Ontario Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller says the province appears to be abandoning efforts to combat cross-border air pollution responsible for 2,700 premature deaths and many thousands of hospital visits every year.

Speaking at the Upwind Downwind air pollution conference in Hamilton yesterday, Miller said the Ministry of the Environment has disbanded its transboundary air unit, stopped holding shared-air summits after the one Premier Dalton McGuinty chaired in 2007 and is no longer engaging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“If it is happening, I’m unaware of it,” he said. “The perception is nothing is going on with the U.S.”

Rachel Kampus of the Ontario Climate Change Secretariat and three ministry officials who spoke after Miller did little or nothing to counter his allegations.

Dundas native Adam Redish, director of the air policy and climate change branch, said the province has intervened in a Mississippi lawsuit against the EPA and signed letters of intent to draft air quality agreements with Michigan and northeastern states.

Miller said recent cool, wet summers “took the heat off government in terms of paying attention, but what happens when smog days return?”

Even though the government in 2004 set ambitious targets to reduce levels of fine particles in the air, particles that are particularly harmful to human health, Miller said there is still no plan and no action.

Calling for more accountability and transparency in ministry dealings with the issue, the commissioner said: “If there is a transboundary air program today, it is eluding me.”

He cited the industry-run Hamilton Air Monitoring Network (HAMN) as an example of what can be done to collect and share information with the public. It has real-time pollution readings publicly available on its website (hamnair.ca), along with 10 years of records — “information you can’t get provincially” — and even added a monitoring station on the Beach Strip, where pollution readings are often high.

“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “We haven’t added any air quality stations in the province of Ontario, I think, in 25 years. You have to be honest, show the problem and magnitude and people will have confidence. Kudos to HAMN.”

Complaining that the ministry is reducing resources and failing to do its job, he said: “The only way we are going to get action is if the people speak out and say it’s not enough. Toronto, you should at least be as good as Hamilton.”