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.
As the city of Montreal looks for solutions for its aging, leaky water infrastructure, Mayor Valérie Plante has made it clear that residential water meters are not an option. In theory, meters could be used to charge each household for consumption, thus encouraging people to use less and reduce the strain on a system that is essentially hemorrhaging drinking water.
A town near Quebec City declared a state of local emergency and other communities ordered preventive evacuations on Tuesday as torrential rain caused rivers across southern Quebec to burst free of their banks. By Tuesday, between 500 and 600 people were forced from their homes in Ste-Brigitte-de-Laval, where the mayor declared a state of emergency for the next 48 hours.
On the Beauchemin family farm in southern Quebec, the problem used to be too much water. But Raphaël Beauchemin says that over the years, his grandfather, father and uncles learned how to cope. Now, with the changing climate, he said, Fermes J.N. Beauchemin et Fils faces a new challenge: long dry periods in the summer. Beauchemin’s father, Ghislain Beauchemin, who has been bringing his children into the dairy and grain farming business for around 15 years, said there are still intense rains that sometimes bring 10 centimetres in 24 hours, but at other times the ground can be parched for two months.
During an unrelenting stretch of dry, hot weather last August, Rachel Mahannah and her husband spent two hours a day hauling water from their other farm a kilometre and a half away, to make sure their dairy cows didn't get dehydrated. The well on the dairy farm, 70 metres deep, had almost run dry. "That was the first kind of red flag that came up for us," said Mahannah, who co-owns Mahvhays dairy farm in Brigham, Que., about 75 kilometres southeast of Montreal.
