impunity.
The gravel mining industry is authorized to extract thirteen times more gravel every year than what we use, from more than 5,000 existing gravel mining sites in Ontario.
The provincial government allows the gravel mining industry to consume on average an additional 5,000 acres of land each year.
Gravel mining destroys the existing environment and damages communities — while paying less property tax than some single families do.
Gravel mining accelerates the climate crisis, by feeding sprawl, highways, cement production, transportation and other massive causes of greenhouse gases.
The gravel mining industry does all this without any consent of Indigenous Nations, as our Constitution says they must.
This multinational, foreign-dominated industry is so out of control, so widespread, and so deep-pocketed, that the moment you try to stop one site another one appears somewhere else.
We — the people of Ontario — demand that our government impose an immediate moratorium on all new gravel mining approvals, until an independent panel can chart a new path forward.
It’s time to honour treaties and obligations with Indigenous Nations, prevent more climate destruction, protect groundwater and farmland, and give the communities dealing with these sites more say in how land use is decided.