Posted yesterday at 4:00 p.m.
A basket of blueberries bought on the 117 North, in Louvicourt, just before Val-d’Or. Wild blueberries, picked by hand (with a comb) by Anishnabe people of the Lac Simon Nation. A small cabin plywood on a vacant lot. One hundred and forty-four kilometers further on, there were none left. I promised myself to stop on the way back, to take even more, for the jams. Because with a little butter on toast, it’s one of the beautiful things in our galaxy.
A few weeks ago, I was in Rouyn. Since then, something has bothered me.
” My boyfriend is embarrassed, but he would like a picture with you. »
On stage, Sarahmée was brilliant. The crowd was dancing.
Like his boyfriend Martin, 28, she works in the mines. He has a secondary five and “makes $109,000 a year”. They came to see Loud. This is the FME (Emerging Music Festival). Magnificent event carried out at arm’s length by hundreds of volunteers in the middle of the city. Right in the shade, literally a few yards, from the Horne Foundry.
Rouyn is a surreal city. Overlooked by a factory that is much talked about these days.
A few minutes later: “Can we take a picture with you? Two guys from Côte-Nord (from Havre-Saint-Pierre), late twenties, early thirties.
“Did you come for the festival?
– No, we work here. In the mines. »
We chatted for a few minutes. Nothing on the news, almost nothing on arsenic. The guys work in a gold mine. And nickle. Other essential metals, with copper, to the great free world. But we feel that it is taken in the throat. We touch the thing. When you’re 30, you’re still immortal, I told myself.
Still later, at the Choses Sauvages show, one of my daughters calls in FaceTime. She wants to see. I raise my phone, she sees the stage, the lights, the crowd, hears the music. The technology is amazing. Progress has been made since the discovery of a deposit and the founding of Rouyn, barely 100 years ago.
The next day, through a few more conversations, I guess the concern. Not so much arsenic, because we’re going to decontaminate the most affected sector this fall. Especially the rest. The population was quickly reassured about the toxic emissions. Thirty-three times higher than the standards. In the media, politicians toss the ball around. On the ground, we will correct, reduce it to so little that in fact it will soon be almost invisible traces. Standards will be met.
Then an immense malaise that rises from the bottom. Why now if it was possible before? It gives the impression that people (leaders) have been eating butter by the handful for decades.
There, they just got caught. To paraphrase the poet born in Rouyn: not everyone knew do one’s best.
One thing settled, we will murmur, in a head office in Switzerland and behind the scenes of the theater of annual profits.
How do you say already, when a subject that is not named takes up all the space? It comes back to me: a moose in the canoe.
I have been told a lot and above all with uneasiness about the hundreds of thousands of tons (340,000 to be precise) of toxic and electronic waste from the planet that have come to be treated in Rouyn since 2017. At the Horne Foundry. Still. Waste that crosses continents, takes the boat, then a train…
my phone which FaceTimait live the day before and the devices that took photos to immortalize a worried present and feed Instagram or TikTok will probably end their useful life burned here. Ditto for the batteries of electric cars, waste water treatment residues, PCBs from electrical transformers, and all these recycling, obsolete objects of the green shift, and others. Because the factory can separate the rare and precious metals of our wonderful era committed to a sustainable and long-lasting future. It’s screwed up, seems to me; it is always the future that is being improved. Rarely the present.
We are no longer satisfied with digging the Cadillac fault in Abitibi-Témiscamingue (deposit of copper, gold and nickel), we have found a bigger, infinite vein: that of consumption and the growing number of humans. And that’s a little worrying.
Because standards are too often reactions after already serious and harmful consequences.
We recycle, as if to be forgiven. We would not give up the copper anodes of the batteries, or his iPad and other tablets, which will also be found one day in Rouyn. Yours and those of billions of others.
To tell the truth, and sincerely, it is wonderful, this idea of recovering and recycling these metals. These are jobs at home, and instead of burying them, we are extracting them again. But couldn’t we do it elsewhere than in residential areas bordered by a lake?
This model, unfortunately, works like the old military rules: a few generals send an infantry of people (the people, that cannon fodder) to the profit front. Think differently ? Can we venture to ask?
An idea like this: I suggest naming the two foundry chimneys Siri and Alexa. As long as you worry, why not do it smiling, amazed by everything you invent?
The solution does not come from the particular fact of a factory, a multinational or a science, but from oneself. Accept or not this fatality.
I finally found what was bothering me. On the way home, I forgot the blueberries.