Cowboy Fitzgibbon decided it, so everyone crashes dry freight, the green people along with it.
For seven billion dollars that we are giving it, the Swedish “green” battery factory Northvolt will set up in the St. Lawrence Valley in the precise place where, just a few months ago, a housing project was launched. was rejected by the Ministry of the Environment because it would have damaged the rich biodiversity of the place. We are talking about 74 wetlands, which have become rare in the valley.
But despite all this money that will rain on the plain, its biodiversity suddenly becomes less rich. In any case less important. Enough that the Minister of the Environment, Benoît-la-Charette, listening only to his political survival instinct and the orders of Cowboy Fitzgibbon, agrees to cheat a standard established here for 45 years which requires an exhaustive environmental study before implementation of a project likely to seriously affect nature. This study is carried out by what is called the Office of Public Hearings on the Environment (BAPE).
Matamore Fitzgibbon is in a hurry. “OK Benoît! We’re going to do your study, but then! “.
Autopsy
After? Instead of an evaluation of the living world of the future Northvolt site, we will therefore be entitled to its autopsy. No social acceptability can result from such a contemptuous approach. The developer has even already undertaken work on the land before obtaining the necessary authorizations!
If the choice of autopsy is confirmed, it will be the end of the BAPE. Large wild rivers can be harnessed without discussion. Big industry will get what it always dreams of, a “free for all” to do what it wants, where it wants.
François-Philippe Champagne, our federal minister, summed up the plan well: “When it’s good for Ford, it’s good for just about everyone.”
The Boreal Action in Abitibi seems a long way from the St. Lawrence Valley, you might say, but lithium deposits – necessary for the manufacture of batteries – lie dormant in Témiscamingue and very close to the Amos eskers. These are special geological formations that provide the best water in the world. Without significant safeguards to preserve it, anything can happen. Our regional history has taught us that above divine law, the law of mines reigns. There still reigns.
Mobilization and resistance
We ask ourselves at Action Boréale, while asking the “at large” question: Why are there so few groups opposing Northvolt? Where is the impressive mobilization that succeeded in blocking the gas pipeline project deemed useless in this same valley?
What particularly worries us is the more than timid reaction of Quebec conservation leaders based in Montreal, who generally make the headlines when a frog is touched in Laval. On the official sites of Greenpeace, Équiterre, Snap, Nature Conservacy, the Suzuki Private Foundation, the Common Front on Energy Transition – which total hundreds of thousands of members – there is still no mention of Northvolt project… and even less of a call to resistance. What do they have to say to their members today?
Would these large groups support the erection of these supposedly “green” battery assembly plants but which are eminently questionable as to their effectiveness in reducing contamination of the planet?
Are we witnessing, with the passage of time, a decline in the natural and historical antagonism between the State-Industry and these large groups? Would they ultimately be grateful for the recurring grants and donations they benefit from? In return, don’t they constitute today an unprecedented intermediary body between the people and the government which relies on its new “go-between” friends to pass the unacceptable into public opinion? Whose Northvolt project?
These groups have chosen their approach: silence.
L’Action boréale deplores this.
Richard Desjardins, vice-president
Henri Jacob, president
Boreal Action