Release of contaminants | The demands of the Horne Foundry hidden from the public

The Quebec Ministry of the Environment refuses to disclose the request for renewal of ministerial authorization submitted by the Horne Foundry for the pursuit of its activities, a document which should however be public.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
The Press

The ministerial authorization, formerly known as the “remediation certificate”, is the mechanism that makes it possible to derogate from the Environment Quality Act (EQL), which prohibits, in principle, pollution.

That of the Horne Foundry expires next December; the company belonging to the multinational Glencore submitted its renewal application on May 20, the government indicates.

This document details in particular the contaminants that the company plans to emit over the next five years as well as the thresholds that it proposes not to exceed.

“Just that, basically, it’s information that should be known,” says the lawyer at the Quebec Center for Environmental Law (CQDE) Anne-Sophie Doré.

She deplores this lack of transparency, recalling that the Environment Quality Act (LQE) recognizes the right to a healthy environment.

The reform of the EQLadopted in 2017, provided that ministerial authorizations, renewal applications and documents filed in support of these applications, among other things, be public, recalls the lawyer – exceptions are provided for commercial reasons such as industrial secrecy.

“We are disappointed, because we have been promised a lot of transparency”, declared to The Press Mireille Vincelette, co-spokesperson for the Rouyn-Noranda Waste and Toxic Emissions Stop Committee (ARET).

“These are documents that we shouldn’t even have to ask for, they should be tabled, accessible to everyone,” she said, lamenting the government’s “lack of consistency”.

Five years later, no register

A register allowing the public to obtain these documents was also to be created, indicated the reform, but five years later, its creation is still not finished.

“The future public register, as provided for by the reform of the EQLwill be in effect when the government has set the date of entry into force of this new public register”, indicated to The Press the spokesperson for the Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change (MELCC), Sophie Gauthier.

Issues concerning “the stability and security of the service’s functionalities” are delaying the creation of the registry, said the press secretary for Minister Benoit Charette, Rosalie Tremblay-Cloutier.

“This is a major project and several steps remain to be completed before the public register is fully completed,” she told The Press.

Lawyer Anne-Sophie Doré sees it more as a symptom of the lack of resources affecting the MELCC.

“The Ministry is overwhelmed, it is not even able to respond to access to information requests in a timely manner,” she said. It’s a double trap for anyone who wants to know what’s going on, what other contaminants are being emitted. »

A consultation “on the sly”

The previous renewal of the decontamination certificate for the Horne Foundry, in 2017, had been done discreetly, recalls the Regional Council for the Environment of Abitibi-Témiscamingue (CREAT), which calls for a more transparent exercise, this time.

The government had held a public consultation “on the sly”, in the middle of July and August, “very little publicized” and complex, remembers Clémentine Cornille, director general of CREAT.

Only the CREAT had also made comments at the end of this public consultation, underlines Mr.^me Cornille, who invites the population to participate in large numbers, this time.

Quebec defended itself by explaining that the Environment Quality Act — since reformed — did not allow him to require the publication of the documents on the Internet and that his proposal to do so had been rejected by the Horne Foundry.

The Ministry of the Environment had not indicated to The Press the next steps in the renewal of the Horne Foundry’s ministerial authorization, at the time of this writing.