“There were more than 73,000 hazardous spills reported in Ontario between 2011 and 2020, but the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks attempted to recover its response costs just three times. Even in those three, it went after only about half of the $1.3 million spill response cost it incurred, said Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk, in her Annual Report of Environment Audits. When looking at just 30 other spills where the government did not attempt any cost-recovery, the audit report estimated those spill responses cost taxpayers, and not polluters, about $4.5 million. The total amount of unrecovered costs is potentially tens of millions of dollars more.”