Highlights
A memorable date for the St. Lawrence
3 June 1988 will remain a memorable date in the annals of the St. Lawrence River. On this day, the Environment Ministers of Quebec and Canada, Clifford Lincoln and Tom McMillan, and the Ministère du Loisir, de la Chasse et de la Pêche du Québec (Quebec’s Minister of Recreation, Wildlife and Fisheries), Yvon Picotte, signed a cooperation agreement which would result, one year later, in the launch of the first Canada-Quebec Agreement on the St. Lawrence, known thereafter as the St. Lawrence Plan.
During the same ceremony, the Prime Minister, Bryan Mulroney, announced federal investment of 110 million dollars to clean-up industrial discharge in the St. Lawrence. For its part, Quebec had already been committed for more than ten years to a broad program of municipal effluent purification. However, the first concerns regarding the degradation of the St. Lawrence arose even longer ago. It was in 1973 that a first initiative bringing together the governments of Quebec and Canada resulted in the creation of a study committee whose warnings, in the form of twenty recommendations from five years of work, convinced the authorities of the need to act. The main elements blamed were municipal and industrial pollution, sediment contamination and the deterioration of banks. It was this which had encouraged the Quebec government to launch its municipal water clean-up program.
Date modified: 2008/06/03 – Important Notices
