Ontario Brownfields Regulation Becomes Law On October 1, 2004

This article was originally published in Blakes Bulletin on Environmental Law - October 2004

Ontario’s Brownfields program took another step forward recently with the finalization of a regulation that will codify a substantial portion of the province’s contaminated site clean-up process. Regulation 153/04 was issued under the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) and, for the most part, will take effect on October 1 of this year, along with the relevant sections of the EPA that were enacted in November 2001 as part of the Brownfields Statute Law Amendment Act (Brownfields Act).

The regulation has been in the works for almost two years and represents the most challenging part in the implementation of the Brownfields Act. Entitled "Records of Site Condition" (RSC), the regulation stipulates the form and content of a document that has seen somewhat limited use over a period of about eight years as part of Ontario’s "Contaminated Sites Clean-up Guidelines". The RSC is used to document the