气候变化领域集成服务门户

The Abitibi-Témiscamingue region and the mining industry are historically linked. Resources are why Europeans first came to this area, in the 1890s. Mines started extracting lead, zinc, and silver, followed by copper and gold, along the Cadillac Fault, which snakes all the way into eastern Ontario. During the Great Depression, the Quebec government provided incentives for city dwellers to move to rural areas like this region in order to colonize the land. Mining companies recruited immigrants during the Second World War to move to Abitibi from Montreal or directly from their home countries to do often-dangerous manual labour; there were many major injuries and 292 deaths in the area’s mines between 1925 and 1950.

Quebec is responsible for one-fifth of Canada’s mining activity and produces the most diverse array of resources in the country, including fifteen metals and fourteen minerals, according to a 2018 provincial report. The sector directly creates roughly 48,000 jobs and $9 billion in economic activity, about 2.5 percent of the province’s GDP. With seven active mines, Abitibi has the largest number of mining projects in Quebec; the industry accounts for nearly 20 percent of jobs in the region.

Between 2014 and 2018, spending on lithium mining in Quebec increased by 789 percent; the Quebec government is bullish about lithium’s economic promise as well as its potential to uphold the province’s commitments to electrification. Premier François Legault’s CAQ party wants Quebec to be an EV leader at every link in the supply chain, from mine to finished battery, and the provincial government has formalized its commitment to EVs by vowing to ban the sale of gas-powered cars as of 2035. (This target is five years ahead of the zero-emissions-vehicle goal set by British Columbia, the only other Canadian province with this official objective.) The province already has the highest number of electric cars on the roads, and there’s no sign of that slowing down: in its 2020/21 budget, Quebec allotted $1.4 billion to Roulez Vert, a program through which people buying new EVs can save up to $8,000, the most generous such rebate plan in Canada.

Fitzgibbon places electrification and the processes that enable it at the heart of the province’s environmental future, championing plans to turn Quebec into a battery-producing market by investing up to $3.6 billion in the industry over five years, starting this year. Last August, the CAQ reinvested $300 million in Nemaska Lithium, a company plagued with financial issues that filed for creditor protection in 2019. Nemaska is trying to open a mine in Whabouchi, Quebec, in the James Bay region, where its estimated 36.7 million tonnes of reserves would make it the seventh largest lithium-extraction project in the world. And, before Sayona showed up, North American Lithium (NAL) operated a mine in La Corne, a town 64 kilometres from the proposed Authier site; NAL has since filed for bankruptcy, and Sayona is bidding to purchase the site. With a third exploration site nearby the Tansim project, 82 kilometres southwest of Authier the company is hoping to turn the area into a major lithium hub.

Laliberté emphasizes that Quebec’s lithium industry is greener than those of other producing countries, which he says is due to two factors: lithium here is found primarily in pegmatites, which are easier to extract from than salt flats, and the endeavour would be powered by hydroelectricity. By contrast, Australia uses coal as its primary power source, so mining there creates far greater emissions, while Chile’s vast lithium deposits are in the brine of hard-to-extract salt flats, and production there has depleted water supplies. Though Quebec’s projects may not seem so damaging in comparison, before going bankrupt, the NAL mine was responsible for over eighty environmental accidents between 2013 and 2018, leaking hundreds of thousands of litres of lithium sulfate, hydraulic oil, process water, lime, diesel, motor oil, and other toxic products into surrounding groundwater.

It is that history, in addition to questions of transparency, that concerns the Comité, which continues to advocate for a balance between economic development and environmental protection. Companies, Turgeon says, “need to realize the resource-rich regions in their minds aren’t just there for resources, they’re also inhabited.” The mining industry often cites employment and prosperity as advantages of its projects, though that is not how Turgeon sees it playing out, pointing to influxes of a relatively small number of high-paying jobs (approximately 160 for Authier) that create wealth gaps within communities.

Because the project would be located partially on Algonquin territory, the Abitibiwinni First Nation of Pikogan would also be affected by mining development. In 2019, the Abitibiwinni signed an agreement with Sayona; in a press release, chief Monik Kistabish said the agreement “provides benefits for the Abitibiwinni First Nation in terms of sustainable development and economy” and that she looked forward to collaborative discussions about the environmental ramifications of the project with Sayona. (Representatives of the Abitibiwinni First Nation declined to comment further.)

Following the Comité’s actions, Sayona moved the planned location of its mining pit to be farther from the esker, though its precise whereabouts are still not publicly known. The company hired independent experts to conduct studies about the mine’s potential environmental ramifications and issued an environmental impact report. And, though few details are available, Laliberté maintains that Sayona will work with Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Abitibiwinni First Nation on wetland wildlife relocation.

Though they perhaps recognize the mine’s inevitability, members of the Comité have a hard time accepting that projects threatening ecosystems are fundamentally on the side of ecology. “There’s a rich forest ecosystem here, there are wetlands and groundwater for the entire region,” says Turgeon. “The company has two messages: one for investors, which is to present the project as being as big as possible, and a second message for the local population, which is to present the project as being as small as possible.”