It’s a scandal, a real one. No, I’m not talking about the closure of the four terraces on Rue Peel on a Friday Grand Prix evening.
Everything has been said about that. We shouted loudly. We were equally outraged. In the last episode of the series, we were calling for the head of the fire chief of the City of Montreal…
Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the metropolis, trucks dump tons of toxic junk into the environment. From morning to evening, these behemoths vomit contaminated soil along the banks of the Ottawa River. In full view of everyone.
And no one says anything, no one does anything, or almost nothing.
“It’s an environmental disaster unfolding before our eyes,” a source from the Quebec Ministry of the Environment told the English-speaking media The Rover1. At the beginning of the month, journalist Christopher Curtis documented the comings and goings of trucks, leaving a construction site in Laval to dump their contents in Kanesatake. He followed them, filmed them.
Then my colleagues Ulysse Bergeron and François Roy witnessed the same incessant ballet2. This time, the trucks were leaving from a construction site in Beaconsfield. Using a drone, journalists captured images showing a ten-wheeler unloading the contents of its dumpster just a few meters from the Ottawa River. Not far away, a bulldozer is leveling the embankment, gradually making the beach disappear.
Every day, dozens of loads are dumped illegally in Mohawk territory. The cowboys who do this have no green light from the Band Council, no permit, no environmental study. Nothing.
Every day, these cowboys poison the land, without showing the slightest ecological awareness, as if we had learned nothing, as if we were still in the 1950s. All this to make a dollar. It’s scandalous.
And what is even more scandalous is that they pollute under the noses of the authorities. They do this to our face, day after day. Without the slightest embarrassment. Because they know that no one is going to do anything to stop them.
“If you believe, or if you have been informed, that this is a lawless region, you are wrong,” warned the Kanesatake Band Council in a formal notice addressed to the president of the excavation company Nexus, on May 14, in the hope of putting an end to the daily comings and goings.
Except that it is, unfortunately. Kanesatake, in fact, is a lawless zone. A territory where the community is paralyzed by fear. A region without a police force, where silence reigns and where bandits are kings.
And the polluting cowboys know it too well.
Nexus took weeks to respond to the formal notice from the Band Council, as if that was the least of its worries. In fact, she only bothered to respond when my colleagues started asking some awkward questions. Mind you, that didn’t stop his trucks from continuing to treat Kanesatake like a dump…
And why wouldn’t they treat him like that? After all, other cowboys don’t get in their way – and no one stops them, either. Inspectors from the Ministry of the Environment do not dare to collect samples from the site, for fear of being beaten up. Not without reason: last month, two heads of the Council who accompanied inspectors were beaten before being driven out manu militari.
This is exactly what it is, a lawless region.
A year ago, I relayed the heartfelt cry of a Mohawk3. “Pink” spoke to me on behalf of a group of Kanesatake residents who were urgently demanding help from the authorities to restore security in their community. She requested anonymity, fearing that her family would be threatened or her house burned down…
A year later, these threats still weigh. The urgent help requested by residents never came. “Nothing has happened for a year except chaos. More and more chaos. Always more confidence among the Mohawks who work to destroy what was given to us by our ancestors,” laments Pink.
The chaos she speaks of is not limited to the rubbish that is thrown around every day in Mohawk land. “Toxic waste,” she said, “is a symptom of a bigger problem happening in the community. »
Arms and drug trafficking continues with total impunity. Last week, Pink and her group threw another bottle into the sea, in the form of an anonymous letter. “Anyone who raises difficult questions faces retaliation from those associated with organized crime,” they wrote.
“People are afraid to report or are complicit,” says Pink. She calls for an independent international investigation into what has been rotting for too long in Kanesatake – and how Quebec and Canadian authorities have let it rot, knowingly or not.
“All the companies that come [déverser des sols contaminés] here should be under investigation. Brothers [Robert et Gary Gabriel, propriétaires d’un dépotoir illégal d’où s’écoulent des eaux sulfureuses toxiques] should be under investigation. An independent group must look into the actors who have created this chaos in our community. »
For too long, the authorities have turned a blind eye to the activities of the Gabriel brothers, two men who have long been involved with organized crime, denounces Pink. She suspects that “their non-Indigenous partners are exploiting the fact that the government does not want another crisis.”
No one wants another Oka crisis, that’s understood. “But if there is another crisis, it will not be for the same reasons,” emphasizes Pink. It will not be to protect the earth. It will be because of the corruption that has been fueled, at the expense of the safety and well-being of members of the community. There are elders who are afraid. They should have the right to peace and security in their old age, but this is not the case. It’s crazy. It does not reflect the values of our people. This is colonialism at its best, this way of treating land as a commodity, this way of treating people, without respect, as if they are worthless. »
1. Read the article from Rover (in English)
2. Read “Soil spills cause serious tension in Kanesatake”
3. Read “The Heartfelt Cry of a Mohawk”