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If I were a bigwig investor in some highly polluting industry, I know where I’d want to establish my company: in Quebec. Traditionally one of the more slack places north of the Rio Grande in enforcing environmental laws, the province is becoming even more lax.
I’ve written two columns in recent weeks about the Quebec government’s pitiful record of prosecuting polluters. But now there’s new evidence that makes the point even more strongly.
That evidence is a comparison of court records in Quebec and Ontario. It took a few weeks for Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment to tabulate its data for me, but the results were worth the wait.
Prosecutors in Ontario were able to get convictions last year on 796 charges of violating environmental laws—a staggering 306 per cent more than the 196 that the Quebec government says its prosecutors obtained. Guilty parties in Ontario paid more than $4 million in fines—a cool 222 per cent more than polluters in Quebec.
To be sure, you’d expect Ontario to rack up bigger figures because it has more people and more industry than Quebec. Yet that’s a weak excuse: Ontario’s population is bigger than Quebec’s by only 64 per cent and its gross domestic product (the handiest measure of industrialization) is greater by 94 per cent.
So, even when we take into account the the size factor, the disparity between the two province’s anti-pollution efforts is like night and day.
What’s also discouraging is that those 196 charges in Quebec on which there were convictions were far fewer than in the previous year, when there were 268. Indeed, 2005-06 had the lowest number of successful prosecutions in memory. Convictions have been in general decline since 1992-93, when there were 645 charges with convictions. For the record: The environment minister of the day was the Bourassa government’s Pierre Paradis.
The decrease began under the Bouchard government and has accelerated under the Charest government.
The most noteworthy prosecution in Quebec last year involved Tembec Industries Inc. After environmental groups had complained for several years that the paper company’s installation in Abibiti-Temiscaming was getting away with fouling the Ottawa River, prosecutors slapped Tembec with 155 charges. Quebec eventually agreed to a plea bargain in which the company pleaded guilty to 36 charges. The $1-million fine was the highest in the Quebec government’s environmental history.
Let’s leave aside the hard-to-answer question of whether this plea bargain was a reflection of Quebec’s leniency with polluters. Instead, let’s simply do the math. Take away this one exceptional case and polluters in Quebec last year would have faced only $289,525 in fines. That would have been one quarter of the Paradis-era level.
A Quebec environment official told me last week that the province had eased up on seeking to punish polluters in court and instead was pressing them more gently to get them to change their ways and, if possible, to restore damaged land to good condition.
Yet Quebec’s output of pollution under this compassionate approach is certifiably worsening.
As I reported two weeks ago, unpublished data compiled by the Commission for Environmental Co-operation compare the performance of 293 industrial plants in Quebec in 1998 and 2003. The commission, a monitoring body created by the North American Free Trade Agreement, said the volume of chemicals dumped in waterways jumped by 38 per cent.
The commission also tracks the pollution records of companies throughout all Canadian provinces and U.S. states. It painted a generally upbeat picture last month. Industrial facilities in the United States cut toxic pollutants (which mostly exclude greenhouse gases) by 21 per cent between 1998 and 2003. Canadian industry cut its pollutants by a less impressive, but still encouraging, 10 per cent.
Ontario shares the credit for this. Quebec does not.
While the continent is becoming more environmentally responsible, Quebec is becoming less.
Yep, if I were an investor without a conscience, man, I’d love Quebec.
Henry Aubin is a columnist for the Montreal Gazette.
E-mail: haubin@thegazette.canwest.com