The bill allowing the expansion of the Stablex hazardous waste landfill in Blainville was passed under closure on Friday morning.
After an all-night session, MNAs finally passed Bill 93 by a vote of 61 to 31. The three opposition parties opposed the legislation.
They saw it as an affront to municipal autonomy since the government is using extraordinary measures to expropriate Blainville to provide Stablex with the land it wants.
“What we’ve just witnessed is a government that has caved in to the dictates of an Arizona-based company,” said Parti Québécois MNA Joël Arseneau.
During the debates, which lasted from Thursday night to Friday, the Minister of Natural Resources, Maïté Blanchette Vézina, continued to defend the choice of land selected by the government and the company.
The site includes nine hectares of wetlands and 58 hectares of woodland.
“We conducted a fair and responsible analysis, weighing the disadvantages, particularly the fact that we want to prevent a service interruption,” Blanchette Vézina pleaded.
“This is the site that allows us to avoid a service disruption, while mitigating the impacts,” she concluded.
The company had argued that to avoid an interruption in services, the preparatory work, including tree cutting, needed to begin no later than spring 2025.
“Perpetual consequences”
The Mayor of Blainville, Liza Poulin, made several unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Legault government to reverse its decision.
She had offered another adjacent site, an option rejected by both the government and the company, who considered it too small and too close, at 300 meters, to a residential neighbourhood.
In a video posted Thursday evening on social media, Poulin once again urged parliamentarians to “think carefully about the decision they are about to make, which will have perpetual consequences.”
She also announced that the City of Blainville and the Montreal Metropolitan Community intend to challenge the law.
At the start of the debates on Thursday evening, government House Leader Simon Jolin-Barrette acknowledged that the CAQ “will not win a popularity contest with this decision”.
“But when you work in public service, it’s not to be popular, it’s not for “likes” but to make difficult decisions,” he argued.
“The balance of disadvantages leaves us no choice (...) to prevent irreparable harm to the well-being and general interest of the population.”
The Stablex industrial waste treatment centre currently includes a processing plant and five landfill cells.
The waste treated comes, for example, from the mining and pharmaceutical industries. In 2024, 17 per cent of this waste was imported from the U.S.
Stablex reportedly has only two years of storage capacity left.
The selected site would allow the company to build a sixth landfill cell and continue operations for around 40 years instead of 24 years on the smaller alternative site.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on March 28, 2024.
