Jordan: There are, as you might imagine, a lot of protocols for properly disposing of construction site waste. And rightly so. It is often toxic if it’s not properly disposed of. It can harm the air, the water, the soil, even the people in the community around the disposal site.
However, it’s also expensive to follow those rules. Much more expensive than finding someone willing or just desperate enough to let you simply dump your waste on their land with no protocols and no regard for the health of the indigenous community that has been struggling for years To keep this waste out of their land.
This is a story about what happens when residents have had enough, when they’re willing to risk their own safety to stop this toxic waste from choking off their community. And it’s a story about what happens when enough people speak up that the government has no choice. But to listen, finally.
I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. A quick note. Nexus, a company that you’ll learn about during this broadcast, has denied all allegations of illegal dumping. They refuse to respond to questions from any journalists, except La Presse. to whom they denied the allegations and reiterated their commitment to environmental protection.
Chris Curtis is an investigative journalist who is the co founder of The Rover, one of the publications that has led coverage of this remarkable story. Hey, Chris.
Chris Curtis Hey, Jordan. Thanks so much for having me.
Jordan: You are most welcome. And maybe you can begin for those who don’t know the area. Just explain to us, where’s Kanasatake and what is it?
Chris Curtis: Kanasatake is about a 45 minute drive if there’s no traffic, uh, northwest of Montreal. It’s basically what’s left of this Mohawk territory north of the city that used to be about the size of the island of Montreal. Now it’s about 12 square kilometers. It’s this tiny little piece of land right where the Ottawa River meets the Lake of Two Mountains.
And there’s about 2, 000 Mohawks. who live in Ganasadage or the neighbouring village of Oka.
Jordan: Explain maybe the context and history here of, uh, illegal dumping and pollution on this land, because what we’re going to talk about today, uh, is what’s happening right now. This is not the first time you’ve investigated this story.
Chris Curtis: No, no. Um, about four years ago, a colleague and I, Virginie, uh, we, you know, we’ve been hearing a lot about, uh, We all knew about the existence of this dump that was so big and so full of sulfur and, you know, contaminants from construction sites across the region that it would occasionally catch fire.
There was so much sulfur in there. And, and when the wind picked up, you know, everyone within two or three kilometers could smell. That horrible rotten egg smell. And we’d even have people who described getting nosebleeds when they smelled that, or having a headache or getting sore joints. We spoke to people who live near the dump, who had to constantly change the air filter in their home, who, who had black sludge coming through their taps at home.
That spurred us to, to want to take action. You know, we snuck onto the site, we took samples. We spoke to a bunch of people who’d been threatened by the, by the dump sites owner. So our, our media outlet, The Rover, a partner media outlet, Ricochet, and another partner media outlet, the Mohawk owned Eastern Door newspaper, we all combined our forces and, um, I think our reporting managed to get the dumps, uh, license suspended.
And finally, we all thought, okay, well, illegal dumping is over on the Ganasatake territory, you know, and, and, and, We kind of all patted ourselves on the back, but as it turns out, uh, it’s not over and it’s, it might be worse than it’s ever been.
Jordan: You went, uh, as you know, we kind of mentioned, uh, with some, uh, Mohawk folks from the area to go and look at some of the illegal dumping that’s going on right now.
Can you describe it? What are those sites look like? What kinds of things are being dumped? Is it garbage? Is it waste? Like take us in there.
Chris Curtis: So the old dump was just everything. The one that was shut down in 2020. It was permitted to have like, I think 30, 000 cubic meters of waste and there were 400, 000 cubic meters of waste.
That’s enormous. That’s like, I believe it’s like 160 Olympic sized swimming pools full of smelly, rotten, super dangerous materials. And it’s, you know, within a very close range to all these water wells that farmers use for their, their water. It’s right near the lake that about a million people use for their drinking water.
It was huge, but then it shifted underground. So people in the construction industry would make deals with often vulnerable people in the community who need a little bit of money and they would offer to dump a little bit of fill on their sites. Witnesses say they would downplay what was in the earth.
They’d say, look, it’s just basically, you know, earth. It’s just, there might be one or two little baby contaminants in there. It’s going to cost us a fortune to get rid of it. Why don’t you help us with the expenses? And, uh, you know, no one needs to know. So we could find about 14 sites across this pretty small reserve.
