A Quebec city, fearing arsenic in the air, presses the province to get tougher on Glencore smelter

Ethan Valois is eight now, and the arsenic levels in his body have started to come down.

He and his parents live in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., home to a copper smelter that emits the known carcinogen at levels about 30 times higher than the provincial limit.

For decades, residents didn’t think much of this fact. La fonderie Horne was simply part of the landscape for the city’s 40,000 residents – as immovable as a mountain.

As provincial standards for heavy metal contamination were revised, however, public health authorities decided to find out whether the dangerous emissions produced by the smelter were lingering in residents’ bodies. Studies in 2018 and 2019 took fingernail clippings from children living in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood, adjacent to the smelter. The results revealed that local kids had four times as much arsenic in their systems as the control population in a neighbouring town.

For reasons that remain unclear, no child had a higher concentration than Ethan – 5,600 nanograms per gram of fingernail, about 15 times the average in Notre-Dame. His horrified parents moved the family to a distant neighbourhood. “We don’t know if he’ll have long-term consequences,” said Ethan’s father, Éric, sitting in a local diner this winter. “You start asking yourself questions: We have a little tomato plant outside the house – is it because he eats tomatoes?”

Open this photo in gallery:

Horne smelter

Ave. Portelance

Quartier

Notre-Dame

École NDP

Centre

Polymétiers

Lac Osisko

Measuring

station

Rouyn-Noranda

391

117

0

300

M

0

80

Rouyn-Noranda

KM

QUEBEC

117

Montreal

Georgian

Bay

ONTARIO

Toronto

N.Y.

VT.

N.H.

Lake Ontario

Atmospheric concentrations of arsenic

in Quartier Notre-Dame

In nanograms per cubic metre. Less than three is considered safe.

           

1,200

Governmental pressure

1,000

Measuring station

Portelance

800

École NPD

Polymétiers

600

400

200

0

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

‘18

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

CONTRIBUTORS; government of quebec

Horne smelter

Ave. Portelance

Quartier

Notre-Dame

École NDP

Centre

Polymétiers

Lac Osisko

Measuring

station

Rouyn-Noranda

391

117

0

300

M

0

80

Rouyn-Noranda

KM

QUEBEC

117

Montreal

Georgian

Bay

ONTARIO

Toronto

N.Y.

VT.

N.H.

Lake Ontario

Atmospheric concentrations of arsenic

in Quartier Notre-Dame

In nanograms per cubic metre. Less than three is considered safe.

           

1,200

Governmental pressure

1,000

Measuring station

Portelance

800

École NPD

Polymétiers

600

400

200

0

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

‘18

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

CONTRIBUTORS; government of quebec

Horne smelter

Ave. Portelance

Quartier

Notre-Dame

École NDP

Centre

Polymétiers

Lac Osisko

Measuring

station

Rouyn-Noranda

391

117

0

300

M

0

80

Rouyn-Noranda

KM

QUEBEC

117

Montreal

Georgian

Bay

ONTARIO

Toronto

N.Y.

VT.

N.H.

Lake Ontario

Atmospheric concentrations of arsenic in Quartier Notre-Dame

In nanograms per cubic metre. Less than three is considered safe.

           

1,200

Governmental pressure

1,000

Measuring station

Portelance

800

École NPD

Polymétiers

600

400

200

0

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

‘18

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

CONTRIBUTORS; government of quebec

The family’s anxiety is widely shared in Rouyn-Noranda. And that feeling has only intensified since last year, when another public health report confirmed the fears of many: The city’s population has a series of alarming health problems, including 30 per cent more cases of lung cancer and a higher rate of underweight babies than the rest of the province.

The study stopped short of directly linking the city’s arsenic exposure and its ill health – there could be many other factors, and such a small population makes statistical analysis difficult. But for many residents of Rouyn-Noranda, it didn’t matter. The link was clear enough. After all, arsenic was known to cause cancer and was associated with developmental problems in children. What else could it be?

