A large part of the questions currently raised by the battery sector and the increasing privatization as well as the increase in production capacity of Hydro-Québec, if not the entire government strategy called ecological transition, can be explained by another diversion of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Environmental Quality Act (LQE).
Indeed, the feeling of incoherence, even improvisation, which seems to characterize these files is largely explained by the desire of the current government not to follow up on the new chapter of the EQA on strategic environmental assessment (articles 95.5 to 95.14), adopted by the National Assembly almost unanimously in spring 2017 (chapter 4 of the laws of 2017). The legislator wanted by this addition to the law to ensure that we cease to evaluate piecemeal the different projects encompassed by a government policy, program or strategy in order to allow the population and the government to have, from the planning stage, an overview of their environmental effects, defined in the law as being the sum of ecological, social and economic dimensions, as well as the conditions of their environmental and social acceptability.
But the government, including the Prime Minister, François Legault, and his Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette, who, however, personally voted for this chapter of the EQA, have refused for seven years to adopt a regulation which would define the sectors of the economy to which this chapter of the law would apply. The LQE thus provides this in its article 95.10: “The Administration’s programs determined by government regulation, including the strategies, plans or other forms of orientation that it develops, must be the subject of an evaluation strategic environmental protection in application of the provisions of this chapter. »
We can see more clearly the government’s desire to evade, after six years in power, the duty of transparency, information and consultation that these legal provisions impose. Indeed, even if such a regulation has not yet been adopted, the law provides that for programs which are not determined by regulation, which is currently the case for programs included in the so-called energy transition strategy, the government ” may exceptionally, in whole or in part and according to the conditions it determines, subject them to such an evaluation when these programs are likely to have significant impacts on the environment. So the law can apply now.
Strategic environmental assessments (SEAs), such as Quebec carried out in 2011 on the development of the shale gas industry, for example, have the legal objective of “promoting better consideration of environmental issues, including those linked to climate change and the health of humans or other living species.
The ESAs also aim to determine and evaluate the importance of the cumulative effects of projects as well as the taking into account of the principles of sustainable development in government decisions, including respect for the support capacity of ecosystems, which currently seems to be neglected in what are claimed to be parts of a so-called ecological transition strategy.
The “upstream” assessment of the cumulative effects of projects in an ESA would bring a consistency that is currently lacking in government decision-making.
For example, instead of evaluating a particular dam project, an SEA would compare with the same rigor the repercussions of several scenarios of new electricity production sectors or of several power plant projects, or even of energy saving strategies. , in order to favor the most acceptable and profitable sectors in all respects. It would allow us to ask ourselves whether the benefits of all the projects in the battery sector are worth it and whether, for another example, the five projects planned in the Bécancour industrial park together will have releases or pose globally worrying risks for the river and the local environment.
Currently, all projects planned for this location escape the public environmental assessment process. It may be that each project considered “on a case-by-case basis” is acceptable, but that the whole poses questions that would need to be answered before authorization, which is what a rigorous SEA would consider.
Until now, the Legault government has displayed a worrying indifference to the spirit and letter of very important environmental and social provisions of the law, legislative provisions that it had nevertheless supported in opposition. An indifference which, once again, tends to demonstrate that the Ministry of the Environment is trailing the will of the economic ministries, which are still promoting a type of unequivocal development of the 1950s, which we would certainly have liked to be over, especially in the face of climatic and biological emergencies.