Ray-Mont Logistiques’ container transshipment project will dramatically change the daily lives of residents living in its surroundings, particularly due to extreme noise levels. Never mind ! This project is moving forward, against all odds, and has so far escaped any rigorous analysis aimed at the effects on the environment and public health.
It is still difficult to understand how this project, approved by Quebec in early November, can escape the scrutiny of the Bureau of Public Hearings on the Environment (BAPE), while Quebec could have decided to request one. All the red lights are on around this hotly contested project from all sides, but it is the waltz of authorizations and the absence of evaluations. Located in the east of Montreal, in the Assomption Sud–Longue Pointe sector, a stone’s throw from a residential area, this project will have obvious negative repercussions on the environment and the health of citizens: air pollution and deafening noise, intensification of heat islands in a sector already suffering from a deficit of greening areas, intensification of active transportation in the surrounding area.
The Ministry of the Environment has given the green light to the transit of some 1,000 containers per day on the site, in addition to the storage of 5,000 containers. The company may be in operation all week between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Experts predict that the level of noise caused by the transshipment of huge metal containers will lead to disproportionately high noise levels, even though some residential areas are located just 100 m from the site.
No BAPE, therefore, but no impact assessment on the health of citizens either, as The duty revealed this week. The Regional Public Health Department of Montreal will not be able to carry out this valuable examination, yet demanded loudly this fall by doctors, public health experts and environmentalists, because the project is “too advanced”. The HIA must be carried out upstream of a project, and not when the realization is advanced. It’s heartbreaking.
While the climate emergency calls for projects combining industrial development with environmental concerns and social acceptability, it is difficult to understand how the industrial ambitions of Ray-Mont Logistiques could totally prevail over the health of citizens and the environment. ‘environment. Against the will of local authorities and federal and provincial deputies responsible for this area of eastern Montreal, already exposed more than the rest of the population of the island to health risks and a lack of green spaces , here we are planting an industrial wart in a vacant lot, without regard to the consequences that the citizens will suffer.
This hateful project has become the perfect embodiment of the predicted disaster: since it has not passed the usual process of rigorous impact review, the consequences will be assessed over months and years, in real time, in the field. On the winning side, the industry will raise its fist. In the losers corner, we will see the residents and the environment adding up the damage.