Campbell’s Bay

K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist

Pontiac’s council of mayors has rejected a request from Alleyn and Cawood for a pause to the MRC’s legal action to collect its unpaid 2024 municipal shares.

In January, a majority of mayors voted in favour of pursuing legal action against Alleyn and Cawood to recover its 2024 municipal shares, which the municipality refused to pay in protest of what it calls a “flawed evaluation process” that caused its shares to increase from over $112,000 in 2023 to over $289,000 the following year.
The MRC hired law firm Deveau Dufour Mottet Avocats to recover the amount owed in shares, plus an additional $35,000 in interest accrued during the year.

At the council’s March meeting last Wednesday night, Alleyn and Cawood pro-mayor Sidney Squitti tabled a resolution requesting legal proceedings be paused until the municipality receives word from Quebec’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MAMH) as to whether it will compensate the municipality for the $138,000 in shares it believes it was overcharged by the MRC last year.

The resolution was voted down by the mayors, with 13 voting against the motion and only mayors from Otter Lake, Thorne and Alleyn and Cawood supporting it. Mayors from Bryson and Fort Coulonge were absent.

Shawville mayor Bill McCleary asked Squitti if her municipality planned to pay the remainder of the amount owed, about $150,000.

“What our lawyer has proposed that we do is put the main balance into a trust with the courts until the case is settled,” Squitti responded.

Allumette Island mayor Corey Spence responded by saying that the $138,000 the municipality owes in shares is essential to the operation of the MRC.

“I think what the MRC could do in the interim to not affect their budget is take that money from the surplus,” Squitti said, noting she did not know how much longer the municipality would have to wait before receiving a formal response from MAMH.

Litchfield mayor Colleen Lariviere raised the issue of interest, saying that $35,000 in interest has already accrued, an amount that could grow the longer Alleyn and Cawood does not get an answer from municipal affairs.

“You want the MRC to put it on hold, but you have no idea how long it’s going to take, and in the meantime interest continues to build,” she said.

MRC Pontiac warden Jane Toller said after the meeting the mayors did not support the resolution because Alleyn and Cawood did not give a timeline when they would expect financial assistance from municipal affairs.

“I think they felt that the answers were not sufficient to be able to support pausing, because one of the biggest concerns was that [ . . . ] no time frame was given.”

Toller said there was also a feeling among the mayors that Alleyn and Cawood not paying its municipal shares could be precedent-setting, encouraging municipalities in the future to believe it is okay to not pay their shares.

Toller said she contacted Alleyn and Cawood mayor Carl Mayer and director general Isabelle Cardinal in December to ask if they would consider a partial payment, but was told the municipality would not do this.

“Their council had voted, under the advice of their lawyer, to pay nothing,” she said.

Cardinal said in an interview Friday that their lawyer’s advice was to keep the remainder of the money until they heard back from municipal affairs.

“What we had for advice is that before paying anything, we wanted to have a commitment from the MRC and we wanted to have communication with the MRC, which we are not having right now,” she said.

“We were hoping not to be in a situation where we pay a portion and then everything is forgotten about and they just expect us to pay the rest.”

Cardinal said while she was not surprised the resolution did not pass, she was disappointed, because if the municipality receives the money from the province, the entire legal action could be dropped.

She said there will be a meeting this week with MAMH as well as in-person meetings in April and June to discuss receiving aid for the amount they believe they were unfairly charged.

“If you compare the three last years of shares, you can see that there was something wrong that happened in 2024 and it doesn’t bear fruit, so that’s what we’re trying to prove,” she said.

Cardinal doesn’t believe there is a precedent for a municipality receiving assistance from municipal affairs in this fashion, but given the legislative change they have already been able to make at the MRC and provincial level, they are hopeful the answer will be a positive one.

“We’ve had some good communication with them, but I don’t know which way they’ll go,” she said.

Toller said she could not share any updates about the status or nature of the legal proceedings.

“I can’t comment on much, but at this point, our lawyer has been engaged.”

