After having sent a last bottle to the sea, the companies which take water from Quebec suffer a new refusal from the Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette. The elected caquist will not add exemptions to the water rates he is about to raise.
“There will be no exemption. The groups that were targeted remain so,” the Minister made a point of specifying during the special consultations on his Bill 20 establishing the Blue Fund. “I prefer to mention it at the start. »
Mr. Charette was responding to the recommendations of the Association des brasseurs du Québec (ABQ), which demanded that the new draft regulation increasing the value of water royalties be amended to exempt the food processing industry. The day before, the Quebec Forest Industry Council (CIFQ) had made the same suggestion to him for paper mills, which annually use hundreds of billions of liters of Quebec blue gold.
“Water doesn’t belong to the brewers, it doesn’t belong to the Quebec government, it doesn’t belong to any particular company. It is a common resource. So, we have to give it a value, ”said Mr. Charette, Wednesday, in a parliamentary committee.
“Requests for exemption, we cannot go in this logic,” he continued.
Currently, companies that capture water and include some of it in their final product must pay a royalty of $70 per million liters of water withdrawn. For those who use it in their manufacturing process and then reject it, the price is $2.50 per million litres. Certain sectors, such as the agricultural industry, are however excluded from this fee.
“You are not treated unfairly”
Benoit Charette intends to multiply by ten the revenues from these rates, which have not been reviewed since 2011. In April, he tabled a draft regulation that would ensure that companies that bottle water pay $150 to $500 $ per million liters of water. Monday, in the pages of Dutythe Canadian Beverage Association had raised concerns about being unfairly targeted by the new Quebec regulations.
Minister Charette raised the tone, Wednesday, during the passage in parliamentary committee of the organization, which represents several bottlers in Quebec territory. Asked to comment on the Association’s recommendations — including the recommendation to impose the same royalties regardless of the sector — the Minister insisted on reminding him that “it is a resource that [lui] does not belong”. “You are not being treated unfairly,” he thundered.
The heated exchange continued when the representative of the Association, Martin-Pierre Pelletier, maintained that the water captured by the bottlers always ends up reintegrating into the environment… through the sewers. “It takes a little longer, but [l’eau] returns to the Quebec watershed,” he said. “You return it by natural means.
“That’s not helping you here. You say it stays in Quebec because through urine, the water returns to nature. That’s not the best argument,” replied Mr. Charette, after refusing to modify his rules to apply equivalent royalties to everyone.