Now, thousands of residents are demanding action, in public consultations, irate Facebook groups, community theatre productions and protests. Above all, they want the province to end the smelter’s long-standing exemption from limits on arsenic emissions, pegged at three nanograms per cubic metre of air.

So far, the government of Premier François Legault has refused to go anywhere near that far, requiring only that the company reach 15 nanograms in five years. The Swiss mining giant Glencore, which operates the smelter, says that even after the expensive overhaul that is currently under way, lower emissions are technically impossible.

In the meantime, residents of Rouyn-Noranda are trying to figure out how to continue living in a place that has learned such a dark fact about itself: The historic heart of the community is poisoning its people.

Naturally enough for a city that owes its existence to copper mining, symbols of the industry are visible everywhere.

The smelter’s smokestacks and their thick pillars of white vapour are the main local landmarks. Municipal street signs are decorated with images of copper anodes, the smock-shaped plates into which the metal is moulded. The junior hockey arena is called the Aréna Glencore. (It is located inside the Centre Dave-Keon, named after the Toronto Maple Leafs great whose father was a copper miner in Noranda.)

Before its merger with neighbouring Rouyn, Noranda was essentially a company town, featuring whole neighbourhoods built by its namesake company as worker housing. Even after the underground mine closed in 1976, the smelter – left to process metal from other mines, as well as industrial waste such as old computer motherboards – remained an economic engine of the town.

Emissions made the industry all the more present in people’s lives. On some days, noxious yellow smoke chased residents inside. “Ça goûte la mine” (”It tastes like the mine”), they would say when the smell of sulphur filled the air. The fumes were so corrosive that, in 1978 alone, the company had to reimburse 2,720 residents for damage to their car paint jobs, according to the 1984 documentary Noranda.

When a process was developed for transforming the sulphur into marketable sulphuric acid (used in products from car batteries to fertilizer), those emissions began to steadily decrease. To this day, some people with memories of the more in-your-face form of pollution tend to dismiss concerns about colourless, odourless arsenic, said resident Jennifer Ricard Turcotte.

“All the adults in my life told me, ‘Oh no, it’s not that bad – it’s better than it was.’”

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In the meantime, however, the arsenic problem was getting worse. In the 1990s, the company introduced a process of “doping” anodes with the heavy metal because its weight helps drag out impurities during the refining process. Some of the supplementary arsenic evaporated into the air instead, acknowledged Marie-Élise Viger, the environmental manager of Glencore Copper for North America and the Philippines.

Business was also booming with the growth of electronics, which vastly increased the demand for highly conductive copper wiring – a demand that Canada’s only copper smelter was well-positioned to take advantage of. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, ground-level air-quality meters operated by the government found that arsenic emissions near the factory spiked to an annual average of almost 700 nanograms per cubic metre of air.

Today, the smelting process produces much of its ambient arsenic when copper concentrate is heated to temperatures reaching 1,200 degrees Celsius, then transferred between hulking black steel machines known as the reactor, the convertors and the anode furnace. The arsenic is vaporized, escapes through vents in the roof designed to keep workers from being poisoned, then turns to dust with the drop in temperature, before falling imperceptibly to the ground in Rouyn-Noranda.

With the alarming rise in emissions around the turn of the millennium, an expert panel under the government of then-premier Jean Charest recommended that the smelter’s owner – then still its founding firm, Noranda – reduce its arsenic output to 10 nanograms within 18 months.

Blaming technical constraints, the company came nowhere close. A more than $500-million overhaul of the facility, designed to make the smelting process more “compact,” by reducing the number of times molten copper is shifted between vessels, and better capturing the vaporized arsenic through the increased use of so-called “bag houses,“ will only bring emissions down to 15 nanograms by 2027.

To the disgust of many newly minted activists in Rouyn-Noranda, that is all the government is asking of the company. In a compromise decision handed down in August, after the shock of the lung cancer findings, Environment Minister Benoit Charette threatened fines and even the possible closing of the smelter if Glencore failed to meet that five-year target. But he refused to demand the company meet the annual average of three nanograms required everywhere else in the province.

