The history of the ministry [de l’Environnement] confirmed […] that its trajectory is strewn with pitfalls, even insurmountable obstacles. Let us recall, for example, that two of the largest environmental spending programs of the Quebec government over the past 40 years, namely the $7 billion of the PAEQ [Programme d’assainissement des eaux du Québec] and the billions gathered for the fight against the climate crisis, had been placed from the outset under the authority of the Ministry of the Environment.
Posted yesterday at 5:00 p.m.
It was however quickly stripped of it, with the results that we have seen. Thus, any update to Quebec’s sanitation infrastructure, valued at around $17 billion, is now stuck in the infrastructure programs placed under the authority of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, which has historically conferred on the latter control of the priorities at the origin of the delay that the community suffers today.
As for Quebec’s efforts in the area of climate change, we see in the light of the reports of the Auditor General and the Commissioner for Sustainable Development that several departments have in fact siphoned off the sums accumulated in the Green Fund to accommodate their priorities and their clientele without submitting to the control of the Environment, which obviously never had the means to verify the efficiency of the agreements concluded with these ministerial partners. And the latest government initiative at the time of writing removes more power from it as Bill 44 authorizes the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources (MERN) to manage a separate fund from the Green 2.0 Fund, the new electrification and climate change. This concession confirms the autonomy of the MERN in relation to the Environment, which has certainly been given the captain’s hat in the fight against the climate crisis in the law, but not the possibility of having its hands on the helm.
It is worth recalling here that Quebec’s initial sanitation strategy was thwarted by sectoral interests, which expressed themselves either through industrial lobbies or through the departments that manage interests. Thus, the fragmentation of the strategy to the benefit of the sectoral ministries got the better of the policy of depollution from upstream to downstream and of a synchronization of government interventions in the municipal, agricultural and industrial sectors.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPAQ) has taken over most of the control of agricultural depollution in its sector. During this time, manufacturers obtained the power to self-assess to a large extent and they managed to postpone the development and application of regulatory pollution control standards in several sectors to the point of succeeding, in addition, in paralyzing the Plan of action Saint-Laurent (which was amputated from its component of the federal-provincial fight against pollution of the main navigable artery of Quebec).
In both of these sectors, it is private sector professionals who effectively enforce some of the key regulations aimed at controlling the release of toxics into the environment. A privatization of government controls that the general public essentially ignores.
Successive governments in Quebec have systematically disguised this recuperation of environmental powers by the sectoral ministries by saying that it was a matter of “making accountable” both these public institutions and their private sector clienteles. There is no need to argue about the value of this strategy endorsed by the various governments and by a generation of senior civil servants trained in the great schools and convinced that the public interest merges with that of the private sector. It suffices to note the dilapidated state of Quebec’s wastewater treatment plants: it is only in 2040, in fact, that all these plants, without exception, will be equipped with secondary treatment in accordance with 2012 standards. we will surely have to wait a few more decades before tertiary treatments are added everywhere, and we do not know if they will be able to neutralize the emerging toxic molecules. Such a failure of a policy that started in 1980 is still staggering.
The green deposit
Louis-Gilles Francoeur
With the collaboration of Jonathan Ramacieri
Ecosociety, March 2022
222 pages
Who is Louis-Gilles Francoeur?
Louis-Gilles Francœur was notably responsible for environmental coverage in Homework (1982-2012), before being appointed vice-president of the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE, 2012-2017). He is the author of Nature passion (Multimondes, 2007) and the preface to Hunting Meditationsby the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (Septentrion, 2006).