Wherever you were in Montreal last Monday, everything reeked of dry, irritating smoke. Another old abandoned building, this one dating from 1870, which burned down. Located next to the former offices of the Dutythe devastated block of buildings, topped with slate cornices, had been left to its own devices for years while construction sites for housing towers were happily growing all around.
There were firefighters everywhere. The smoke inconvenienced part of the city. To the point that almost everyone ended up having the feeling that this smell of death had been permanently grafted onto life.
This is not the first time that everything has flared up like this. A stone’s throw away, a beautiful building from the same period, with a unique facade, was reduced to ashes in 2016, under similar circumstances.
Is smoke as a horizon of common life a foretaste of what awaits us collectively this spring?
Last spring, when the atmosphere resembled cat pee distillate, North America repeatedly recorded unprecedented levels of air pollution. As of April, remember, more than 6,000 forest fires had been recorded in Canada. A record. We are not done with the fire.
The conditions are once again ripe for the same theater of desolation to replay itself: an abnormally mild winter, the mildest in years; the lack of snow, everywhere 30 to 40 cm less on average; consequently lower water reserves. Not to mention the general increase in temperatures. The St. Lawrence shrimp are dying. Many other species are threatened.
In our woods, the caribou takes on the appearance of an additional symbol of a world that is being allowed to go up in smoke. The Minister of the Environment of Quebec, the one who constantly repeats, as if to better convince himself, that he applies some of the most rigorous standards in the world, has however not yet done anything decisive to protect this species . Everyone noticed it. So does the federal government.
According to the areas of jurisdiction guaranteed to the provinces by the Canadian Constitution, the forest and the destruction carried out there for the glory of commerce come under the provincial authority. In the case of woodland caribou, what is Ottawa getting involved in by demanding their rescue? Caribou just have to read the Constitution. They will understand that there is no fire.
Speaking of Ottawa, a lot of media space has been used in recent weeks to unreservedly celebrate the memory of the Honorable Brian Mulroney. Even Pierre Karl Péladeau explained to us, at length, that the former prime minister was his mentor, both in business and in politics. Which gives a good idea of the type of sovereignty envisaged by some for Quebec.
In the orgy of tributes devoted to the former prime minister, less glamorous parts of his career have been put aside. It has hardly been pointed out, among other things, that the adoption of its free trade treaty, NAFTA, coincides with the loss of thousands of jobs in Quebec in the manufacturing sector.
We were promised that this institutionalized laissez-faire would reduce Mexican immigration by creating jobs there. These people actually found themselves even more exploited. There was no shortage of lures. They were agitated in the name of the supposed virtues of deregulation, of globalization, in the name of the sole sovereignty of companies to which, along the way, we have granted the right to sue States without hindrance. Who paid the high price for the construction of this global highway towards the money made at the expense of communities? The invisibles, the farmers, nature, all these lives reduced to ashes by the sinister inferno of neoliberalism.
There has been little talk in recent days of the discussions which led to the massive rejection of CETA by the French Senate. This free trade agreement between Canada and Europe has been in partial application for seven years. However, it was never officially approved. For its victorious opponents, this agreement, which is to be seen in the wake of NAFTA, constitutes a democratic, ecological and social scandal.
According to what European opponents of this treaty, people on both the left and the right, observe, Canada allows the use of more than 41 molecules banned in France. Pesticides, hormones, GMOs, antibiotics and animal meals, used in Canadian agriculture, are not tolerated on the other side of the Atlantic. Isn’t this reason for us to worry about our way of life when our health standards are thus condemned abroad?
“CETA is a heresy, a catastrophe for the climate, for human health and for our sovereignty,” insisted a French senator. In the name of the infinite liberation of commerce, it torpedoes the environment and reduces worker protection to dust, it has been repeated. Whatever happens, it is a safe bet that President Macron and Justin Trudeau will persist in ratifying this unloved treaty. In whose interest?
We had already experienced the excesses of NAFTA, like those of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), an agreement negotiated secretly between the 29 member countries of the OECD. Also those of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). To name just a few. How can we escape the world that the giants of industry and finance have imposed on us since the 1980s? Are we perpetually doomed to submit, without flinching, to these treaties imposed in the name of the law of the strongest, without ever questioning this headlong rush?
We live in a society of arsonists who insist on burning everything, while the bulk of the population is left behind a smoke screen.
Isn’t spring the ideal time for a change of scenery?