Residents are sounding the alarm about the apparent contamination of a river in Laval, Que., and are calling on the province to fix it.
Laval resident Francis Letourneau enjoys taking walks through the Bois Papineau nature park not far from his home.
The small river, called Ruisseau la Piniere, is a common stop.
“For me, this place is really important,” he told Global News. “It’s the biggest creek in Laval. This is the main source of water and food for the wildlife in this park.”
One day in 2019, he noticed something was off. The river was running grey.
“It’s supposed to be clear or brown, but it was like more of a greyish colour like cement, like a sidewalk,” he recalled.
He and his wife walked near the river quite a bit during the pandemic, as there wasn’t much else to do.
They documented a total of 13 occasions the river turned totally grey. He says other park users told him this had been going on for a decade or more.
“I was like, ‘OK, that’s a real problem.’ That was the precise moment that I started to say, ‘OK, I’ll start to pay attention to this problem,'” said Letourneau.
The exact source of the contamination is not known.
Letourneau isn’t making any accusations, but wonders if a nearby quarry where multiple cement companies operate a few kilometres upstream could be to blame.
“I took a stick and I put it in the water, and when I pulled it out, there was a substance around the stick. It was greyish. It was cement,” he says.
He reached out to Canopée, the agency that manages Laval parks.
They tell Global News they’ve made multiple complaints over the years to the Quebec Environment Ministry without noticing any improvement.
“We continue to assure environmental watch by doing patrols regularly. We think that this situation needs to stop for the community and the ecosystem health benefit,” said Canopée conservation coordinator Francis Allaire.
The new mayor of Laval says the situation worries him.
“As this is a file under the provincial government, I asked my employees to quickly contact the team of the Minister of the Laval region and Minister of the Environment, Mr. Benoit Charrette,” said Laval mayor Stephane Boyer.
Letourneau is fed up.
“You tell us that we need to protect the environment, climate change, everything. But this is the basics. This is A-B-C, and nothing is done about it for years,” said Letourneau.
He’s also spoken with Laval Liberal MNA Saul Polo, who is calling for action as well.
“We’re asking the Minister of Environment to use its full power to protect the environment in Laval and to make sure that these contamination situations that have happened do not replicate or are not reproduced in the near future,” Polo told Global News.
On Monday, Environment Minister Benoit Charette said inspections have ramped up recently.
“We are now collaborating more closely with the city of Laval because there are many potential sources of these emissions,” said Charette. “If there’s an enterprise behind that, this enterprise will have to be accountable.”
Laval’s regional environment council (CRE Laval), said it is satisfied the minister responded positively to a recent request to take a closer look at the problem, and will be monitoring the ministry’s work.
Letourneau is encouraged but wishes Quebec would act faster. He wants inspectors monitoring the stream on rainy days when the contamination is more likely, not days later.
“I want not only talking and ‘we’ll do a study’ and everything. I want action because action speaks louder than words,” he said.