On November 26, a few days before the COP15 on biodiversity, we will mark the 20th anniversary of the National Water Policy. This should enable us to restore the quality of the water in our lakes and rivers.
We are still a long way off, but the good news is that the intensity and number of wastewater spills have shown a decrease over the past five years. Several elected officials and municipal managers have reiterated their firm intention to reduce the number of spills and to make all the necessary efforts to bring treatment plants up to standard by the end of 2030, as the government has undertaken to do. du Québec with its counterparts in other provinces in 2014.
However, efforts will be needed a lot, since our treatment plants still pollute too much! Talk to the residents of Repentigny, Lavaltrie and even Trois-Rivières, who still cannot dip their toes in the St. Lawrence River because the wastewater treatment plants in Montreal, Longueuil and Repentigny, among others , discharge contaminated water to the E. Colidue to a lack of adequate disinfection mechanisms.
To protect our waterways and their ecosystems, major and complex modifications will have to be made to 14 large wastewater treatment plants by 2030 with the addition of disinfection, increased treatment capacity and the development of basins. wastewater retention. This is without taking into account the upgrading of 86 wastewater treatment plants whose discharges of suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demands greatly exceed the permitted limits. We must also adequately equip dozens of other stations to remove phosphorus, disinfect, reduce overflows and resolve the case of the 81 municipalities that still discharge water without treatment.
In announcing the creation of the Blue Fund last August, Prime Minister Legault recalled that his government had reserved $7 billion over 10 years for municipalities so that they can intervene in their drinking water and wastewater systems. . However, almost all of this sum will be devoted to the replacement of obsolete water mains, sewers and treatment systems. This is known in the jargon as “asset maintenance”.
The 2022-2032 Quebec Infrastructure Plan provides for only $1 billion over 10 years, or approximately $100 million per year, to improve the performance of water treatment systems. This sum is ridiculous when you know that the implementation of disinfection by ozonation in Montreal will cost at least 700 million dollars, of which approximately one third will be paid by Quebec. If we take into account the contribution expected from the federal government, at least $4 billion is missing from the Quebec plan.
At the time of writing these lines, dozens of municipalities are struggling to assess their financial needs for bringing their facilities up to standard. They all know, full well, that there is no money planned either in Quebec City or in Ottawa.
How can they do their job?
What will happen on December 31 when Quebec receives the 14 financial requests totaling several billion dollars when there is no money planned to cover this work? Are we going, once again, to postpone the deadlines, just to save time? Or are we going to settle for a mediocre answer to a glaring problem?
The Legault government prides itself on being far-sighted and pragmatic. It must immediately include all the necessary amounts in the Québec Infrastructure Plan and thus send a clear signal to elected municipal officials who need predictability to integrate the investments into their budgets.
The announcement of the creation of the Blue Fund shows a new government concern for the protection of water. But what is the point of better characterizing municipal discharges, cleaning the banks, fighting invasive plants or monitoring the quality of lake water if we continue to dump our wastewater into them without adequate treatment? We must act at the source of the problem now and demonstrate how seriously the situation is taken by investing the necessary amounts, in line with the expectations of Quebecers.