It was not the town of Noranda which gave its name to the mine in 1926. It was rather the Noranda company which gave its name to the town, which today became Rouyn-Noranda.
This is because Noranda, which is now merged into Rouyn and where we are preparing to close a neighborhood to protect it from the toxic fumes released by the Horne Foundry, is a “ company town », as Pierre Céré explains in his most recent essay, Journey to the end of the mine. The Horne Foundry scandal. In fact, the fate of the city is so linked to the company that it is the Foundry which supplies the city of Rouyn with water, based on old agreements, reveals Pierre Céré.
The author does not remember, in living memory, having known anyone who had ever bathed in Lake Osisko, on the shores of which the town of Rouyn is located. The lake is so polluted by waste from the Horne Foundry that stirring up the bottom is dangerous. “Everyone knows that you should not drink its water or eat its fish. » The drinking water that the establishment supplies to the city comes from Lake Dufault. Lake Osisko “was the trash, was the septic tank of the foundry. They had the right to send their mining waste there and then their foundry waste,” he said in an interview.
A mermaid on Friday
However, Pierre Céré, who is also spokesperson for the National Council of the Unemployed, was born and raised in Rouyn. He also remembers the siren from the foundry which went off on Fridays to warn residents that it was going to release a thick cloud of smoke. Residents then barricaded themselves in their homes, notably to escape the stench of the exercise.
In Lake Osisko, we find thallium in particular, a very toxic product whose name Pierre Céré did not even know before starting his book. “Thallium is worse than mercury. Its properties are similar to those of cyanide,” he adds. And the rare earths released from the Foundry contaminate lichen for miles around.
The situation was considered normal, precisely because the city is a company town, that is to say it was created due to the presence of ore in the region. That said, while the mine could employ up to 2,000 workers in the 1950s, today it only employs 600. On this subject, Pierre Céré quotes Martine Ouellet, former PQ minister of Natural Resources: “We don’t there is no need to compromise the health of an entire population [cancers, allergies, problèmes respiratoires, enfants ayant des problèmes d’apprentissage]… for some jobs. You have to put the wrong one business in its place. »
And that’s not easy to do when business in question is at the very origin of the city’s existence.
Long-known problems
“Understanding the development of Rouyn-Noranda necessarily brings us back to an essential condition: without these deposits of non-ferrous metals, we would never, ever have built in the middle of the forest in the 1920s, in these swamps surrounded by rocky massifs, the cities of Rouyn and Noranda,” writes Pierre Céré. Since then, the region has become what he calls a “resource region”, like many others in Quebec.
“The question that arises is: what kind of development do we want? Are we condemned, despite all the democratic progress of our societies over the past century, to having to endure again and again this colonialist relationship which reduces the existence of regions to the role of “resource regions”? ” he asks.
Is it this report that leads the government to accept the Horne Foundry’s promise to reduce its arsenic emissions at a rate five times higher than the norm? At the same time, the book asks the following question: why were we not reacted sooner to concentrations of arsenic that we knew were well beyond acceptable standards for decades?
Because it has been a long time since results comparable to those of the study by the Abitibi-Témiscamingue Regional Public Health Directorate made public in 2019 which noted abnormally high rates of cancer and births of low weight babies in Rouyn. -Noranda are known to the authorities. Pierre Céré cites extensively an investigation carried out in the early 1980s by doctors from Mount Sinai Hospital, who analyzed the effect of lead, cadmium and arsenic on the health of workers at the Noranda mine. According to a union representative, the investigation had to be entrusted to doctors from outside the city, because “the doctors in Rouyn-Noranda did not fear the mine, but did not want to face it.”
A year later, Robert Monderie and Daniel Corvec directed the film Norandawith Richard Desjardins, on the same subject.
Despite the dark dossier he presents on this multinational that gave birth to his city, Pierre Céré does not lose hope of changing the situation. The resistance, notably that of the Mothers at the Front movement in the Horne Foundry issue, reinforced his ambition.