Do you remember Flushgate?
Quebec as a whole was scandalized to see the City of Montreal pour billions of liters of wastewater into the St. Lawrence in the fall of 2015.
The name used to baptize the event (derived from Watergate, the political scandal that sank Richard Nixon in the 1970s) reflected the sulphurous nature of the affair.
And it was legitimate, this indignation. The problem is that our anger is variable in geometry.
Too many rivers across Quebec have been in atrocious state for too long…and there is no widespread protest.
Figures compiled recently by the Montreal Journal yet confirm how scandalous the situation is.
Quebec has 344 analysis stations located on various waterways. And what we learn is that 53% of these stations indicate that the waterways are “in poor or very poor condition”.
There are several culprits, from sewage to road salts to of course pesticides and fertilizers. Because unsurprisingly, it is especially the rivers located in the agricultural areas of the St. Lawrence Valley that are in the worst shape.
In many cases, they are downright “asphyxiated”.
Quebec has had a national water policy since 2002. At the time, it was promised to “reduce health risks and reduce water pollution”.
Overall, progress has been made and more is on the way (one mentions, among others, in Quebec, the modernization process on farms launched last year).
The problem is that this progress is still largely insufficient. The health check of our rivers is clear proof of this.
A few years ago, our journalist Daphne Cameron made the sad portrait1 one of the suffocated rivers: the Chibouet, in Montérégie.
A river “of horrors” where the Ministry of the Environment had detected between 21 and 27 different pesticides and where the water quality threshold necessary for the protection of the species found there was almost always exceeded.
According to data analyzed by the Montreal Journal, the situation has not really changed. We even detected 29 different pesticides in this river last year.
For what ? It’s an open secret: we lack the political will to redress the bar with enough vigor.
One example – among others – of the softness of Quebec: we learned last spring that the Legault government was granting farmers a “compliance period” of four years before forcing them to protect waterways with the help of vegetated strips and to treat wastewater from washing fruits and vegetables.
We are not even talking here about banning the use of pesticides. We are talking about acting downstream, with a proven method, to limit the contaminants that end up in waterways.
A fundamental problem is that Quebec does not give itself an obligation of result in terms of water protection.
The Fondation Rivières recently highlighted this shortcoming, urging the CAQ government to set itself objectives, in order to then quantify and measure the effects of its approaches.
In a brief presented last May during the parliamentary committee on Bill 20 – establishing the Blue Fund – she also deplored that the money invested in Quebec each year for the protection of water represents only a fraction of the amount made necessary by “the magnitude of the problems to be solved”.
In short, there are solutions. But in Quebec, people are still reluctant to take the bull by the horns.
Our blue gold is our pride. It is heartbreaking to see, year after year, the delay in acting accordingly.