Recording, photography banned in council meetings

Mayors voted in favour of a new bylaw regarding the management of MRC council meetings, which will now forbid recording of meetings for everyone except the media.

The bylaw came from the Federation of Quebec Municipalities (FQM) as a response to an increasing number of public officials leaving their posts due to harassment and abuse.

Article 14 of the bylaw passed on Wednesday states, “It is forbidden to film and photograph inside the place where municipal council meetings are held, and the use of any photographic device, video camera, television camera, or other is prohibited.”

The draft bylaw was first tabled at the February meeting, and at that time did not include an exception for media, though one was written into the bylaw passed this month.

“This provision does not apply to journalists who are members of the press,” the article reads.

Other changes to council sittings include the addition of a second question period at the end of the public meeting. This period, now called ‘question and statement period,’ will last 10 minutes, unless the presiding officer extends it by up to 20 additional minutes.

“I thought question period was an awkward term. What right do we have to limit the public coming to one of our public meetings, and if they have a concern, and we tell them that they can only express it in a question?” said Toller.

The bylaw mandates the meeting’s agenda to be posted on the Monday before the public meeting, and all of the resolutions on the agenda to be read out in full at the meeting.

“When people are listening, they need to understand not just what is the topic, but what is the resolution? It will make the meetings a little longer, but I think it’s important to clarify that,” Toller said.

K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist

The MRC Pontiac’s council of mayors voted at its Feb. 19 sitting to pass two resolutions that will enable the MRC to move forward with its plans to create an AgriSaveur food transformation facility.

The first motion grants the MRC the power to sign a lease on a commercial kitchen for the AgriSaveur project, and the second to purchase equipment for the kitchen.

AgriSaveur, an MRC project aimed at supporting the development of the region’s agricultural industry, has three components: the Shawville abattoir, a boutique store located in the abattoir, and a commercial kitchen where producers will be able to transform their products and sell them directly to consumers.

The MRC’s economic development commissioner for agriculture, Shanna Armstrong, confirmed in an interview the day after the meeting that the three-year lease for the kitchen, located at 107 Rue West in Shawville, will begin Apr. 1 at a cost of $2,500 per month.

The space will be used as the hub of the AgriSaveur project’s transformation kitchen, where she said local producers can come to turn their ingredients into value-added products, or where people can do large-batch cooking, for example.

“There’s been a lot of interest from producers, like vegetable growers, [ . . . ] then the idea is they could bring it there and process it in larger quantities,” she said. “We’ve also had interest from bakers, [ . . . ] and then there’s also been some people from outside the Pontiac who’ve shown some interest as well.”

Armstrong said the kitchen is pretty much ready to go, and includes much of the equipment needed to begin operations, such as two commercial ovens, slicers, utensils and a smoker.

The second AgriSaveur motion passed Wednesday evening was for the purchase of the equipment, totalling $45,000.

“It’s ready to go, you could go in and start using it tomorrow,” she said, noting the MRC still has to apply for a permit from the province before it can start renting out the kitchen.

She said the facility will be for foods that contain 50 per cent or less meat, and that any food transformations of primarily meat-based recipes will be a service offered at the abattoir, which was purchased by the MRC as part of the AgriSaveur project last spring.

“They could have their sausage processed [ . . . ] there at the abattoir, but it will be the staff that are running the abattoir that would be providing that service.”

Armstrong hopes the facility will be available for public use by June. “Once we get the use of the building, there will be some little things we’ll have to do, [ . . . ] but we don’t envision very much work required.”

She said the MRC hasn’t yet determined the cost for members of the public to use the facility yet, but that she is expecting the it to range from $25 to $30 per hour. Anyone who wishes to use the facility must have food handling training.

“It’s a bit of an incubator to help [producers] grow and flourish, so part of that will be providing support, like getting the training lined up,” she said.

Also last week, THE EQUITY confirmed with several sources three members of the board of directors that formed to run the abattoir have stepped down from their positions.

“We’re still going ahead with the co-op,” said co-op vice-president Kyle Kidder, explaining the group is still waiting for a band saw and a meat grinder to arrive, and will soon begin hiring for the abattoir’s general manager position, among other jobs.

