Quebec solidaire (QS) suspects that the Legault government is trying to pass Bill 93 under a gag order to accommodate a hazardous waste treatment company.
Stablex wants to expand its landfill in Blainville, on Montreal’s North Shore; the bill proposes to expropriate the municipality of Blainville and provide the company with the land it wants.
The Union of Municipalities, the Federation of Municipalities and a number of municipal councils see this as an affront to municipal autonomy, since the government is going to great lengths to dispossess Blainville against its will.
Blainville offered another adjacent site, an option rejected by both the government and the company, which considered it too small and too close, at 300 metres, to a residential area, compared with a distance of one kilometre for the preferred site.
The land sought by Stablex includes nine hectares of wetlands and 58 hectares of woodland.
“The rumours are increasingly clear that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is going to impose a gag order on Bill 93,” QS interim co-spokesperson Guillaume Cliche-Rivard said at a press briefing on Tuesday.
He calculated that this would be the Legault government’s sixth gag order. As its name suggests, this exceptional parliamentary procedure has the effect of ‘gagging’ elected representatives in order to speed up the passage of a bill.
According to Cliche-Rivard, “This (gag order) is special because it comes in the middle of a mid-session, in only our seventh week of parliamentary business. The CAQ introduced its bill not even a month ago, on Feb. 27”
“All the stakeholders came to tell the government that it was a bad bill. The principle of the bill has not even been adopted yet, and the CAQ is once again demonstrating a highly undemocratic manoeuvre,” he added.
QS will table a motion on Tuesday calling on the CAQ not to pass Bill 93 under a gag order, Cliche-Rivard said. He challenged Premier François Legault to show “courage” and “do the only right thing.”
The Stablex industrial waste treatment centre currently comprises a treatment plant and five landfill sites. The waste treated comes, for example, from the mining and pharmaceutical industries.
In 2024, 17 per cent of this waste was imported from the U.S
Stablex would have just two years' storage capacity left. The site chosen would allow the company to build a sixth landfill site and continue its activities for around forty years, rather than 24 years on the other, smaller site.
The mayor of Blainville, Liza Poulin, has already indicated that the town intends to challenge the law if it is adopted.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on March 25, 2025.