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The company’s exemption from the arsenic rules dates to 2011, when Quebec first imposed them, because the smelter has been operating since 1927 and the regulation includes a grandfather clause. Instead, Glencore’s emissions are governed by five-year agreements with the province; the latest one was up for renewal in December, a deadline pushed into the new year when Mr. Charette said the residents of Rouyn-Noranda didn’t want to receive the news over the holidays.

(While it answered technical questions, Quebec’s Ministry of the Environment declined to comment on the controversy surrounding the Horne while the smelter’s ministerial authorization was up for renewal.)

Elsewhere in the world, certain copper smelters do respect local emissions rules. A similar operation in Hamburg, Germany, which processes even more of the metal than the Horne does, generates arsenic readings of just 4.5 nanograms per cubic metre of air, observes Nicole Desgagnés, the spokesperson for the concerned citizens group ARET. That’s below the European Union threshold of six.

Glencore argues that the German measuring stations are farther away from the plant than their own and says its new target will keep most people safe. Under its emission-reduction plan, 84 per cent of Rouyn-Noranda’s urban area will be at three nanograms or less, the company maintains. The closest air monitors in Rouyn-Noranda are in the smelter’s parking lot, so they give the highest possible readings, Ms. Viger pointed out.

“Nobody lives in the parking lot that I’m aware of,” she said. “I don’t know if we have campers there.”

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Marianne Saucier and her two adolescent sons don’t live in the parking lot, but they’re not that far away. Like hundreds of Notre-Dame residents, their home is in the shadow of the smelter. The psychologist moved to a comfortable, white clapboard house on a quiet street with her boys a couple of years ago – something affordable, with more space for the kids to roam – just before the full scope of the city’s health problems, and their possible link to the smelter, became public knowledge.

Since the release of the damning public health reports, however, the family has felt “a little imprisoned.” Ms. Saucier may not let her cats out next summer so they don’t track in arsenic-tainted dust. Her younger boy has become more vigilant about closing the windows in the summer and has decided he would like to move – although his best friend would have to join him, of course.

Now, the single mother can’t help wondering if she has put her children in danger.

“Sometimes I think, ‘God, I should have known,’” she said.

Information about the possible health effects of arsenic emissions have been slow to trickle out. The question of when the government knew about Rouyn-Noranda’s elevated lung cancer rates, in particular – perhaps the most troubling finding from the local population studies carried out between 2018 and 2021 – has become a source of bitter controversy and cast doubt on the government’s handling of the file.

In June of last year, Radio-Canada revealed that the data on lung cancer was available in 2019, but the director of public health at the time, Horacio Arruda, held it back. The information only appeared last May in another report on the state of the community’s health. Dr. Arruda’s office pleaded that the cancer data was not ready to be published earlier because it was not detailed enough. In any case, residents were left in the dark for two years about the higher incidence of a fatal disease known to be caused by arsenic.

The next public health chief, Luc Boileau, further aggravated residents when he marvelled at how “anxious” they were and suggested that their imaginations were running away with them. He, too, advocated for a 15-nanogram emission limit, which many thought was far too high. (Dr. Boileau refused multiple requests for an interview.)

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In one sense, he wasn’t wrong: Many people in Rouyn-Noranda are profoundly anxious about arsenic poisoning. The idea of a killer dust is hard to shake. They quite plausibly imagine it entering their homes on the soles of their shoes and in the coats of their dogs, accumulating in corners and carpets – the regional public health authority recommends regularly using a vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter – and eventually in their bodies.

“I think about it every minute of every day,” said Ms. Ricard Turcotte, a member of the activist group Mères au front (Mothers on the frontlines).

“I had a miscarriage this summer,” said Laurie Paquin, another member. “My first thought was, ‘Was it that?’”

Although it is impossible to draw a straight line between any individual’s health issue and atmospheric arsenic dust, it can be difficult to avoid making the connection.

