In addition to all the wetlands that will disappear from the site of the future Northvolt factory, the Legault government has authorized the company to encroach on wetlands “identified” for their ecological interest by the Metropolitan Community of Montreal (CMM), learned The duty. However, the company promises to restore the site in the coming years.
When approving the destruction of a little more than 138,000 m2 of wetlands in order to prepare the site for the battery component factory, the Legault government also approved an encroachment of more than 15,000 m2 on wetlands which must be “returned to the state they were in before this work began or in a state close to it at the end of the work, no later than December 31, 2032”.
By email, Northvolt also confirmed this aspect of the project, specifying that “these are temporary spaces necessary to carry out the work”. We do not know to what extent these natural environments or the species that live there will be affected by the industrial project, since there has been no impact study. But the company assures that they will be restored in the years to come, as required by the government.
Among these natural environments, we find 4700 m2 “of wetlands identified by the CMM”, indicates Northvolt in its response to the Duty. According to the company, however, there is no “special status species habitat”, and therefore no threatened species, in this area.
It was not possible to verify this information from an independent source. The only documents available were produced by firms commissioned by the Swedish multinational. However, we know that the environments in question are located at the limits of an area of the land where we find in particular habitats of the least bittern, a “threatened” species.
You should know that the CMM has identified wetlands on its territory based on their “interest” in preserving biodiversity. They are found on the Northvolt site, particularly in an area that serves as habitat for different wildlife species, including species at risk. This is the northwest sector of the site, which is identified as a “wetland of metropolitan interest”.
These are in theory protected by an Interim Control Regulation (ICR) adopted by the CMM, but only once they have been subject to “an environmental characterization and detailed delimitation”. Compliance with these regulations, however, is the responsibility of McMasterville and Saint-Basile-le-Grand, specifies the CMM by email.
Saint-Basile-le-Grand, which is favorable to the project, precisely specifies that “Northvolt has submitted characterization studies making it possible to specify the limits of the metropolitan wetland which could have been subject to the RCI. No work takes place in these wetlands.”
Document refused
In a document filed in Superior Court on Wednesday by the Quebec Environmental Law Center, we learn that Saint-Basile-le-Grand has revised the scope of the RCI on the Northvolt site, which reduced the surface area of the wetland protected by the RCI, after determining that the habitat of the least bittern would be more restricted than the total area of this wetland.
The duty attempted to obtain the document presented in Court on Wednesday in the Northvolt case and produced by the City in the context of revising the scope of the RCI. The communications department refused to send it to us, inviting us to make a request under the Access to Information Act. Such a process can take several weeks.
The Saint-Basile-le-Grand communications department also indicates, by email, that “submitting an authorization request to the ministry before December 16, 2022 allows you to benefit from the exceptional measures provided for” in the RCI. In this case, the request was made in 2020 by the promoter of the real estate project which was refused last year by the Legault government, the Quebec Ministry of the Environment confirmed on Wednesday.
Even if the request had been made by a project which no longer exists, Saint-Basile-le-Grand used this provision as part of the process which led to the authorization of tree cutting in the natural environments of this sector of the land, according to what the Quebec Environmental Law Center argued in court on Wednesday.
Disappeared environments
The felling of trees is covered within the framework of the application of the RCI, but the City considers that the area planned for the work is not part of the wetland which must be protected under the CMM regulations. Wetlands are practically non-existent in the territory of Saint-Basile-le-Grand. They cover at most 0.2% of the territory. And the forest cover, which will decline with Northvolt’s work, until now covered 7% of the territory.
As part of a notice of refusal of a real estate project on the same site as Northvolt last year, experts from the Quebec Ministry of the Environment explained that “the areas currently occupied by wetlands in the basin- slope of the Richelieu River are estimated at approximately 6%, which is already insufficient to ensure the maintenance of the ecological functions that these environments fulfill.
“The project undermines the biodiversity conservation function of the wetlands present on the site by causing the destruction of large areas of diverse environments providing habitats for food, shelter and reproduction of living species” , could we read in the document. Northvolt will destroy an area of wetlands twice as large as planned as part of the real estate project.