The seduction tour of the Swedish manufacturer of electric battery cells Northvolt began Wednesday evening with a stop in McMasterville, where a team of around thirty employees of the Swedish company as well as its co-founder and CEO for North America , Pablo Cerruti, met with the citizens of the municipality to explain their project to them and play down its ins and outs.
At 5 p.m., around a hundred people were already lining up in front of the doors of the McMasterville School of International Education in order to learn more about this $7 billion megaproject that we’ve only been talking about for a few weeks.
Rather than giving a masterful presentation and subsequently holding a question-and-answer session with citizens, Northvolt has instead decided to engage in active education by setting up information kiosks: the electric battery, its manufacturing, the impact in the community, the jobs, the stages of the construction of the factory…
Quebec, French and Swedish employees from Northvolt were there to discuss and answer citizens’ questions. CEO Paolo Cerruti welcomed people in front of the first kiosk, in small groups of five to ten people who gathered together to be able to hear him and relaunch him.
The discussions were cordial, the calm tone and the search for credible answers largely predominated over the accusatory reproaches. Some left the conversation welcoming Paolo Cerruti…
But there were also quite a few questions and concerns. A majority of them concerned the impact of the construction phase on mobility in the sector, noise and truck traffic, the capacity and infrastructure to accommodate the 4,000 workers who will be required to operate the site. in 2026…
A couple with two children aged 18 months and 3 years were concerned about the proximity of the daycare to the construction site. A young father living nearby wanted to know the fire risks linked to the cell manufacturing processes and especially the emergency procedures that will be put in place to avoid tragedies like the region has experienced in recent decades.
The after-effects of an industrial heritage
For 120 years, McMasterville residents lived near the CIL explosives plant, which was the scene of a terrible tragedy when an explosion killed eight workers and injured seven others , 1er October 1975. CIL closed the McMasterville site in 1998.
For decades, the residents of Saint-Basile-le-Grand cohabited with an illegal warehouse in which tens of thousands of liters of oils contaminated with PCBs were stored, which were completely destroyed when a fire broke out on August 23, 1988.
A fire which produced a cloud of highly toxic smoke which contaminated the air, as well as the water and the ground due to the spill of 130,000 liters of oils contaminated by PCBs, forcing the evacuation for two weeks of 5000 residents of the municipality.
We therefore understand the concern that a project like that of Northvolt can cause as the scale and the mark it will leave in the immediate environment of the Richelieu River will be considerable.
“But Northvolt seems a serious company, it will be beneficial for businesses in the region as CIL has been. It was thanks to the CIL that I opened my welding business Camfab in 1983. You have to assess the risks,” Camille Blanchet, a McMasterville resident who experienced the 1975 explosion, told me.
Since the closure of the CIL 25 years ago, only a portion of the site which housed the explosives factory’s research laboratory has been recycled and converted into a residence for the elderly and allowed the construction of a few condominiums. Another part of the land was used to create a large parking lot for the McMasterville train station.
The rest of the site – where we found several of the 250 buildings of the CIL complex and industrial waste stored in the open air – extends along the side of road 223 and is today a huge wasteland delimited by an old Rusty Frost fence.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Part of the land intended for the Northvolt complex
Quebec refused to rezone this industrial site for real estate developers who wanted to deploy a vast housing project there with more than 5,000 housing units.
The site has already been coveted by Volkswagen to build its electric vehicle battery mega-factory, but Hydro-Québec did not have the kilowatt hours to satisfy the German manufacturer, which set up at great expense in Ontario.
The mayors of Saint-Basile-le-Grand and McMasterville, Yves Lessard and Martin Dulac, understand the apprehensions of residents who are concerned about the environmental impact of the deployment of the Northvolt complex and the repercussions it will have on the surrounding fluidity road trips.
Their visit to Northvolt’s facilities in Sweden convinced them of the seriousness with which the company manages its environmental footprint, which it seeks to reduce as much as possible through its industrial processes.
NORTHVOLT PHOTO, ARCHIVES PROVIDED BY REUTERS
Northvolt factory, Sweden
The mayor of Saint-Basile-le-Grand is stuck with industrial land that he has an obligation to develop, and now an investor shows up who wants to establish a new industrial sector on this infertile land. And the mayor is calculating.
Saint-Basile-le-Grand, a town of 17,000 inhabitants, today receives 0.3% of its property taxes from the industrial sector, all the rest of its income comes mainly from the residential and commercial sectors.
The establishment of Northvolt could make it possible to increase the share of industrial revenues in the city’s total budget to more than 25%. Same thing in McMasterville, which will see its tax base increase by at least 25%, once the establishment of the Swedish company is complete. Additional income that can be used to improve the quality of life of residents and promote a certain social acceptance.