Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
The Montreal Island city of Côte Saint-Luc has some of the worst tap water in the province, according to testing results for lead released through access to information legislation. The test results, compiled by Quebec’s Environment Ministry, show that 46 tap water samples from the Montreal Island city of 30,000 people had more than 10 parts per billion (ppb) of lead over a four-year period from 2015 to 2018.
Thousands of Quebecers could be getting misleading information about lead contamination in the water coming out of their taps because the province uses a sampling method that underestimates the true level of exposure, Global News has found through surveys and 84 tests of residential drinking water conducted in five cities across the province. The revelations are based on a collaborative investigation by a team of two dozen journalists from Concordia University’s Institute for Investigative Journalism, Global News and Le Devoir. The journalists fanned out across the province to knock on hundreds of doors, taking water samples for testing that revealed lead levels often higher than city workers had told residents.
