Meadowbrook: one of the last creeks in Montreal dried up because we dump our sewers there

Meadowbrook Creek will soon be dried up by the City of Montreal because residences in Montreal West and Côte-Saint-Luc have been dumping their wastewater directly into it for nearly 20 years. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MAMH) and the Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change (MELCC) are aware of the problem, but have failed in their obligation to impose the necessary corrective measures on the two cities .

Here is the sad story of a long battle carried out for years by the citizens' committee, Friends of Meadowbrook Park, and taken over by the Montreal Journal.

Thus, the City of Montreal is required, by a court judgment, to build a stormwater pipe to divert wastewater flowing into Meadowbrook Creek, which will have the effect of reducing water inflows by 96 %. Montreal is here the victim of the negligence of the cities of Côte-Saint-Luc and Montreal-West which have not corrected all the reverse connections, that is to say residential or commercial sewer pipes connected to the network rainwater, on their territory. Their contaminated water thus flows into the territory of Montreal, into the stream.

Pollution in Meadowbrook Creek: a known problem

The MAMH has known for a long time this problem of reverse connections which ensures that sanitary wastewater is not connected to the sewer network and that it flows into the environment. The Treasury Board has required by decree, since at least 2007, that such poor connections be corrected, failing which municipalities would no longer obtain subsidies for their other infrastructure work (see the Treasury Board notice below) . But the two cities did nothing and the MAMH continued to grant them subsidies without forcing them to correct these problems.

Water pollution through poor connections has been a well-known scourge since the 1980s. It is necessary to dig in the street or on private land to modify the pipes and this is why the government has decided to make all financial aid conditional on the implementation of an action plan. Obviously, this condition is not respected.

“Never has a municipality been required to carry out work or respect a simple action plan, it’s pathetic,” said Alain Saladzius, president of Fondation Rivières. We have written to both ministries. At the environment, we were told that diverting water from Meadowbrook Creek is not an intervention in a watercourse and we still have not received a response from Municipal Affairs. Faced with the urgency, we filed a complaint with the Sustainable Development Commissioner. »

The Montreal Regional Environmental Council worked very hard on this file and Fondation Rivières supported the citizens' committee of course.

Some epistolary exchanges

Photo: Daniel Sturgess/Unsplash