Armstrong, who on Wednesday was named as the MRC’s representative on the abattoir’s AgriSaveur co-op, said through attending meetings she learned that some members felt they had contributed all they could to the effort.

“These members felt that they had contributed all their expertise in the startup and early development of it,” she said. “Now they’re just going to take a step away and let others move forward in the next phase.”

Draft bylaw would ban photos, videos in council sittings

A new draft bylaw tabled by the council would, if passed at next month’s meeting, change the way the council sittings are managed.

The draft details rules for remote participation from mayors, management of question periods, and what kind of recording is permitted by the public during council meetings.

Article 14 of the draft bylaw suggests banning any filming or photographing inside the council room.

“It is forbidden to film and photograph inside the place where the municipal council sittings are held, and the use of any photographic device, video camera, television camera or other is prohibited,” the article reads.

MRC Pontiac warden Toller, who was not present at this month’s plenary meeting where this bylaw was discussed, said she did not know it would forbid photography, and that she would make sure to review it and consider reducing the ban to just videography. “I see a difference between taking a photograph and having a video,” she said.

There is no exemption for media written into the draft bylaw, but Toller said she believes the media should be able to take photos and would consider making an exception.

After a November council meeting where Toller asked a woman who had set up a tripod near the mayors’ table to stop filming, MRC director general Kim Lesage said in an email to THE EQUITY the MRC was working on a bylaw to control the conditions of recording during council sittings.

Lesage cited article 149.1 of chapter C-27.1 of the municipal code, which says the council may prohibit the recording of images or sounds if a video recording of the meeting is available online free of charge the working day following the meeting.

Toller, who cited the high number of elected officials, particularly in Quebec, who are stepping down from their positions due to increased harassment and threats from the public, said the bylaw came down from the Federation of Quebec Municipalities (FQM) and is intended to give the person presiding over the meeting more control.

“Some elected people have felt really threatened and abused, and I guess some are just saying, ‘Who needs this?’ So what they’re trying to do is add some decorum or rules to help the people that are leading the meeting have something to fall back on,” she said.

“It should be obvious if someone is causing a disturbance versus taking a picture of their kid being recognized.”

Regarding updates to the management of question period, article 17.1 of the draft bylaw also permits a second question period of up to 10 minutes at the end of the sitting if there are further questions addressed to the council.

Toller said having the question period before the meeting’s resolutions doesn’t allow question-askers to engage with the content of the meeting. “I think we should be encouraging that,” she said, of people asking questions.

The resolution to table a draft bylaw means that the bylaw won’t be officially voted on until next month, and tweaks can be made to the bylaw before that time.

“At our March plenary we have another opportunity to still fine-tune it,” she said. “It has to work for our council. It can’t be the cookie-cutter exactly what FQM has said we need to do.”

The next MRC council of mayors meeting will take place Mar. 19.

K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist

Representatives from Samonix, the company planning to build a land-based salmon farm in Litchield’s Pontiac Industrial Park, delivered project updates and addressed residents’ concerns at a public consultation hosted Thursday night at the Campbell’s Bay community centre.

A few dozen people were in attendance to hear from Samonix president Mathieu Farley, technical director Fred Brisco and senior director Rémi Bertrand on how the project might affect the surrounding environment, including the Ottawa River and the drinking water of residents living downstream of its proposed site.

Among those with concerns was Portage du Fort mayor Lynne Cameron. “Are we going to have to do additional water tests now?” she asked, noting the village’s water filtration plant is just downriver from the project’s proposed site.

“I hate to be negative on any type of new business or big project in the Pontiac, but not at the expense of our precious water,” she said in an interview.

Other attendees asked questions about the ethics of farming salmon in pools, the likelihood of possible pool breaches, and spin-off impacts of the farm on the local economy.

In a previous interview with THE EQUITY, Bertrand explained the company will raise the fish entirely indoors, in large pools of treated water that is drawn from the Ottawa River. A small water plant will sterilize and neutralize the water from the Ottawa River before it is used to fill the pools.