One of the sites is right next to a playground. Uh, one of them overlooks the local high school. Some of them are right next to farms, uh, and a bunch of them are right on, uh, privately owned land on the lake. And those sites have been taking hundreds. and possibly thousands of loads of contaminated soil every month.
And that is what’s scaring the hell out of, uh, out of everyone is all of this contaminated soil, right on the banks of the lake of two mountains. It poses a huge threat to the marine life, to the ecosystem in general, and to everyone’s drinking water. And like the people who take me to these sites, are putting themselves a huge personal risk.
Uh, you know, this one guy, George, he says he won’t leave the house without his shotgun. You know, I was riding with him and I looked down on his lap and I see this, this little pump action shotgun. And I’m thinking, Oh Jesus, I don’t want him to think I’m scared or anything. I want him to think I’m like a tough guy.
But that, you know, you could see that I was terrified of it. He said, Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ve got a full of, uh, he shows me these two shotgun shells. He says, I got it with rock salt and rubber pellets. If there was ever anything, we probably wouldn’t kill anyone.
Jordan: Yikes.
Chris Curtis: So it’s, I mean, it, it shows you how dangerous things are because out there, if you call 911, like the cops might show up 45 minutes or an hour from now, and they might not.
They’re there. A lot of these cops are afraid of. going on the res, like it’s almost exclusively white cops and they are scared of the Mohawks. It’s been that way since the OCA crisis. And so increasingly you’re seeing people go through unofficial channels. They either go to the media. Uh, some people have confronted truckers directly.
Uh, one person fired a warning shot over the truckers. There’s been fistfights. There’ve been threats. It’s really just a small number of local Mohawks who are taking advantage of this and making a little bit of money. Everybody else just wants to live their life. on whatever tiny patch of Mohawk land there is left.
Jordan: Before we talk about, uh, where this illegal waste is coming from and, and who might be dumping it, this is the second time now you’ve mentioned or kind of alluded to this area being a legal grey zone. Can you unpack what that actually means in practice?
Chris Curtis: Absolutely. So, uh, you know, this is not something that’s unique to Gunnesedage, like Indigenous territories across Canada.
Disproportionately are affected by this kind of industrial pollution because controlling the environment is a provincial jurisdiction. So in Quebec, it’s provincial, but the reserve exists on crown land and when, whenever you need to do anything on, on, on the land, you kind of, you have to speak to Quebec, to Canada and to the local band councils.
So all of these overlapping jurisdictions. are often given as an excuse by the government for not doing anything. So you might call the environment minister and they might say, well, yeah, that’s actually, you should call fisheries and oceans Canada because it’s close to a body of water, or you should call the minister of indigenous affairs because it’s on crown land.
We don’t want to deal with it. And then you would call Ottawa and they’d say, well, this is an environmental concern. So it’s more Quebec and it’s a local concern. So it’s more the local band council. And then you go to the band council and there’s political dysfunction there. So it. It creates this kind of revolving door of like, no one taking any accountability for anything.
And what ends up happening is the people most affected by this are, you know, are these indigenous people who’ve lived in the area since time immemorial and they’re seeing their land shrink from underneath them and what little land is left is, is being poisoned. And it got so bad, the contamination is, I think this is a detail that needs to be mentioned.
It got so bad that one of my sources were this guy Jeremy Tomlinson, who is the head of the local health center. He got a grant from the federal government to start a local farm to promote local health and community and language revitalization and all these great things. All he needed to do was find 60 suitable acres of land on the territory, could not find 60 acres of non contaminated land, so they had to go buy a farm in a neighbouring community.
So that tells you what the stakes are, you know, it’s, it is the survival of a way of life. It’s the survival of a land that sustained these people for generations.
Jordan: What do we suspect about who’s actually doing the dumping here? Uh, what have you tried to find out there?
Chris Curtis: I always wanted, I thought like, okay, if I have the time, I’ll just hang out by one of the dump sites and follow a truck as it leaves. And so about a month ago, I started doing that, you know, following trucks from the res, seeing where they go, get their fill and seeing if they come back to the res.
