The St. Lawrence should be the city’s greatest treasure. Montreal treats it like an open sewer. This is no geographic accident: it’s a decision.
There is one image that sums up the contradiction. An island-city, surrounded on all sides by fresh water —the St. Lawrence River, the rivière des Prairies, Lac Saint-Louis and Lac des Deux-Montagnes—, in the middle of July, in thirty-degree heat, and its residents with nowhere nearby to take a swim. To cool off in clean water, the average Montrealer has to get in a car and drive between thirty and ninety minutes to the far west end of the island. Whoever has no car does not swim. That simple, that unjust.
It bears saying without euphemism: the problem is not nature, it’s management. Montreal’s large treatment plant, the Jean-R. Marcotte, treats enormous volumes of water, but only with a primary physico-chemical process, without biological treatment and without any disinfection at all. The ozonation plant meant to fix this —promised some twenty years ago, budgeted in 2005 and planned back then for 2018— is still under construction in 2026 and, after a cost close to one billion dollars, will not enter service before the end of 2028. It is a method the industrialized world abandoned decades ago: when it comes to water, Canada’s second city operates by the standard of the last century.
And that backwardness has a chemical name. The Marcotte plant is the single largest emitter of heavy metals into all of Quebec’s waterways: it leads the discharges of lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, copper, zinc, manganese and cobalt, in addition to ammonia and phosphorus. These are not anecdotal traces: it is the number-one source of those toxins for the entire province, substances that do not dilute or disappear, but instead accumulate in the sediment, in the fish and, moving up the food chain, in bodies. Added to this are the overflows: every year, with each heavy rain or snowmelt, the combined sewer network saturates and dumps untreated water directly into the river, thousands of times. In 2015, the city went so far as to discharge eight billion litres of untreated wastewater into the St. Lawrence, over the course of a week, on the argument that the current would dilute it.
The bill for that neglect is paid by bodies. Sampling data from 2024 showed that forty percent of the measuring stations recorded water unfit for bathing. And here appears the line that a discourse analysis cannot ignore: the contamination is not homogeneous. The suitable water is concentrated in the wealthy west of the island; the centre and the east —the densest, poorest sectors, the ones hit hardest by urban heat islands— are precisely the ones left without relief. The three municipal projects that would have opened accessible urban swimming areas —in Lachine, at the Promenade Bellerive, at the plage de l’Est— were all abandoned. The map of access to water is, point by point, a map of inequality.
It will be said that cleaning up a river is a costly utopia. That is false, and one need only look outward to disprove it.
In July 2025, Paris reopened the Seine to public swimming for the first time since 1923 —more than a hundred years of prohibition—, following a decontamination of one billion four hundred million euros driven by the Olympic Games. Today, three free sites in the very heart of the city receive close to a thousand swimmers a day. Copenhagen did it earlier and without the Olympic alibi: in the nineties it undertook a cleanup of its industrial harbour that culminated in 2002 with the first harbour baths. Its architect put it better than any report: they showed that, with a clean harbour, instead of driving hours to reach the beaches, citizens could jump into clean water in the heart of the city. It is, word for word, Montreal’s contradiction, solved. Switzerland went even further: after a typhoid outbreak in 1963, it wrote high-standard water treatment into its law as early as 1971. Today in Basel people swim in the same Rhine that in 1986 turned red from a chemical spill.
But the example that dismantles the argument is not in the prosperous north. It’s in the south.
Chile —the country that the first-world imagination dismisses as “third-world”— reached, in 2012, coverage close to one hundred percent in urban wastewater treatment, most of it with biological activated-sludge technology. It went, in a single generation, from laggard to leader in Latin America, an achievement internationally recognized by the United Nations, the IDB and the OECD. Let the contrast be clear: a middle-income country, with less than half of Canada’s GDP per capita, treats almost all of its urban water with secondary treatment, while one of North America’s wealthiest metropolises still discharges its own barely screened. The Chilean model is no utopia —it was built on a privatization that carries its own tensions of tariffs and equity—, but the hard fact is incontestable. The word “third-world” does not describe Chile: it describes, with uncomfortable precision, Montreal’s water treatment.
And here lies the semiotic core of the matter. What does it mean for a city to turn its back on its own river? It means having turned the riverbank into a border instead of a threshold; having transformed a common good —water, coolness, the elemental right to immerse oneself— into a privilege conditioned on postal code and car. Other cities are renegotiating their social contract with water, giving back to people what industrialization took from them. Montreal, for now, keeps reading its abundance as a threat.
The island has all the water in the world. What it lacks is the decision to share it.
References
Fondation Rivières. (2023). Dans les coulisses de la station d’épuration des eaux usées de Montréal.
La Presse. (2024, December 14). Traitement des eaux usées de Montréal : 3,7 milliards à investir dans l’usine d’épuration.
Radio-Canada. (2015, November). Montréal : le déversement d’eaux usées terminé, les rejets de polluants continuent [analysis of the National Pollutant Release Inventory, Environment Canada; 2015 data].
Radio-Canada. (2025, July). Nager en eaux troubles : portrait de la qualité de l’eau du fleuve Saint-Laurent.
Fondation Rivières. (2022). Carte du potentiel de baignade à Montréal et Laval [abandoned swimming projects].
International Olympic Committee. (2025). The Seine reopens: how the Olympic Games helped Paris reclaim its river. Olympics.com.
Préfecture d’Île-de-France. (2025). Inauguration des premiers sites de baignade publique sécurisée en Seine.
Wonderful Copenhagen. (n.d.). The harbour in Copenhagen.
Swissinfo (SWI). (2024). Why today’s Swiss waterways are fit for swimming [Zermatt typhoid outbreak 1963; 1971 wastewater treatment law].
Superintendencia de Servicios Sanitarios (SISS). (2015). Informe de Gestión del Sector Sanitario 2014. Government of Chile.
SciELO Chile. (2023). Universalización de acceso a agua potable y alcantarillado en un país periférico: el caso chileno, c. 1880–2020.
World Bank. (2024). GDP per capita (current US$): Chile / Canada.
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