The facility will then use a method called the recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) which treats and recirculates 99 per cent of the water used to hold the fish. The remaining one per cent of wastewater that cannot be recirculated, largely fish feces, will be removed and treated through a process called biomethanization. 

The leftover liquid will be processed by a wastewater treatment plant, and then discharged into the Ottawa River as per the parameters set by the Ministry of Environment.

In response to the concerns raised, Brisco explained the project has met all provincial and federal environmental guidelines, and said the facility will release effluent back into the river gradually using a diluting machine at the end of a pipe that will end several metres from the edge of the river.

“Within the first 12 metres it is [ . . . ] diluted fivefold, and then if you go down to 70 metres and 120 metres it becomes undetectable,” he said.

“So if you guys are doing water treatment, it would have no impact on you whatsoever. Your intake is almost seven kilometres downriver from us, so there would definitely not be any impact there.”

“We will be monitoring our water quality in and out, every day, every hour,” added Farley, who said the health of the river water is also important to their business, which takes water from the river to be recirculated within the fish farm.

“We need it for the intake, and we need it for the outtake. Water quality is a major element of the business.”

In September, the Ottawa Riverkeeper’s director of science and policy Larissa Holman raised concerns about the salt levels in the fish farm’s wastewater, which would be released back into the Ottawa River.

The organization, dedicated to protecting the health of the Ottawa River, has spent several years studying the impact of road salt, and consequently chloride, on aquatic organisms.

“Chloride is toxic to aquatic environments [ . . . ] and can affect [organisms’] ability to breathe underwater and to reproduce,” she said, adding that the organization had met with Samonix to discuss these concerns.

Holman suggested Samonix would need to keep chloride levels under 120 mg/L of salt to respect guidelines developed by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment.

Brisco said the project has met all requirements from the province so far for chloride levels as well as other substances including phosphorus, ammonium-nitrogen, nitrates, and total suspended solids (TSS), emphasizing the roughly 2,300 cubic metres of water being released back into the river at times of peak production will be completely free of pathogens.

“The effluent is treated with ozone and UV rays,” he said. “Anything that is in our facility before going into the river is entirely sterilized at a high level, so there is no question that a pathogen that was in our facility would make its way into the river.”

Brisco said the company is still undergoing various environmental impact studies, and in order to get authorization from the provincial environment

“For the moment, it’s about environmental impacts, citizens’ concerns in terms of environmental impact, but after that there’s an extremely rigorous process from a technical point of view,” he said, adding that they will have to demonstrate the exact chemistry of the effluent.

More public consultations to come

The project is still waiting on a power hookup from Hydro-Québec as well as its authorization certificate from the province’s environment ministry.

The latter, Bertrand told THE EQUITY, will not arrive soon, as the province has now decided the project should be reviewed by Quebec’s public consultation bureau (BAPE), which wishes to hold additional consultations.

“By going through this new process, it adds probably about 12 months to our initial time schedule that we put forward,” he said. “We can do some work in parallel, but we do need to wait until we get any comments back before we can do final engineering.”

Bertrand added that in the meantime the company will continue to meet with stakeholders and build relationships with trucking companies and feed suppliers. He also said the company is exploring housing opportunities for eventual employees.

“If we go as expected and end up with 100 employees, there’s definitely going to be some housing requirements, because there’s already a shortage,” he said, adding that the company estimates to add another 500 construction jobs to the local economy.

Brisco provided information about the farm’s day-to-day operation, saying the facility will purchase fertilized salmon eggs from Iceland, hatch them, and grow the fish in five stages of increasingly larger tanks. Then, when the fish are fully grown, they will be gutted and prepared for shipping at an on-site transformation area.

Farley said once the company receives its environmental authorization it can begin working on the building plans, which will take about a year. “If things move the way we hope, we could start construction in the summer of 2027,” he said.

“It will take two years to build the facility,” he said, adding that the company would complete construction in the winter of 2029 and thus is likely about five years away from having its first fish.

