Organizer Patricia Leger addressing the information session in Memramcook on Monday night. Photo: Meredith Fisher

About 60 people attended an information session in Memramcook Monday evening to hear about the environmental implications of the proposed 500 MW gas/diesel plant near Centre Village on the Chignecto Isthmus.

“I felt pretty excited that the whole issue was moving beyond Tantramar,” Patricia Leger, who organized and moderated the session, said Wednesday during an interview with Warktimes.

“We in Memramcook are only 20 kilometres away,” she added, “so it feels very close.”

Leger pointed out that the poster for the French-language meeting asked: “Pourquoi Memramcook Doit S’Inquiéter?” indicating why Memramcook should be concerned.

“I think a lot of people in Memramcook don’t even know that it will affect them,” she said, adding that Mayor Maxime Bourgeois and several local councillors attended the session.

She said the mayor asked about the potential effects on the underground aquifers that feed water supplies in the village and the areas around it, an especially sensitive issue after a summer of extreme drought.

The municipal council was so concerned about people’s wells running dry, it announced a program to pay up to $1,000 per household for water deliveries to their homes.

Memramcook offered a similar program during a drought in 2020.

In an  e-mail to Warktimes, Bourgeois said he doesn’t know enough yet to comment on the proposed gas plant project.

“I am certain that we will have the chance to discuss the matter in the near future,” he added.

For her part, Patricia Leger says the gas plant project would affect people in the whole region including in the predominantly French-speaking municipality of Cap-Acadie on the Northumberland Strait.

She added that NB Power should be answering people’s environmental questions rather than leaving it up to the American company PROENERGY, which is current seeking environmental approvals from the province.

“To me this is so ludicrous because it’s like the company that stands to make money off of this is going to tell us about the negative impacts. They’re not. We need answers from NB Power.”

She said she sees parallels to the fight against shale gas exploration in 2013 that led to a moratorium on fracking.

“The camaraderie that happened all over the province during the shale gas movement is what we need here too because people have eco-anxiety ahead of time, but now with it coming so close, it’s very stressful, so we really need to work together and support each other,” Leger said.

Health effects

Retired family doctor Renée Turcotte. Photo: Le Moniteur Acadien

Renée Turcotte, chair and founder of the New Brunswick committee of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE NB) warned about the severe health and environmental effects of gas plants during the meeting in Memramcook on Monday.

She repeated her concerns about the lethal effects of air pollution during an interview with Warktimes the next day.

“It has been proven that fossil fuels are dangerous for health,” she said, “and that air pollution is killing 15,000 people in Canada each year.”

The retired family doctor also referred to the warming effects of burning fossil fuels.

“We know that the heat is killing people,” she said. “During the heat dome in British Columbia in 2021, 619 people died. So that’s another concern.”

Turcotte said that gas plants have been shown to increase health-care costs.

“The Americans know that the plants cause a lot of health effects and they come to pollute our province.,” she said. “We are an area to be sacrificed.”

At the same time, she expressed hope that the proposed gas/diesel plant near Centre Village can be stopped just as fracking was stopped.

“I’m sure a lot of people understand the problem,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to stop it. And if we are able to convince our government of the dangers and the costs, we’ll be able to stop it.

“The more people we keep informed,” Turcotte added, “and the more pcople can come to these meetings and be informed, the better it will be.”

During the meeting,  Juliette Bulmer one of the organizers of the Stop the Tantramar Gas Plant Group and Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton also expressed their opposition to the proposed project.

The four speakers at the Memramcook information session, L-R: Dr. Renée Turcotte, Patricia Leger, Juliette Bulmer, MLA Megan Mitton. They are holding postcards addressed to Premier Holt. About 60 people sent messages to Holt about the proposed gas plant.  Photo: Daniel Beaudry