Hailed as green energy source, northern Quebec lithium project divides Cree

Type the word "Nemaska" into a search engine and most results refer to Nemaska Lithium, the company that sought bankruptcy protection in 2019 before being partly bought out by the Quebec government's investment agency. The episode resulted in tens of thousands of small investors losing significant savings.

However, Nemaska is above all a Cree community in the heart of the boreal forest, more than 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. They share their territory with a wide variety of species, and caribou herds have long visited the area, drawn by its abundance of lichen.

These fragile ecosystems are home to a multitude of threatened species that will soon have to deal with new visitors: starting in 2025, approximately 15 heavy trucks a day will roar through these ancestral hunting grounds carrying the thousands of tonnes of ore that Nemaska Lithium plans to mine.

According to the promoters, the region contains some of the world's largest deposits of spodumene, a rock from which lithium — key to the energy transition and the electrification of transport networks — is extracted.

Nemaska Lithium describes itself as a corporation that "intends to facilitate access to green energy, for the benefit of humanity."

The Whabouchi open pit mine will be located about 30 kilometres from the village of Nemaska, in the watershed of the Rupert River, considered one of Quebec's ecological gems.

"If the water becomes contaminated by the mine, I don't see how we can limit the damage to the food chain," says Thomas Jolly, who was chief of Nemaska from 2015 to 2019, stressing the importance of fishing to his community.

Nemaska means "Place of Plentiful Fish," and that is what led the Cree to build their community here in 1979 after a proposed Hydro-Quebec dam project threatened to flood their ancestral village. (In the end, the Crown corporation chose to build its reservoirs elsewhere, and the flooding of Old Nemaska never occurred.)

"At the time, the Department of Indian Affairs wanted to impose another site on us, but it was partly a swamp so we chose to settle here instead, where it's dry, in a place where there is everything we need to hunt and fish," Jolly said in an interview in Nemaska.

Various other Hydro-Quebec projects have led to an increase in mercury levels in lakes and rivers near Nemaska, to the point where for some bodies of water, public health authorities recommend eating no more than two fish of certain species per month.

According to public health data, one of the waterways with the highest mercury levels is the Nemiscau River, which is also set to receive mine effluent from Nemaska Lithium.

"How much more contamination can these streams handle?" Jolly wonders.

He explains that history has taught him to be wary of the studies carried out the mining company on the environmental impacts of lithium extraction. "Hydro-Quebec said they didn't know [the mercury contamination] would happen," he says. "Come on!" 

The construction of the mine will cause the elimination of a lake and a stream in addition to modifying several other bodies of water.