Riding Shotgun: A Tour of Kanesatake’s Secret Dumpsites

George* smiled when I noticed the shotgun on his lap.

“Don’t worry, I’m a licensed carrier,” he said. “There’s some bad dudes involved in this, you know? I’m not taking any chances.”

I sat there and nodded while my mind tried, in vain, to process the sight of a pump-action shotgun under the steering wheel.

“Plus it isn’t even loaded,” he added.

In fact, the two shotgun shells George carried were filled with rubber pellets and rock salt. Not exactly lethal but punchy enough for a ride to the emergency room.

He casually placed the weapon in the back seat and we kept driving. Unless you’re hunting or en route to the shooting range, it’s illegal to transport a firearm in Canada. But this isn’t Canada, it’s Mohawk territory. And, out here, history has shown that you can’t expect justice from the cops.

So you make your own.

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George is trying to stop illegal dumping in Kanesatake, a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) settlement of about 2,000 people just a short drive northwest of Montreal. He took me on a tour of the dump sites last week, weaving his car into dirt roads and around gullies, stopping at a field of grey waste that sinks into the Lake of Two Mountains.

For months, George has investigated a scheme that’s seen thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil dumped throughout the Mohawk territory — taking down license plate numbers, recording cell phone videos and even confronting drivers over the contents of their trucks.

The biggest of the dump sites is a sprawling farmer’s field that houses an estimated 400,000 cubic meters of waste, according to provincial inspection reports. Water samples taken from a nearby creek found high levels of lead, zinc and pyrene, according to a 2020 Environment Quebec report obtained by The Rover.

In some landfills, the soil has been flattened by an excavator, piled 15 feet high, 20 feet wide and spread the length of a football field. Another site spills into a farmer’s crops and a nearby creek. The very worst sites make neighbouring homes smell rancid for days on end, according to two families who spoke to The Rover.

Those families — and whistleblowers like George — are the only reason we know about the ongoing environmental crisis in Mohawk territory.

There are no local cops in Kanesatake and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) are reluctant to stray too far off Route 344 when they patrol the territory. Although provincial conservation officers witnessed the dumping as recently as two weeks ago, they’ve done nothing to prevent it.

Instead, we depend on our sources inside the community to force the government’s hand.

In the four years since The Rover started covering this industrial-scale dumping, our Mohawk informants have put their safety at risk to document and get this story out. Some have been followed by the alleged ringleaders of the scheme and others were paid a visit by the same men after stories surfaced in the media.

Understandably, George did not want his real name published.
He says the extent and persistence of the scheme raises two questions: who is dumping on Mohawk land and why isn’t anyone stopping them?

“This is about the health and welfare of our community, our water table, the air we breathe,” said Victor Bonspille, grand chief of the Mohawk Council of Kanesatake. “It’s not just going to affect us. I also care about our neighbouring communities. We grew up with them, we have friends in those municipalities.

“Local farmers are losing income because of the dust, the toxins in the air are affecting their crops, it’s affecting the grazing area for their dairy cows, it’s putting their water supply at risk. This isn’t just an Indian problem, even though they’re allowing this to happen here because they see us as just a bunch of Indians.”

***

In less than six hours of tailing trucks last week, The Rover uncovered three construction sites in Laval and Montreal that haul loads of contaminated soil from the city onto privately owned land in Kanesatake.

Each time we followed a truck leaving Kanesatake, it crossed paths with at least a half dozen others on the way into the community.

Two of the job sites we observed are run by real estate developers Pentian and Clobracon, whose projects include the 303-unit Astoria complex in Chomedey and the Hyatt Place hotel at Trudeau International Airport.

The other site, outside an industrial building north of Highway 440, is run by Loracon — a Laval-based firm. Among Loracon’s biggest projects are the 197-unit Henri B tower in Cartierville, the extension of a strip mall on Montreal’s South Shore and Milwork, a 90,000-square-foot office building in Mile-Ex.

They use at least two excavation companies, GTM Construction and Nexus Construction, to do the dumping. And while these condo developers aren’t the ones unloading contaminated soil into the lake, they are ultimately responsible for how their refuse is disposed of.

