Montreal-area mayors outraged as Quebec tables bill to expand hazardous landfill

Quebec Minister of Natural Resources and Forests Maïté Blanchette Vézina responds to the Opposition at the legislature in Quebec City, Feb. 4, 2025. (The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot)

Montreal-area mayors are denouncing the Quebec government’s decision to force a suburb north of the city to cede a piece of land for the expansion of a hazardous waste disposal site.

Quebec’s natural resources minister tabled a bill Thursday to transfer the contested piece of land in Blainville, Que., to the province and to lease it long term to Stablex Canada Inc., a company that processes waste from Canada and the United States.

Speaking alongside other mayors from a regional organization known as the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM), Blainville Mayor Liza Poulin described the government’s move as incomprehensible.

“The government has tabled a special bill to allow it to do what the law prevents it from doing normally, which is scandalous, because it will allow Stablex to bury, for the next 40 years, dangerous materials on territory protected by the CMM,” she told a news conference.

Natural Resources Minister Maïté Blanchette Vézina says the government had little choice but to facilitate Stablex’s expansion. She said the facility is the only one in the province treating certain types of dangerous materials.

“The bill tabled today aims to implement the best available option to avoid a disruption in service regarding the management of residual hazardous materials,” she said in a news release Thursday. “By allowing Stablex to have access as soon as possible to the site with the least impact on the citizens of Blainville, we’re ensuring that the companies and municipalities of Quebec, customers of the company, do not suffer the critical impacts of a service interruption and can have a safe landfill site.”

The province said the city will be paid about $17 million for the land.

Poulin told reporters that the 67 hectares sought by Stablex include environmentally valuable wetlands, noting that the CMM has made use of provincial regulations to protect the land. The regulations allow municipalities to temporarily freeze development on parcels of land that could be affected by new land-use rules. Poulin said the region had hoped to protect it, as part of a goal to preserve 30 per cent of its territory by 2023.

The property is home to rare birds, as well as a wide variety of other wildlife including fox, moose and deer, according to the group of mayors. The province’s environmental consultation bureau has described it as an “exceptional” natural site, and recommended in 2023 that the government not authorize the expansion of the disposal site.

Stablex’s waste facility treats and buries materials that come from the mining and pharmaceutical industries, among others. The waste comes from Quebec but also from the United States and other Canadian provinces.

On Wednesday, Blanchette Vézina was asked by a member of the opposition Québec solidaire to stop importing hazardous waste from the United States in order to avoid expanding the site. She replied that Quebec exports four times as much waste as it imports, and a move to block imports would likely be met by a retaliatory move.

“That would mean we’d have four times more waste than is currently the situation in Quebec, and I still don’t have another solution,” she told the legislature.

The environmental consultation bureau appeared to have different figures in 2023. While it said precise statistics were hard to find, it suggested that Quebec imported 302,201 tonnes of waste between 2019 and 2021, compared with 183,918 tonnes shipped out of the province.

Two organizations representing Quebec municipalities issued statements supporting Blainville’s mayor and accusing the province of flouting both municipal autonomy and environmental protection.

“By supporting a landfill project that would destroy ecosystems to bring in hazardous waste, a significant portion of which comes from the United States, the government is compromising not only its own environmental commitments, but also the rights of municipalities to protect their territory,” wrote Jacques Demers, president of the federation of Quebec municipalities.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 27, 2025.