Mayor’s office releases letter protesting suspension of dump
A federal order preventing Montreal from dumping eight billion litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River is “inappropriate and abusive,” Mayor Denis Coderre said Friday in a letter to federal Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq.
He was responding to the federal government’s order to hold off on the planned sewage discharge, which had been scheduled to start Sunday and last one week.
But while Coderre was hoping for a resolution before Oct. 23, Aglukkaq signed an order Friday prohibiting Montreal from doing anything until Nov. 3. The minister wrote in the order that she wanted to “prevent the planned deposit of untreated wastewater effluent” to permit a scientific review, the CBC reported.
On Wednesday, federal infrastructure minister Denis Lebel invoked Article 37 of the Fisheries Act, which protects aquatic life, to tell the city not to dump the sewage pending an independent scientific study on how the discharge would affect wildlife and drinking water.
Coderre has accused Conservative politicians of “playing politics” with the sewage issue to gain votes in Monday’s federal election.
Using a ministerial decree to stop the dumping “is inappropriate and abusive in the present circumstances” and “does not respect either the spirit or the letter of the regulations” covering municipal sewage systems, Coderre wrote in the letter.
Under federal regulations, cities are allowed to dump raw sewage during construction or maintenance work on municipal sewage systems, he noted.
Planned discharges of sewage “are common in the field of urban water treatment and until now have never been subject to intervention by your department,” the mayor wrote. He added there is no need for an independent scientific study because the federal govern-
ment already has a large number of environmental scientists on staff who are specialists on the river, which has been studied extensively since the 1970s.
Coderre had called on Aglukkaq to make a final decision by Oct. 23. Otherwise, the work would have to be delayed for a year, with a high risk of breakdowns that could lead to significantly worse contamination of the river, he warned.
Last week, five experts on urban water systems said the city is justified in dumping the waste because it has no other option while it carries out upgrades to the sewage system.
The dumping will not have a sig-
nificant impact on drinking water in communities downstream, said the experts from the École Polytechnique.
The city plans to empty out the southeast collector — a 30- kilometre sewer from LaSalle to Pointe-aux- Trembles that accounts for about one- third of the municipal sewage system — to allow workers to move a snow chute from underneath the Bonaventure Expressway to Riverside St., near Pointe St- Charles.
The work is part of a project to convert the Bonaventure from an elevated expressway to a groundlevel boulevard.
While the collector is being emptied, domestic and industrial sewage will run directly into the river via 24 discharge pipes along the collector’s length.
Snow- removal trucks use the chute to dump their snow, which is then carried to the city ’s waste water treatment plant.
Aglukkaq claimed her department was only recently informed of the plan to dump the sewage, but Coderre said the federal government has known about it since last year. Coderre said the work was scheduled for this week because it would cause fewer problems than at other times of the year.
Aglukkaq’s office did not respond to the letter Friday.
Planned discharges of sewage ‘ are common in the field of urban water treatment and until now have never been subject to intervention.