The bugles of the party had not yet let out their last cry, to highlight the imminent arrival of the Swedish company Northvolt in the Quebec battery sector, which, already, the Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette, had to repel a rain of suspicion. Does the multinational benefit from preferential treatment which allows it to push this economic development while overlooking its environmental obligations?
For several weeks, journalists from several media, including The duty, diligently inform the population about the potential impacts on biodiversity of the installation in Montérégie of the Northvolt battery manufacturing mega-factory. Some of them used the Access to Information Act to find out valuable information, such as the quantity of wetlands or species at risk on the target site. Fortunately, this tenacity and this quest for transparency exist, because if we had to trust the protagonists of this economic success story to be informed about the scientific and environmental impacts of the 7 billion dollar project, we would be left wanting.
The picture that emerges raises important questions. In a short time, we learned that the coveted site contained 74 wetlands, “including 8 ponds, 19 marshes, 28 tree swamps and 19 shrub swamps,” reports our journalist Alexandre Shields, who used the law to find these important details. Wetlands are essential to sustaining life, nothing more, nothing less. Didn’t we spend an entire COP15 last December, in Montreal, trying to convince ourselves that the protection of biodiversity should be a major area of climate action?
Other things to know? Yes. That Northvolt can plan the areas to be razed to build its factory even though it has not yet received the official green light — and that “this is normal,” according to the government. That the company will not have to submit to the informed and critical eye of the Bureau d’audiences publique sur l’environnement (BAPE) in the construction phase, but only for the battery recycling component, which is planned in effect on its deployment plan. That it was during the year that Quebec modified the rules allowing it to be established which companies must be subject to an environmental assessment: the cathode manufacturing threshold increased from 50,000 to 60,000 — and Northvolt plans produce 56,000.
The Press finally revealed this week that last spring, the former owner of the land acquired at the beginning of November by Northvolt had suffered a refusal from the Ministry of the Environment to build a real estate project there, in the name of the protection of biodiversity. Barely six months later, Northvolt was in the running to expand its factory project – over a much larger area than this real estate project – and all the ministers involved speak of it as a reality.
All this context ends up creating fertile ground for suspicion to grow. Is there a free pass for Northvolt, to the detriment of biodiversity? In a powerful letter published in The duty ten days ago, around a hundred experts — scientists, specialists and stakeholders in the biodiversity research sector — expressed concern about the “lack of transparency, scientific rigor and information” surrounding the project of the Swedish multinational. Should economic development, even in the name of climate action, come at the expense of the life around us? they ask with confidence. The question is valid.
And if Northvolt does indeed intend to compensate for what it will destroy, either through a financial contribution or by creating new wetlands elsewhere, it is the responsibility of the Quebec government to ensure that it will indeed do it. However, Quebec’s record is very bleak in this regard. In a report dated last spring, the office of the Sustainable Development Commissioner concluded precisely that once ministerial authorization was issued, the instigators of large projects like that of Northvolt almost never underwent a compliance inspection. Worse: in 70% of the major projects presented, the commissioner noted that the project leaders had mainly tried to justify the need to establish themselves where they wanted rather than demonstrating the impossibility of avoiding harm to the wetlands.
We would perhaps not make such a big deal of it if the site chosen to build the mega-factory did not contain one of the last sites in Montérégie to shelter the richness of these wetlands. In 2017, Quebec adopted a law requiring it to respect the objective of allowing “no net loss” of these environments.
The implementation of a project of this magnitude must not only respect the spirit and text of the law, but also be carried out in complete transparency, far from suspicion.