Resisting Neo-Liberalism: the Poisoned Water Disaster in Walkerton, Ontario

This article examines how relations of governance generate particular forms of resistance, and the mechanisms through which resistance can reconfigure governance. It seeks to clarify actual and potential links between resistance, transformative politics and ameliorative change. Empirically it documents an environmental disaster in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, when seven people died and 2300 became ill after E. Coli contaminated public drinking water in May of 2000. Following a Public Inquiry and nine months of Hearings, the intensely critical O’Connor Report explained the disaster as resulting from policies adopted by Ontario’s neo-liberal government and its ‘Common Sense Revolution’. The Report forced government to re-regulate and restaff the Ministry of the Environment. To understand how this critical narrative was produced and why it was heard, the article situates the Inquiry process in its historical, cultural and political context. Focusing on two particular forms of knowledge/power, science and law, it argues that the universalistic truth claims of science were allied with the normative and procedural claims of law to challenge hegemonic power and interrogate the truth claims of neo-liberal government. Resistance in this case took local form, but its roots and resonance came from history, timing, and world-wide struggles against globalization, free trade and the ever-expanding American empire.