None of these companies responded to The Rover’s repeated requests for comment.

Quebec law requires contractors to register any contaminated soil on their job sites into a database called Traces Québec. They’re supposed to test the soil, enter its chemical composition into the database and notify the government which provincially-sanctioned landfill or treatment centre is taking the refuse.

Once they unload the soil and pay a fee that usually ranges from $700 to $1,500, the landfill has to then enter that transaction into the database. The system can track any shipment in real-time. That is, of course, if contractors bother using it.

But given that there are no provincially-approved landfills in Kanesatake, none of the dumping is being recorded into Traces Québec.

Instead, when the truckers circumvent the law and go to Mohawk territory, they’re paying between $200 and $300 per load. A decent-sized excavation company could save over $10,000 per day by breaking the law.

So the trucks keep coming.

The illegal disposal of contaminated soil is so widespread that the team of engineers who built Traces Québec wrote to the province’s Environment Minister in the summer of 2022, demanding the government take action. Their warning fell on deaf ears.

After reports of the Kanesatake dump sites surfaced in The Rover and La Presse in early June, someone from Quebec’s Environment Ministry contacted the engineers and asked that they present a series of recommendations on how to enforce dumping laws.

They met on Tuesday and a source close to the environment minister said their chief recommendation — that cities withhold building permits until the contractor registers with Traces Québec — would mitigate the crisis significantly. Some feel this is too little too late.

“It’s a recommendation that was made two years ago and didn’t go anywhere,” said the source. “If the CAQ government moves forward with it now, is it because they genuinely care, or it’s because they’re embarrassed at how bad this looks?”

Last month, officers with the Environment Ministry and SQ accompanied two Kanesatake chiefs to one of the sites to try to get soil samples. The chiefs were literally fought off by the property’s owner as the police stood and watched.

No arrests were made and they couldn’t collect soil samples. When contacted by The Rover, the SQ promised to return with additional information on the attack. Three weeks later, they have not.

“In a non-Native community, this problem would have been taken care of right away,” said Bonspille, who has lobbied the provincial and federal governments for years on this file. “Because why? They don’t want another Oka Crisis? Come on, give me a break.”

To say that citizens in Kanesatake have exhausted all official channels would be an understatement.

Three years ago, I spoke to a mother who wrote to Canada’s Health Minister, detailing respiratory illness and nosebleeds she thought were related to the fumes from nearby dumpsites. She was told to contact the provincial government.

When she did, the province told her to get in touch with Marc Miller, who was Indigenous Services Minister at the time. Though Miller began the process that led to the feds investing $100 million to clean up Kanesatake, the mother never found out if the dump was making her family sick.

“It’s getting serious, we’re not going to just sit and be patient forever,” said one source, who pushed to have Green Party Leader Elizabeth May get involved in the file. “At this point, everything’s on the table. Warrior Society, direct action, you name it. If this doesn’t stop — and it’s killing our elders and killing our kids — something’s going to happen. We’ll handle it ourselves.”

To that end, George says about 40 people met under the pines at the Kanesatake baseball field earlier this month to discuss taking matters into their own hands. Among them were members of the Warrior Society from sister communities Kahnawake and Akwesasne.

“We’re concerned citizens looking for a nonviolent way to end this,” George said. “But if it doesn’t stop, people are going to start shooting out truck engines and slashing tires. Our people will physically block the road if we need to.”
 

***

Illegal dumping has been a reality of life in Mohawk territory for decades.

In interviews with two people who once accepted cash to store contaminated soil on their property, they say it was a way of getting out from under credit card debt or keeping up with their bills when times got tough.

“When your back is against the wall, you’re not thinking about 10 or 20 years down the road, you’re thinking about what you’re going to do when the next bill comes,” said one source, who has accepted refuse on their land. “At some point, you just have to feed your kids.”

Poverty in the community — and Indigenous poverty is one of the most consistent byproducts of settler colonialism — opened the door for unscrupulous contractors to fatten their profits.

“It’s not something anyone’s proud of, accepting that soil, but it wasn’t happening on an industrial level,” said George. “What’s happening now is destroying what’s left of our land.”