And so one of the companies doing this, uh, on a huge scale is a company called Nexus Construction. Uh, it’s owned by, uh, some brothers in Laval. It’s, uh, used to be a kind of a nothing, nobody company. In fact, both of its owners had declared bankruptcy before it was, uh, you know, it wasn’t. The most stable player in the region.
And then all of a sudden years later, you see dozens of Nexus trucks. dumping on, you know, on, on, on Mohawk land and, and probably saving hundreds and hundreds of dollars every time they dump. So probably saving, you know, upwards of a million dollars on a big, big, big dumping contract they might have with the local construction company.
A lot of people were doing that. So when I, when I followed Nexus, I followed them to two big construction sites. One was in the industrial Boulevard of Laval. Uh, they were digging up the parking lot. I don’t know exactly what the renovation they were doing was, but it was a relatively big project. So, you know, you had this excavator on the construction site, digging up asphalt.
and contaminated soil, dumping it directly into this dump truck. I’m across the street, pretending to read a newspaper or something, trying to look unsuspicious when the truck left, I followed it back onto the res. You know, it has, it has contaminants, visible contaminants in the soil, like big chunks of asphalt, which is full of hydrocarbons.
And, and so, uh, I followed it back to the res. And they dumped very close to the shore, did this again, followed it to a construction site, which, uh, we were able to determine is going to be a luxury condo tower in Southern Laval. These are not small companies involved in this. These are like pretty big companies involved in really expensive real estate development projects where, you know, a unit might go for 750, 000.
And the person buying this house probably doesn’t know, or buying this unit doesn’t know that to make this house, uh, you know, environmental laws were, were broken and, and, and people were possibly exploited. So, uh, we found a bunch of different construction companies that work with these excavation people who are, who are dumping illegally.
And we found, you know, we found dozens and dozens of projects that possibly could be involved. We don’t, we don’t know yet, but if this is being done on the scale that we see it’s being done, there are job sites across the region dumping illegally because it’s, it’s, it’s so much cheaper. It’s big. It’s really, really big.
Jordan: What do these companies or contractors, uh, that you’re saying are dumping illegally there, uh, say about it? I assume you’ve reached out and, and asked them. And, uh, I know you published, you know, stories about this. So I assume, you know, you’ve got the, you’ve got the backup, uh, to prove it. How did they respond?
Chris Curtis: Oh, they just haven’t. They haven’t responded. In one case, I got a message that said, yeah, we’ll get back to you next week. And that never happened. And we’re talking about, I think, eight companies that I’ve contacted. They just haven’t gotten back to me. I don’t know that that silence necessarily is damning, but I think their silence is telling.
Jordan: Right. And I know that, uh, there have been, uh, allegations, lots of allegations just in general terms about, uh, corruption in the Quebec construction industry. Is this sort of par for the course, I guess?
Chris Curtis: Well, it’s, it’s, so it’s harder and harder in Quebec to be, uh, corrupt or to, um, to get involved in funny business if you’re a general contractor, right?
If you’re the one signing all the checks, if you’re the one who directly deals with the provincial government, uh, then, or any municipal government you happen to be dealing with, then, you know, you’re, you have to be a lot cleaner than you did 10, 15 years ago. Good. Yeah, no, it is. It is good. And that’s a function of a, you know, of all the revelations made during the Charbonneau commission.
But if you’re a smaller subcontractor and what you do is very specialized, like excavation, which is digging up soil and getting rid of it, there’s, there’s more opportunity for, for funny business because you’re just the subcontractor. No one’s looking at you as carefully. And what you do is so specialized and so specific.
that it kind of gives you a competitive edge. So if you’re able to go to a general contractor and say, look, I have this way of getting rid of the soil, that’s gonna, that’s going to save you 500, by the end of this one contract. Of course, you’re going to use those guys and you’re not going to ask questions, uh, which is too bad because you know, you, you should be asking questions.
And the way it works in Quebec is if you’re getting rid of, any contaminated soil. The government has to know immediately when the soil is leaving the construction site, where it’s going. There need to be truck manifests. There needs to be a paper trail, but you know, despite this really good clean system we have, no one uses it.
Like a lot of legitimate places don’t use it either. It’s just, they don’t feel the need to it’s it’s the government doesn’t really enforce its, its own environmental regulations. It’s kind of a free for all.
Jordan: So I understand that in the weeks following, uh, your initial publication of this story, there has now been a government response.
