Posted at 2:00 p.m.
Hopeless
Despairing, your text because it hits the bull’s eye! It goes without saying, you say, but those who work at the Horne foundry are not ready to lose their jobs, their livelihood, should I say. Eternal dilemma! I live in Abitibi and I played tennis in Noranda with the taste of chimney smoke in my mouth when the wind blew on our side! Residents near the smelter are against it, but the whole town? Same thing as with the effects of climate change, which are irremediably approaching us (Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, etc.), but the governments are not in emergency mode! It’s distressing, hopeless, I told you at the beginning!
Helene Vincent, Val-d’Or
The role of urban sprawl
Completely agree with your text except for a small part: in the same way as for the landfill sites of certain cities, it is rather the suburbs which went to join the factory and not the reverse. All the same, that does not absolve this multinational of the harmful effects that its activity causes on the inhabitants who surround it, but it should serve to convince that urban sprawl is also partly responsible for the problems that many cities may encounter in future years.
Simon Bourgault
A matter of values
You are right on one point: we are all contributors to mining and recycling plants. On the other hand, one can very well operate mines without exploiting human beings (except Glencore) and one can very well operate a recycling plant without polluting the surrounding neighborhoods. It is a question of values and will.
Gilbert Savard, Quebec
The part of things
It’s hard to tell things apart. Of course, putting toxic and harmful products into the atmosphere is far from desirable. However, are we able to properly quantify the danger, the inconvenience, the risk of breathing this air. To date, Public Health thinks that the risk of inconvenience is minimal, and when one consults the statistical data on the prevalence of lung cancer in Abitibi, curiously, this region does not appear so badly; other regions in Quebec report more lung cancers. The analysis of this question is not simple; perhaps making the mining region richer through good wages reduces other health disadvantages related to poverty? Who knows… maybe the blueberries eaten, picked by Aboriginal hands, have unprecedented virtues, especially if they are drizzled with maple syrup rich in Quebec. Nice text, read with interest.
Hugues Beauregard
Blueberries at a gold price
When I want to eat blueberries, I don’t pick them in my region, Rouyn-Noranda, because the contamination there is too high. I also buy them in Louvicourt (135 km from the foundry) hoping that the pollution from the Horne does not go that far. Otherwise, like this year, at the gold-priced grocery store (in Abitibi, we are used to talking about gold), hoping that the word organic written on the bag still means something.
As for the situation in Rouyn-Noranda, it is far from settled. Minister Benoit Charette will renew, in November, the ministerial permit granted to the foundry for five years without obligation to reduce its emissions before 2027.
Yes, the foundry will have the opportunity to pour into the air up to 100 ng/m3 of arsenic without any obligation on its part to reduce its emissions during this period, contrary to the recommendations made a month ago by the Director of Public Health, Dr.r Luc Boileau, to reduce a little more each year, during these five years, these emissions to reach 15 ng/m3 in 2027 (five times the provincial regulatory standard).
I am not even talking about heavy metals which are not, for the moment, the subject of any government directive. There it is free for all.
Finally, let’s talk about the Emerging Music Festival (EMF). The organizers erected the outdoor stage in the most polluted district of the city, at the foot of the chimneys, in this same district where children (and adults, including my aunt and a friend) are contaminated, according to the biomonitoring study ( 2018-2019) four times more than those of the control group (Amos). The FME, in its advertising on its website, is proud to be associated with the Horne foundry, one of its sponsors.
We no longer have the artists we had. There was a time (in my youth, I am now 67) when artists would have denounced this enterprise loud and clear. Today, they sing their songs in the most contaminated city in North America as if nothing had happened. I wrote twice to the management of the FME to make them aware of this issue, last spring, but I did not even receive an acknowledgment of receipt.
Louis Cossette