Plan St-Laurent - Pour un développement durable

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Highlights

A Special Response Team

This group could be called “the clean effluent squad". These 30-odd specialists in industrial cleaning at the federal and provincial levels are part of a special response team that was set up during the creation of the St. Lawrence Action Plan (SLAP) in June 1989.

Their mission: To negotiate with each of the 50 most polluting industries along the St. Lawrence regarding a clean-up plan to drastically reduce the dumping of toxic fluids in the river. The overall objective for these 50 companies is to reduce toxic materials in their effluents by 90% over the next four years, i.e., before the end of the five-year agreement between Canada and Quebec, from which the SLAP was developed.

Since the requirements of both levels of government were not harmonized the companies were able to slip through the cracks, as it were. Henceforth, they must respect the standardized guidelines of the program. Their reluctance is all the more reduced since they lose nothing in the process. Quite the opposite is true.

On the one hand, the clean-up plans negotiated with experts from the federal-provincial team offer interesting financial incentives for industry. On the other hand, the St. Lawrence Centre (Environment Canada's research centre created at the same time as the SLAP) will work with them to develop the appropriate technology for their given situation. In many cases, especially in the pulp and paper industry, these new technologies will in fact help companies to improve their productivity as well as clean up their effluents. Plants will become more competitive for many years to come.

The objective of reducing 90% of the toxic waste from 50 companies will be reached, and even exceeded, at the beginning of the second phase of the St. Lawrence Plan, which was renewed in 1994.  Given this success, the response team will then be maintained, and 56 new plans will be added to the clean-up program, which will then allow to set up a new state-of-the-art environmental industry in Quebec. This program will also create or consolidate more than 2,000 jobs per year during its existence, in addition to generating economic benefits evaluated at $1.4 billion.

News release