The citizens of Limoilou die prematurely and are less well off than the Quebec average. In this neighbourhood sacrificed”, they cohabit with five polluting industries and are condemned to breathe what they call the “soup toxic”.
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In this district of the lower town of Quebec, landlocked by three highways, the presence of five polluting industries is felt: an incinerator, a metal recovery company, a paper mill, a fine paper manufacturing company and – above all – the Port of Quebec where the transhipment of nickel is done without cover.
Residents breathe air seven times more polluted with nickel than elsewhere in Canada, not to mention other contaminants, according to figures collected by Environment Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance Program, and compiled by the Initiative vigilant citizen of the Port of Quebec.
They call it the “Limoiloise toxic soup”.
continuously sick
When she arrived in the neighborhood in 2010, Véronique Lalande quickly realized that something was wrong.
“I am an asthmatic person with a high allergy potential. I had chronic symptoms: itchy eyes and throat, eczema attacks. I was sick all the time, and my son was starting to get sick too,” she says.
Six years later, she made the decision to move “only and only for that”.
“It’s difficult to live in an environment where there is a constant attack on our health and our quality of life,” she argues. “You can’t take a break to breathe.”
She is now behind the Citizen Vigilance Initiative of the Port of Quebec, a group of citizens whose mission is to collect and disseminate information on the environmental impacts of industrial activities at the Port of Quebec.
In the sector, diagnoses of chronic lung diseases are 1.5 times higher than anywhere in Quebec, according to data from the Public Health of the Capitale-Nationale.
In fact, life expectancy there is downright shorter than elsewhere. People there live four years less than in the province as a whole, with premature mortality nearly twice as common.
“A slap in the face”
Despite these worrying data, the Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charrette, agreed to raise, on April 28, the daily standard for nickel particle emissions. This went from 14 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) at 70 nanograms ng/m3as well as at 20 ng/m3 annually.
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This is nearly seven times the annual limit recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the type of nickel found in the air in Quebec, pentlandite, which is associated with lung cancer.
This decision was denounced by the 18 regional directorates of public health in Quebec, the College of Physicians, the Quebec Association of Physicians for the Environment (AQME) and the opposition parties, among others.
“The nickel issue in Quebec is a fairly classic example of a neighborhood where vulnerable people live who are already exposed to a cocktail of chemical contaminants, where there is a higher proportion of lung disease and heart disease, and where a decision taken to encourage industries that do not even pay for their pollution will aggravate their environmental burden”, explains the president of the AQME, DD Claudel Petrin-Desrosiers.
A discriminatory policy
In Limoilou–Basse-Ville–Vanier, the entire sector affected by poor air quality, the median income is 33% lower than that of Quebec as a whole. There are three times as many welfare recipients and almost twice as many families living on low income. The high school dropout rate and the proportion of vulnerable children in kindergarten are significantly higher than those for Quebec as a whole.
“We are faced with a situation of profound injustice”, drops Véronique Lalande, who admits to being privileged to have been able to change neighborhoods. “Many citizens of Limoilou do not have the capacity to fight or go elsewhere to escape the problem.”
PHOTOS Marcel Tremblay/QMi
The president of the Vieux-Limoilou district council, Raymond Poirier, speaks of a “sacrificed zone”.
“We have confined vulnerable communities to a neighborhood where the air is considered saturated with pollutants by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. The situation was already serious.”
Raising the nickel standard is a “slap in the face” for citizens, he says.
“The political power does not seem to have great empathy towards the citizens of Limoilou. We choose to put the economy ahead of the quality of life of part of the population,” denounces Raymond Poirier.
“Bad policy decisions that discriminate against poorer communities have been perpetuated for a long time,” he continues. “Nobody wants these polluting industries in their neighborhood.”
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