The CGE Cleanup Nobody Wants to Pay For

In Peterborough, we like to sentimentalize the old CGE buildings — the brick cathedrals of our industrial glory days, when the lights stayed on, the shifts were full, and the city’s nickname actually made sense. But sentiment doesn’t clean soil, and nostalgia doesn’t pay for environmental remediation.

Now GE Vernova wants to knock most of the place down — more than 80,000 square metres of it — sweep the bricks into neat piles, and stroll politely away while the ground underneath remains the colour of corporate amnesia.

And why isn’t GE cleaning up the mess?
Because they don’t have to.

Under the “rules,” if you don’t redevelop the land, you don’t need to clean it to redevelopment standards. You can keep a contaminated site in a kind of legal purgatory: monitored, fenced, shuffled between consultants, but never actually repaired. It’s like an industrial version of “I’ll get to it later,” except “later” is measured in decades and the bill has nine digits.

And make no mistake — the bill is exactly why the cleanup hasn’t started. Real remediation of that land isn’t pocket change; it’s a corporate-sized headache. GE knows it. The City knows it. The Province definitely knows it. Everyone is politely pretending someone else will deal with it.

So, GE gets to flatten the buildings and declare “progress,” while the soil sits untouched like an unanswered email. The City shrugs because the legal authority sits with the Province. The Province shrugs because the company claims it’s only demolishing buildings, not redeveloping. And taxpayers just hope nothing ugly bubbles up in the groundwater.

Meanwhile, the neighbourhood gets to stare at a demolition zone that used to employ its parents, its grandparents, and half the uncles on the block. The buildings disappear, but the contamination doesn’t. We’re moving backwards and calling it a fresh start.

The cleanup, if it ever happens, won’t be out of corporate goodwill. It will happen only when the rules force it, or when the land becomes too valuable to leave toxic — at which point everyone will suddenly remember that Peterborough exists.

For a century, GE powered the city. Today, what’s left is a fenced-off reminder of what happens when a company’s physical footprint outlasts its obligations. Peterborough is left negotiating with history, bureaucracy, and a multinational that has perfected the art of strategic inaction.

In the end, the only thing being cleaned up is GE’s real estate portfolio.