Backbencher
Rick Nicholls from Chatham-Kent-Essex is pushing a private-member bill that
would give the province two years to study the issue and 10 years to eliminate
it.
Nichols
blames it on trying to push too much electricity through transmission lines,
says some goes into the ground and can migrate to barn where it harms livestock
and homes where it impacts people.
“You’ve
heard the term ‘dancing cows,'” says Nicholls. “They’re start lifting their
hoofs because they can feel the current, and when that happens is then the body
goes into ‘oh, there’s something wrong here, we’ve got to fight it.’ Well, that
then affects the quality of milk.”
Nicholls
said a farming family near Drumbo told him the entire family suffers from
chronic illness, as do many of his neighbours.
“I said,
‘Well take a look at a number of people on farms that are along the same line
that feeds your operation,'” he says.
“He
identified two, maybe three, that have come down with various forms of cancer,
one in his 40s has early signs of dementia, another young teenager has come
down with rheumatoid arthritis.”
Although
there are no figures available to suggest an impact on the provincial economy,
Nicholls has no doubt the effect has been profound, says reporter Adelle
Loiselle for CKNX Radio in Wingham.
“Not only
on family farming businesses, but if these farmers are going out of business, they’re
not buying permits, they’re not buying building supplies, so there’s an
economic impact in the communities in which they live,” he says.
The bill
goes to committee next for further study.
In the 1990s, I talked with an Old Order Mennonite who farms on the border with Waterloo, and he told how his cattle suffered from tingle voltage.
The situation was diagnosed by his veterinarian who recommended a copper grounding rod. It worked, the cows resumed drinking water from their stanchion bowls and returned to health and full milk production.
But where does tingle voltage arise in a barn of an Old Order Mennonite who has not hookup to electricity? Apparently it migrated along an underground stream from a transformer hanging on a pole at the corner of his farm.