Can you tell me what the provincial government’s doing?
Chris Curtis: So on Tuesday, uh, the provincial government, the, uh, the environment ministry, different, I guess, scientists or lab techs were allowed access to, uh, one of the illegal dump sites. They were escorted by provincial police. Okay. This was after, you know, after the province and the Mogue territory reached a deal to allow the, um, allow the investigators on site.
They’re testing up to six dump sites that lead into the lake of two mountains for um, hydrocarbons. They’re testing the water and the fish habitat in the lake of two mountains to see if it’s been affected by. The dumping, uh, and Quebec has explicitly called what’s happening in gun as a dog and illegal scheme that they are shutting down.
So it’s a surprisingly forceful response. Given how lax the government has been for so many years, but, um, as an officer on site told me, that is what happens when, uh, the media gets together and, and puts pressure on the government.
Jordan: Well, I mean, first of all, congratulations to you and your colleagues for, uh, getting action on it.
But you just mentioned you were talking to somebody on site. What was it like up there when, uh, it was happening?
Chris Curtis: One of the landowners came by and you could hear her mutter like, yeah, well, what about the big dump on the other side of town? And you can tell there’s a kind of frustrated resolve that like, this testing is going to happen, the community accepts it, like no one other than maybe the people who are participating in the scheme, no one wants this, right?
So people are happy that finally there, there’s action being taken in the people for whom the action is being taken against. They kind of have to accept it because there’s not much else you could
Jordan: do. You mentioned they’re testing, you know, right now as we’re speaking, um, what happens if they find hydrocarbons?
What happens if they determine, you know, the fish population has been depleted, et cetera? What are the consequences possible here?
Chris Curtis: Each site owner could pay up to a million dollars in, uh, in fines. That’s gigantic, right? What a, what a huge deterrent that would be to future anybody who would want to participate in this in the future.
The big question mark for me is what about these companies doing the dumping? Like, are we going to just punish a handful of Mohawks or are we going to actually look into the larger system of illegal dumping in Quebec? Because if you talk to an expert, you know, there’s up to an over about a million tons of waste that’s disposed of illegally from construction sites in Quebec every year.
So if we’re just attacking the people who house it and, and many of them are vulnerable people and many of them just need money. Are we really attacking the root of the problem, which look, this is an opinion, but I think it’s, it’s greed and it’s, and it’s the desire for a lot of contractors to cut corners and make more money.
So on the one hand. A really nice piece of enforcement on the other, I, I, you know, I, I worry that this is another situation where a kind of rich white people won’t face justice.
Jordan: So last question then, what happens to all the waste that is there right now? Like what kind of scalar cleanup effort is required?
Chris Curtis: That one dump where there’s 400, 000 cubic meters of shit, that is the federal government estimates going to cost a hundred million dollars to clean up. That’s one site.
Jordan: Huh?
Chris Curtis: A hundred million dollars. There’s, there’s even debate within the community about who should do the job, how it should be done. It’s a really hard process to get going and it’s going to cost a hundred million dollars.
The other sites aren’t as big, but there’s about 14, 15, maybe 16 of them, maybe more. So you would need an individual process for each of these sites.
Jordan: Chris, thank you for sharing this story with us and for bringing it to the attention of everyone, I guess, including the province.
Chris Curtis: Well, you know, I think the biggest thanks goes to.
Those Mohawk sources who put their safety on the line and put their wellbeing and their standing among their peers on the line to do something extremely brave. And, and that, that, uh, that didn’t guarantee a good outcome. I mean, it took them years of fighting and, and, um, a lot of people are worn down in the territory.
And, and yesterday was maybe the first time in a very, very long time that it felt like. Maybe they’re winning this. It’s incredible. Thanks again. Thank you, man. Thanks for being interested in the story. I love your podcast.
Jordan: Chris Curtis is the co founder of the Rover and an investigative journalist. That was the big story for more from us.
You can head to the big story podcast. ca. You can find all of our episodes. There goes back six years now. You can also send us suggestions for the next, hopefully, six years of stories by emailing us hello at thebigstorypodcast. ca or by calling us 416 935 5935 and leaving a voicemail. The Big Story is on all your podcast players and on your smart speaker.
Just ask it to play The Big Story Podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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