Things began to spiral out of control in 2015, when the Mohawk brothers Gary and Robert Gabriel opened a recycling centre on the edge of Kanesatake. Less than two years later, provincial inspectors found the “recycling centre” was little more than a dump.

The facility lacked a water treatment system and there was garbage piled well beyond the established boundaries of the site. In 2017, inspectors sanctioned the Gabriel brothers for storing 80,000 cubic meters of waste — three times what they were legally permitted to store.

But no matter how badly the Gabriels ran afoul of provincial law, it seemed all Quebec ever did was impose a minor fine and look the other way.

That became impossible in the summer of 2020, when the mountain of refuse began leaking black ooze into a neighbouring farmer’s field. By then, the dump had 15 times more waste than it was legally permitted to store. With 400,000 cubic meters of refuse on site, there was enough contaminated soil to fill 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

But even that didn’t result in punitive action from the provincial government.

It was only after an investigation by The Rover, The Eastern Door and Ricochet Media that Quebec finally pulled the Gabriel brothers’ license to run the recycling centre.

Government reports obtained by The Rover show Robert Gabriel taking an active role in cleaning the site up, paying for trucks to pump the black sludge from his property and reinforcing the land against future spills.

Gary, meanwhile, turned his attention to the territory’s burgeoning cannabis industry, opening the Green Room — a dispensary that grew to include slot machines, a nightclub and a gas station. It was also the site of a mafia-style killing that saw a hitman take out one of Montreal’s most notorious gang leaders in broad daylight during a July 1 party in 2021.

Witnesses say Gary was sharing a hookah pipe with the victim — Arsène Mompoint — when a man rolled up in a stolen car, walked over to the patio and put three bullets into the gang leader.

The killer remains at large.

While the Gabriel brothers have moved on from their dump, the mess they left is still rotting away in the sun. Last month, the federal government announced it will soon begin work on a $100 million plan to clean up the site. That plan does not include the 14 other dump sites in Kanesatake documented by The Rover.

One source who reached out earlier this week said that a sergeant in Quebec’s wildlife protection service emailed her last week to say that “an action plan is taking shape to resolve the situation.”

“I have myself witnessed (illegal dumping) from a number of companies,” the sergeant wrote to her, in an email.

“This was the first clear answer I had since I started asking the government questions on this file,” said the source, a non-Indigenous woman who lives near Kanesatake. “Before that, it was everyone just passing the buck. The province telling me to ask Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canada saying it’s Quebec’s jurisdiction. It’s a nightmare.”

***

Here’s a piece of irony that isn’t lost on the Mohawks who spoke to The Rover.

On Thursday — as dump trucks from settler communities around Kanesatake continued to pollute the territory — the federal government passed Canada’s first-ever environmental racism law. The law, called Bill C-226, requires Canada to study why so many Indigenous communities are the victims of industrial pollution and come up with a plan to tackle the problem.

Two years ago, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May — who sponsored the bill — told The Rover she was motivated, in part, by the environmental disaster in Kanesatake.

“There is no doubt that Canada has had a problem with environmental racism for decades, and taking action is now required,” May told reporters at a press conference this week.

“The only reason this is happening is because, to Quebec, we’re just Indians,” said Bonspille. “Maybe they don’t explicitly think of it that way but that’s what their actions show us. We matter less, our land matters less, our problems matter less.”

There was a time, in George’s younger years, when he might not have cared so much what happened to his community. Back then, he was mixed up with a tough crowd and masked his pain with drugs and alcohol.

He’s been sober for years and that clarity has put his priorities back in line. These days, he works two jobs and is proud that his family can count on him when they need someone to pitch in with childcare, an unexpected expense or any sort of problem that might come their way.

Today, his biggest priority is making sure that what’s left of Kanesatake — a once sprawling landmass that’s now about the size of a small Montreal borough — isn’t being poisoned.

“Our kids don’t deserve this,” he said, driving along a site near the high school. “We’ve been patient, we’ve tried working with all levels of government but it isn’t stopping. When you make it impossible for us to get answers, we’ll take care of the problem ourselves.”

Just then, George caught me looking back at the shotgun.

“It’s a last resort,” he said. “It won’t come to that. I hope.”