Dany Bonapace, a local entrepreneur, had been feeling sicker and sicker for a couple of years before visiting a clinic in Houston, Tex., where he has business. His symptoms ranged from headaches and sleeplessness to joint pain and premature loss of bone density. After running a battery of tests on him, his doctors found toxic levels of 15 metals in his body, including arsenic, cadmium and lead.

“Their first question was, ‘Where do you come from?’” Mr. Bonapace said. “I said, ‘Rouyn-Noranda.’”

Like many people who live in the city, Mr. Bonapace is usually proud to tell people that. The community is tight-knit, with a tradition of producing professional hockey players and a vibrant contemporary arts scene. Its relative isolation has helped cultivate a strong sense of local identity.

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Despite that, or perhaps as a result, the debate about the smelter has been passionate and divisive. For all the groups that have sprung up to demand the government impose a three-nanogram limit on arsenic emissions – Mères au front, Mr. Bonapace’s RN Rebelle, a group of about 50 local doctors who signed an open letter to that effect – there are also citizens pushing back, who worry that more regulation could lead to the closing of the Horne. Generally media-shy, they have focused their efforts on the Facebook page J’appuie la Fonderie (I support the smelter).

One hint of the city’s ambivalence came when Rouyn-Noranda elected a deputy from the governing Coalition Avenir Québec in the province’s fall election. The riding had previously been held by the left-wing Québec Solidaire, which demanded that Glencore lower its emissions to three nanograms. The incoming CAQ deputy, Daniel Bernard, was a registered mining lobbyist who declared during the campaign, when asked about the arsenic problem: “Rouyn isn’t Chernobyl.”

There were other reasons to support the CAQ – it was cruising to re-election and was almost certain to hold power – but social media erupted in laments that Rouyn-Noranda was voting against its own health. Several residents posted a well-known Quebec saying: “Aren’t you sick of dying, you fools?”

For supporters of the smelter, it is more complicated than that. Six hundred and fifty people work at the Horne, and hundreds more rely on it, as contractors or dependent family members. It is hard for some to take criticism of the smelter as anything but an attack on their livelihoods, or on Rouyn-Noranda itself, said Isabelle Fortin-Rondelle, a member of Mères au front.

“The city and the smelter were founded the same day – our identity is very closely linked to the smelter. For a lot of people, it’s inevitable – it’s like there’s a mountain in the centre of the city.”

In a church basement one frigid night in December, a group of citizens worked on a novel way to overcome the impasse. The air smelled like peeled clementines, stale coffee and wool socks. The local theatre company, Théâtre du Tandem, was rehearsing a public reading of a 19th-century work by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. An Enemy of the People is about a doctor in a Scandinavian spa town who discovers evidence that the municipal baths are dangerously contaminated, threatening to ruin the town’s economy. The parallels with Rouyn-Noranda were obvious.

Alexandre Castonguay, the company’s artistic director, hoped the reading would help bridge divides within the city. There were two trained social workers present to facilitate a subsequent discussion; he invited residents who support the smelter, knowing it was possible that sparks would fly.

“I want the people of my city to be able to talk about this situation without turning our backs on each other,” he said.

Diane Dallaire, the mayor of Rouyn-Noranda, is proud of how engaged her citizens have become around the issue of the smelter. Yes, it’s “a subject that divides,” she said. About 70 per cent of her time in office has been spent managing the file, she guessed, in part because of how fractious the community has become. Some activists roll their eyes at her cautious approach, scoffing at the new city slogan she unveiled in 2021: Douce rebelle – Gentle Rebel.

But she believes that with pressure and time, the smelter will be brought in line with the provincial standard on arsenic emissions. With the smokestacks visible from her office window, Ms. Dallaire insisted she would not compromise.

“We’re convinced that Rouyn-Noranda will become a model of people who stood up,” she said.

More from this story on The Decibel

Reporter Eric Andrew-Gee speaks about his trip to Rouyn-Noranda and what residents told him about the debate over arsenic emissions from the copper smelter. Subscribe for more episodes.