“It’s a long project, it’s a big project, and if we have additional delays it will be a little later, but once we start we will be producing two million Atlantic salmon every year and sending them to the market.”

The project will have another public consultation as part of the BAPE process, but the exact date is unknown at this time.

K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist

A crowd of about 40 residents from across the MRC Pontiac were present at the monthly MRC council of mayors meeting in Campbell’s Bay on Wednesday night.

Some were there to express their frustrations around what many felt were unfair property evaluations, which were released in September, while others were there to once again urge action from the MRC on producing a new bylaw that would reconfigure the calculation of municipal shares.

In August, the 370% Evaluation Taskforce from Alleyn and Cawood presented a draft bylaw to the MRC which suggested the total elimination of the comparative factor as a way of calculating the amount each municipality owes to the MRC every year.

The task force was hoping the MRC would adopt its suggested bylaw, but neither the bylaw, nor an alternative version of it, has been tabled in either of the two council meetings that have taken place since then.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Alleyn and Cawood mayor Carl Mayer requested to add the proposed bylaw to the meeting’s agenda, but he was ultimately the only mayor on council to vote in favour of this amendment.

For context, the comparative factor is a number determined in the property valuation process. According to the MRC’s website, it is “established based on sales on the municipality’s territory during the previous year, compared with the value deposited during the first year of the triennial roll.”

The sale of over 120 vacant lots in Alleyn and Cawood in years two and three of that municipality’s triennial roll led to a high comparative factor of 3.7 last year, causing all property values, including those of full-time residents, to increase by as much as 370 per cent.

While the municipality changed its mill rate to reduce the impact of higher property evaluations on ratepayers’ wallets, it still had to pay municipal shares to the MRC based on the inflated comparative factor and therefore pay money it hadn’t collected in taxes. It’s this system that Alleyn and Cawood residents and elected officials are taking issue with.

On Wednesday, several fellow mayors expressed support for the residents’ desire to see this process changed, but ultimately said they were not ready to vote on the matter because they still lacked the information they needed to make a decision.

“The bylaw that was presented, there has to be so much more put into it so we know what we’re voting on,” said Litchfield mayor Colleen Larivière. “We want to make sure that what we’re doing is right. Patience and understanding is what we’re asking from you.”

In an interview with THE EQUITY on Friday, Allumette Island mayor Corey Spence also voiced his support for the residents.

“We do support them. We understand their pain, of course we do. We want to do something about it,” he said, noting that there are still certain guidelines that need to be followed.

“There’s only so much the MRC can do, because we get the laws from the province. So we have to work with the tools we have.”

Spence, who chairs the MRC’s budget committee, said they discussed the item at a recent meeting and have come up with a few different options for recalculating municipal shares.

He said the meetings have been going well, but they need to wait for approval from their legal counsel and from the ministry of housing before writing a bylaw.

“We’re working on ways to make sure it’s fair for everybody, and first we’ve got to make sure it’s legal.”
While Toller wouldn’t say what ideas have been discussed in the budget committee meetings, she noted there is some payment flexibility in other provinces, which she thinks is a good idea.

“You can give people a break by not expecting it all to be paid in the first year,” she said.

She also said the possibility of evaluating all 18 municipalities at the same time, instead of the staggered system that currently exists, is attractive.

Alleyn and Cawood director general Isabelle Cardinal said during Wednesday’s question period the municipality will be meeting with the province’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs and will discuss the possibility of changing the evaluation process at a provincial level.

“We put a big package together with what we think are the problems [ . . . ] and we also have solutions. We’re not just saying, ‘your system doesn’t work,’ we actually have solutions to present,” she said, adding that in their conversations the department agreed it was an outdated system.

“We’re not fighting for just Alleyn and Cawood, we’re doing this for all of us small municipalities.”

Toller said the budget committee will continue to look at solutions, but they will require two more meetings before a bylaw can be passed; first, a meeting where the motion for the bylaw would be tabled, and second, a meeting where the bylaw can be voted on by the council of mayors. She did not provide a timeframe by which they intend to have a bylaw.