The Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected the appeal of the rendering company Sanimax, which challenged a judgment dated June 2021 finding it guilty of having carried out an illegal waste water dumping, the previous year. .
Posted at 4:47 p.m.
In May 2020, too much sulfur had indeed been identified in a quantity of water discharged by Sanimax, which in theory contravenes the Water Purification Regulations of the Montreal Metropolitan Community (CMM). The latter in fact prohibits “at all times, the dumping, allowing or tolerating the dumping, into a purification works” of waste water containing certain contaminants in certain quantities.
Before the Municipal Court, Sanimax had first pleaded a “due diligence defence”, but the court had rejected this argument, considering instead “that the risk was foreseeable and that the applicant has not demonstrated, according to the balance of probabilities , that she took all reasonable precautions to avoid the event for which she is accused and its consequences”.
The company had also challenged the interpretation of two articles of that regulation. First, Sanimax had argued that Article 14 of the CMM regulations, which stipulates that anyone responsible for an accidental spill “must immediately report this spill”, created a “specific regime” for accidental spills.
Sanimax simultaneously alleged that the CMM thus failed to take into account the penal application of Article 6 of its own regulations, which sets the maximum standards provided for each of the contaminants.
But according to Justice Stephen Hamilton of the Court of Appeal, “this would mean that in practice, those responsible for accidental spills would only have to disclose the existence of a spill” to avoid being put on trial. fine. “If that were indeed the case, players in the sanitation industry would have no incentive to adopt vigilant behavior to avoid this type of spillage”, laments the judge, for whom the appeal proposed by Sanimax “is doomed to fail and does not deserve the Court’s attention”.
More cross attacks
Joined by email, the company indicated Thursday that it took note of the decision of the Court of Appeal concerning its request for appeal, ensuring that it “intended to respect the decision of the Court”.
The knacker, however, did not fail to attack the City of Montreal and the CMM, recalling that they have also “suffered defeats or legal setbacks” in recent months, particularly in March 2022, when a judge had allowed him to appeal the delegation of the application of the By-law on discharges into the atmosphere by the CMM to the City of Montreal.
Valérie Plante’s office reiterated that it was “looking forward to seeing the landing” of a government action plan for the Sanimax plant in Rivière-des-Prairies, as is already the case in Lévis, to control nuisances. “For the citizens of the borough, the situation is unbearable. They must regain their quality of life as quickly as possible,” says press officer Marikym Gaudreault.
All of this comes nearly a week after the Plante administration came out on a new version of the same Regulations on atmospheric emissions, which will impose on Sanimax – if approved by Quebec in August – having to store animal matter in a building. The company will therefore no longer be able to keep the material outside. Montreal believes that the measure will solve the foul odor problems denounced by several residents. The company says that adding a garage to store the materials would only settle “a crippling part”, and that it would rather be necessary to expand the plant to process the material more quickly.