POINTE-CLAIRE – A Montreal environmentalist is sounding the alarm on what he views as a potentially erroneous set of data being kept by Environment Canada.
Daniel Green, co-founder of the Societé Québecoise pour Vaincre la Pollution, said that on the surface, figures from Environment Canada look encouraging: in 1992, Quebec counted around 800 sites containing PCBs, a toxic pollutant banned in Canada. In 2005, that number declined to about 200, and currently it sits at around 60.
Given that Canada has a benchmark of disposing of the chemicals completely by 2025, that looks like progress. But Green suspects that rather than suggesting a reduction in the number of PCB sites, the numbers imply that authorities are losing track of the sites that exist.
“It begs the question: where did all these PCBs go? Were they disposed of legally, or were they dumped?” he said.
What troubles Green the most is PCB levels currently found in Quebec’s water. After Canada banned them in 1977, the PCB levels enjoyed a steady decline. But over time, as the number of PCB sites continued to dwindle, the levels in the water remained stable, he said.
“Now there is kind of a steady concentration of PCBs, in the St. Lawrence River for instance, and the concentrations don’t seem to be going down as fast,” he said.
Environment Canada did not return a comment request by deadline Friday.
PCBs used to be considered a technological breakthrough, as they were highly resistant to evaporation and were used as a coolant in electric transformers and motors. They hit the headlines two weeks ago when the Journal de Montreal revealed that Reliance Power Equipment was illegally storing transformers on its land that contained PCBs. Those revelations worried and surprised residents nearby.
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