Quebec City could adopt its own standard for the concentration of nickel in the air, indicated the Assistant Deputy Minister for Sustainable Development and Environmental Quality in a technical briefing on this subject Monday morning.
“Yes it is possible that the city of Quebec is exempted from the regulations”, indicated Jacob Martin-Malus. The Municipal Powers Act would allow the city to do so, he said, noting that the ministry was “evaluating this with [ses] lawyers”.
This would allow Quebec to imitate the city of Montreal, which has its own regulations in this area.
However, the city’s approach would be “subject to the approval of the Minister” of the Environment, said the deputy minister.
The Ministry of the Environment had invited the media on Monday to a technical briefing on the study that led it to want to relax its standard on the presence of nickel in the air. The latter would go from 14 ng/m3 on a daily basis at 70 ng/m3a change that is causing a lot of concern in the Limoilou district of Quebec.
A problem specific to Limoilou
In a long presentation, researcher Michèle Bouchard, from the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal, explained that the standard of 14 ng/m3 Quebec was more severe than elsewhere (Ontario, European Union), with the exception of California.
In the study she delivered to the Ministry of the Environment in 2018, Ms.me Bouchard had proposed imposing a standard of 40 ng per m3but the government has suggested relaxing it even further to 70 ng per m3.
Despite the fact that this is not what she had proposed, Ms.me Bouchard said Monday that a standard of 70 ng/m3 could be justified in particular because the ministry also intended to impose another annual standard of 20 ng/m3.
In addition, the deputy minister confirmed Monday that the Limoilou district was the only place in Quebec where the ministry had observed increases in the concentration of nickel in the air.
The department maintains that the current standard is compliant 90% of the time. However, when they have occurred in the past two years, the exceedances have been 14 and 20 times the norm.
More details will follow.