(Montreal) Québec solidaire (QS) and the Parti Québécois (PQ) are condemning the government’s intention to pay for the relocation of 200 households near the Horne foundry in Rouyn-Noranda, La Presse reported on Wednesday morning.
Posted 9:57am Updated 10:48am
Stéphane Blais The Canadian Press
QS environmental manager Alejandra Zaga Mendez said: “To ask 200 families to pack their boxes to accommodate a billionaire company that refuses to meet our environmental standards is appalling! »
She added in a press release that “the people of Rouyn-Noranda have never asked to be uprooted from their homes”.
For his part, in a press conference on Tuesday morning, PQ MP Joël Arseneau indicated “that we should see with the population what they think about the uprooting we envision, which it can cause as trauma to people”.
“The other big problem,” says Joël Arseneau, “is that with a contribution of 85 million from the Quebec government, we want to make it a company that will have a net profit of about 18 this year or in 2022 billion US.
Interim Liberal leader Marc Tanguay believes resettlement “cannot be a solution for the entire population”.
However, he argued “it’s a touchy subject but I think it may be a solution for some”.
A new certificate was presented on Thursday
A government agreement signed in 2017 with the Liberal government allows the smelter’s arsenic emissions to reach an annual average of 100 ng/m3, or 33 times the standard.
But that agreement is about to expire. The Quebec government also issued a new certificate to the controversial foundry last January, and Quebec will unveil new ministerial approval of the Horne foundry on Thursday.
Public Health and the Department of the Environment have called on the Horne smelter to meet an arsenic emission limit of 15 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) in 2027, which could appear in the new certificate.
“We’re aiming for 15 nanograms in five years, five times more, I don’t think it’s holding up. Either the standard of three nanograms isn’t good, then it should be 15, but we can’t have the ambition to … exceed five times the standard in five years,” liberal Marc Tanguay stated in Point Press.
24 times more arsenic in 2022 than the provincial standard
Last week, the Horne Smelter released a document saying the concentration of arsenic it released into the air in 2022 was 73 nanograms (ng) per cubic metre, lower than in 2021 but higher than in 2020
In a document published on its website, Glencore Canada, owner of the smelter, states that for the past year “the annual average of arsenic at the legal station” of the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda “is 73.1 ng / m3, which confirms that our reduction projects are working”.