I had been coordinating a community organization in Lac-Mégantic for about a month when the tragic train incident occurred on July 6, 2013. It seems that, in life, we receive the hardships we are able to to cross. To say the same thing, mental health experts from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie prefer to use the concept of “resilience” because, after all, according to advances in neuroscience, the brain has this incredible ability to remodel itself, to adapt, or even forget…
For my part, I do not have the soul of a heroine any more than the malleable neurons, and for good reason.
Over the past few days, with hesitation and my heart clinging to the moon, I watched the documentary Megantic lake. This is no accident and the series Megantic. After ten years of rumination, it was time for me to begin this pilgrimage.
If I found the fiction written by Sylvain Guy moving and well modulated, the documentary directed by Philippe Falardeau, supported by the research work of Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny (Megantic. A tragedy foretold), revived my revolt. The political criticism of the events surrounding this drama moreover appeared to me as the only path of hope in front of me.
Beyond the recent request for an injunction filed by the future expropriated parties, the planned bypass poses a serious dilemma for the population of Lac-Mégantic.
Out of concern for protection and out of respect for the victims, residents no longer wish to see trains running downtown, nor do they wish to facilitate the growth of rail transportation of shale gas from North Dakota to the Irving refinery in New Brunswick. Increasing longer and faster tank car trains has never been part of the equation. However, this new railway, modern and entirely financed by taxpayers (60% by the federal government, 40% by the provincial government), will provide fuel to the locomotives of the Canadian Pacific (CP) which has bought this strategic routing line of crude oil after the bankruptcy of Montreal, Maine Atlantic (MMA).
Conscious blindness
Despite the vigilance work carried out by a coalition of citizens and organizations committed to rail safety in Lac-Mégantic, despite the evidence provided of blatant neglect on the rails in recent years, Transport Canada is still relying on to the “good will” of CP and its engineers to manage its maintenance, thus demonstrating conscious blindness.
Philippe Falardeau’s documentary shows how this tragedy did not change practices on the ground. The cavalier manner in which the Transportation Safety Board of Canada refuted any possibility of attributing responsibility to CP for the deadly 2019 train derailment in Field, British Columbia, is beyond comprehension in this regard. .
That the railway line is diverted is therefore likely to bring little consolation and peace of mind within the small Estrie town. The Meganticoise community knows it. Now subject to the political authorities, it must face a double constraint, that is to say an impossible, absurd choice, determined by absent voices, either to participate against its will in the development of a company that cares little about railway safety.
To provide for its economic interests, the CP is simply forcing the population of Lac-Mégantic into a non-choice — not by imposing obedience to orders as the company MMA made its workers undergo — but by taking advantage knowingly from the collective trauma engendered by the catastrophe. How, in the circumstances, can such a paradoxical injunction be resolved if not by conceding part of its civic power to the CP while operating a dissociation from the traumatic source?
In my view, it is inconceivable that the people of Lac-Mégantic bear such a political fight on their own shoulders, especially since many municipalities in Quebec and in Canada are subject to the repeated passage of trains transporting hazardous materials near neighborhoods inhabited.
That night of July 6, 2013, I did not lose any relatives or friends. However, I lost a part of my soul that I have since tried to find in the rubble of this injustice. What I saw there, helpless, surpasses imagination. It is impossible to forget such images. Over time, we can, of course, live with them, integrate them in small doses, testify to them and build up a personal story.
We can try to understand and make sense of what happened, which I manage to do more and more thanks to the valuable investigative work carried out by militant people who are above all concerned that the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic not be shamefully exploited by a delinquent company with the complicity of the federal government.