New rules for wood-burning appliances in Montreal, two decades after ice storm

Montreal’s strict, new rules regarding wood-burning appliances are set to kick in this year, two decades after the heating systems regained popularity in the aftermath of the crippling 1998 ice storm.

By October, it will be illegal for Montrealers to use what’s considered a solid-fuel-burning heating system unless the appliance has been certified as emitting no more than 2.5 grams per hour of fine particles into the atmosphere.

The slow crackdown on these appliances, such as wood-burning stoves and fireplaces, began roughly a decade ago after health authorities started warning about the growing number of wintertime smog days in Montreal.

Health Canada says smog, particularly fine particulate matter, affects breathing, heart and blood functions.

Anti-pollution activist Andre Belisle says Montreal’s frequent poor wintertime air quality is partly due to the legacy of the ice storm when, over a severalday period in January 1998, cities along the St. Lawrence Valley received more than double the normal amount of freezing rain for the year.

Electricity blackouts lasted weeks in certain areas and people rushed to buy wood-burning stoves and other similar heating systems to survive the cold and to be prepared for a similar weather crisis.

“There was literally an explosion of people going back to wood-burning heating systems (in 1998),” said Belisle, president of a Quebec association that fights atmospheric pollution.

“We ran a recycling program to try and eliminate slow-burning stoves and we did an analysis and learned that following the ice storm, stores all over the city went out of stock, and people from Montreal started buying wood-burning appliances from all other regions of the province.”

Montreal’s new emission standards are the most strict in the province, according to Chantal Demers, head of a Quebec association representing companies in the heating industry.

“We would have preferred for the rules to be less severe,” she said. “They go above and beyond what is required provincially.”

In 2009, Quebec passed provincewide legislation banning the fabrication, selling and distribution of wood-burning appliances that weren’t certified by the Canadian Standards Association or the American Environmental Protection Agency.