Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Emissions from the Horne Smelter are unacceptable. However, has the foundry been established in a residential sector, or is it the opposite?
Patrick Larocque
Who built a residential area right next to the Horne Foundry in Rouyn-Noranda, where young children have a concentration of arsenic in their fingernails four times too high?
This is the Horne Foundry itself.
In 1926, the Noranda company began to build its mine and smelter to transform copper. Noranda owns all the surrounding territory. The company therefore obtained authorization from the Quebec government to found a city, which it administered until 1949. “The company does not want ‘squatters’ to settle on its territory”, says Benoit-Beaudry. Gourd, president of the Rouyn-Noranda Historical Society.
Noranda therefore plans its town around its mine and its copper smelter. As was done at the time in the “company towns”.
Noranda’s first workers’ quarter is built near the mine. The parish of Notre-Dame-de-Protection (today the Notre-Dame district) thus developed at the same time as the construction and operation of the neighboring factory.
“Building the city at the foot of the mine is the model that was used at the time in all the mines in the region. It was completely normal to be close to the factory, there were no means of transport,” says Sébastien Tessier, coordinating archivist at the National Archives in Rouyn-Noranda.
“You have to put yourself in the context of the times. There are no roads, we are in the middle of the woods. And in 1926, pollution and industrial diseases did not exist,” says Benoit-Beaudry Gourd, president of the Rouyn-Noranda Historical Society.
From the creation of Noranda in 1926 until 1949, it was the company that drew the city plans, developed the neighborhoods and administered the city. Noranda’s first mayor, James Murdoch, is the company’s president. He lives in Toronto.
The company is well aware of certain consequences of its activities on the environment: two large chimneys are built to keep emissions away, and from the 1940s, swimming is prohibited in Lake Osisko, between Noranda and Rouyn.
As early as 1979, the Quebec government was made aware of the dangers of the activities of the Horne Foundry on the health of the children of Rouyn-Noranda, particularly those of the Notre-Dame district, revealed earlier this month the journalist Thomas Gerbet, of Radio Canada. At the time, the level of arsenic in children’s hair was two to three times higher in the Notre-Dame district than in other districts.
Today, the Quebec standard for arsenic emissions in the air is 3 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3). Except that the Horne Foundry is not required to respect it: it benefits from an exemption since it was in operation before the entry into force of these environmental standards. The Legault government has just lowered the arsenic emission threshold for the Horne Foundry by 100 ng/m3 at 15ng/m3 by 2027.
This is not enough, wrote our chief editorialist Stéphanie Grammond this week, who believes that Quebec should show more firmness with regard to the Horne Foundry. In particular, by imposing a specific date on it to reach the Quebec standard for the emission of arsenic into the air of 3 ng/m3.
We are no longer in 1926.