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4 hours ago
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The proposed expansion of a Quebec landfill that accepts hazardous waste from the United States has ignited a turf war between the Quebec provincial government and local leaders, who say they oppose putting US trash into a local peat bog.
Local leaders are protesting the move – saying the state is capitulating to a US company in the midst of a tariff war between Canada and the United States.
For a year, the Montreal suburb of Blainville has been refusing to sell a piece of city-owned forest land to facilitate the expansion of Stablex, a US-owned company that treats and stores hazardous waste, including 33,000 tons exported from the US in 2023. Tech billionaire Bill Gates is listed as a stakeholder in the company.
Last week the Quebec minister of natural resources and forests introduced a bill to force the city to sell the land to allow the expansion to go forward, saying the waste site is about to run out of space and the government must act quickly to avoid a stoppage in hazardous waste disposal.
The company says it offers a safe way to dispose of toxic waste that could otherwise pollute the environment, but opposition leaders questioned whether Canada should be handling US waste.
“We are not the trash can of the United States,” Ruba Ghazal, an opposition member of Quebec’s parliament, said at a press conference. She said it is unacceptable for Quebec’s ruling conservative party to “expropriate a city to give it to Trump’s United States”.
The issue has gained attention following an investigation last month by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican investigative unit, which showed the United States ships more than a million tons of hazardous waste to Canada and Mexico each year.
Opposition to those waste exports is growing at a time when Canadians are actively registering their displeasure with the new administration of Donald Trump. Trump has imposed a 25% tariff on Canadian goods and talked about taking over Canada as “the 51st state”. Canadians have variously responded by boycotting pizza ingredients from the US and canceling their travel plans to their southern neighbor.
A coalition of environmental groups is calling for Canada to stop accepting US hazardous wastes altogether, saying the government of Canada “must take advantage of the current context of economic tension with our southern neighbours to take a strong stand and put an end to the MASSIVE import of hazardous waste from the United States”.
Municipal officials say their immediate concern is protecting about 165 acres (67 hectares) of peat bog and forest land, where Stablex is pushing to expand. They say the company can instead develop what they say is a less environmentally-sensitive site nearby, which is owned by the Quebec government and had previously been designated for the expansion.
“I can’t understand why the government wants to expropriate the land for the benefit of an American company, especially when we have an alternative solution,” Blainville mayor Liza Poulin said.
The landfill, run by Stablex, a subsidiary of the US giant garbage company Republic Services, has operated in the town of Blainville since 1983. In 2023 it received more than 5,000 tons of contaminated soils and sludges from the US, as well 28,000 tons of a variety of substances including cyanide, mercury and nitric acid, according to EPA records obtained through a freedom of information act request. It receives waste from Quebec and other Canadian provinces as well.
Quebec business registration records say that Gates has 25-50% of voting rights in Stablex. This is because his investment firm holds a large stake in Republic Services, Stablex’s parent company.
A spokesperson for Gates’s investment company declined to comment.
The company advertises that it permanently secures hazardous wastes for burial by “treating, stabilizing, and then binding them” before putting them “in a secure placement cell” and promises “to dispose of them permanently and without risk to the environment”.
Between 2018 and 2022, Stablex was the largest importer of hazardous waste to Quebec and the second largest importer of hazardous waste in Canada, according to an investigation published last week by Le Journal Quebec, which analyzed the data obtained by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab.
In a February letter to the Quebec premier, the CEO of Stablex said the Blainville site is on track to reach full capacity in 2027 and, unless the company can break ground on a new storage cell by April 2025, it risks facing a service disruption which could leave Quebec industry with nowhere to dispose of its waste.
“We cannot emphasize enough the seriousness of the situation,” wrote Stablex CEO Michel Perron. “We have seen in the past situations where materials have been disposed of illegally or in unauthorized locations.”
In response, Maïté Blanchette Vézina, Quebec’s minister of natural resources and forests, introduced a bill to force Blainville to sell its land for the expansion. She represents Quebec’s ruling party, which has sufficient votes to approve the bill.
Stablex says the city’s parcel of land is needed because the nearby Quebec-owned alternative site is too close to newly constructed neighborhoods and has clay deposits that would have to be removed, requiring 40,000 annual truck trips through the city’s streets each year for the two years of construction.
“The Quebec government conducted its own analyses and made its choice in the interest of the Quebec community,” said Maxime Couture, a spokesperson for the company. He said the proportion of hazardous materials coming to the site from the US has fallen from 43% in 2018 to 17% in 2024.
City officials noted that Quebec’s environmental watchdog agency released a report last year recommending against the expansion and questioning the company’s stabilization process, which it said was developed 50 years ago and has never been subjected to testing outside a laboratory.
An organization of municipal governments for the Montreal region has come out against the bill as well, saying that expropriating land from the city infringes upon local rights and runs counter to regional wildland preservation goals.
