Former GM site in St. Catharines a lasting reminder of environmental damage from heavy industry

When Melinda Lortie became a mother, her perspective on much of her surrounding world shifted. 

“Motherhood really has made me mad at the world. I love my daughter more than anything in this world, there truly is nothing else that tops her importance to me. I love every part of being a mom. My anger stems from what's around us,” Lortie had told The Pointer in an interview.

“Chris and I have dedicated our lives to protecting this smart, thoughtful, inquisitive, beautiful child and the old GM site is like a monster looming behind us and I don’t know what that monster is capable of.” 

The former General Motors facility that stood for about a century near the middle of the city, now abandoned, has long been a source of environmental contamination. Dangerous chemicals could pose risks to the local community. For families like Lortie’s, it is more than a relic of industrial history—they fear it’s a constant, invisible threat to their health and well-being. 

The likely damage to their surrounding environment has been part of the mounting concern. 

An investigation by The Pointer—which included over two years of legal battles with the City of St. Catharines to obtain critical documents—has uncovered alarming details about the site’s environmental hazards.

General Motors, which owned the property from 1929 until the site was sold, opposed the release of these reports, arguing that doing so would breach confidentiality and cause reputational harm to the corporation. 

Despite the reports’ public relevance, the City sided with GM, citing concerns about the public’s ability to interpret technical data and the potential for unnecessary alarm. City officials argued that most residents wouldn't understand the complexities of the reports, which contained scientific acronyms, test results, and regulations that could confuse the average reader.

Critics, however, accuse the City of prioritizing the corporation's reputation over the rights of its citizens. Residents claim that City officials seemed to be minimizing the public’s right to know about the risks, and argue that withholding the information was a way to avoid stirring unnecessary concern.

In 2020, despite knowledge of these environmental concerns, the City rezoned the property for mixed-use residential-commercial redevelopment. The decision went forward even though environmental assessments from 2010 and 2012 had already flagged serious contamination, including toxic leaks of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), which are known carcinogens associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, liver damage, diabetes, and low birth weight.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), PCBs are long-lasting pollutants that remain in the environment for extended periods and can travel vast distances through air, water, and migratory species, often crossing international borders. These compounds accumulate in fatty tissues and become more concentrated as they move up the food chain, posing significant risks to top predators, including tuna, seals, polar bears, and humans.

Everyone in the world is likely to have PCB particles in their body.

(UNEP)

“It’s (PCBs) everywhere,” Brock University Professor of Biological Sciences Liette Vasseur told The Pointer in an interview. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are many other businesses with remnants of these chemicals. It’s everywhere, more than we think.”

PCBs were used “for a long time” in transformers and even sprayed on gravel roads to reduce dust. Traces of these chemicals were found in crops like broccoli in Quebec long before the cancer risks associated with them were understood, Vasseur explained.

The concern with these toxic chemicals, according to Vasseur, lies in their mobility. 

"Some chemicals are immobile, meaning they don’t move through the soil, while others like PCB—particularly those that are oil-based—can travel much more easily," she explains. "Their movement depends on various factors, such as the humic acid content in the soil and the soil's pH level."

For heavy metals, for instance, the pH plays a crucial role. "At a high pH, heavy metals aren’t easily absorbed by plants, making them less bioavailable. But at a lower pH, they become more bioavailable, and plants can take them up more readily," Vasseur adds.

PCBs aren’t the only hazardous chemicals found at the site. 

Other toxic chemicals which are “normal for the construction of cars” such as petroleum hydrocarbons, lead, benzene, cobalt, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were also detected at alarming levels—sometimes up to 1,100 times higher than the province’s water quality guidelines. 

Despite these concerns, the City moved forward with the redevelopment with the current levels of contamination remaining unclear.

Barrels sitting on site at the former GM plant in St. Catharines.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer)

In addition to the environmental assessments, the landowners—Bayshore Groups—were required to install a massive berm to contain rainwater and snowmelt, after it was revealed that toxic PCBs were leaking off the site. The berm was designed to channel contaminated water to a processing facility where it could be treated before being released back into the environment.

Despite these efforts, testing conducted by the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation, and Parks (MECP) in 2020 and 2021 revealed that surface water from the site had become highly contaminated upon contact with the site’s soil. The Ministry described this as a “continuous and significant leak” of PCBs migrating off-site. The findings were shared with city councillors in a public meeting in 2021, but no mention was made of the additional contaminants uncovered in the 2010 and 2012 assessments.

The Ministry of the Environment received these earlier studies in January 2020, but it remains unclear why those troubling findings were not more prominently discussed in the MECP’s reports.

This wasn’t the first time governments concealed critical information, private companies prioritized business over public safety, and residents were forced to take matters into their own hands to confront the harmful impact of industrial contamination on their health and the environment.

This was also not the first time a General Motors facility caused environmental havoc, only to wipe its hands clean and walk away, leaving the mess behind to be dealt with by others.

General Motors, Alcoa, and Reynolds Metals played a significant role in poisoning the Akwesasne community, part of the Mohawk Nation, spanning across Ontario, Quebec, and New York State, with their industrial activities. 

All three companies established power-hungry plants, including an aluminum casting foundry, where toxic substances like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were used as hydraulic fluids. PCBs were found to have contaminated the land, water, and air around the sites. 

Despite numerous violations and fines, including a $507,000 fine in the 1980s for illegal dumping by GM, the damage was far-reaching. 

The contamination has had long-term health impacts on the community, with residents now grappling with a higher incidence of cancer.

“The contamination is rarely contained to those sites. And depending on the substance can be highly mobile in water, soil, in the environment, and the atmosphere,” Environmental Defence’s senior program manager for toxics, Cassie Barker, said. “These people who certainly aren't responsible for contamination pay for it because of all of this transboundary movement of these substances.”

In Oshawa, where McLaughlin Motor Company—later known as GM—operated for decades, the company used trichloroethylene (TCE) as a degreaser in the 1950s, leading to widespread contamination of soil and groundwater. 

When the City acquired the land in 1985, it was clear that TCE contamination persisted, particularly under the neighbouring YMCA property, which was developed in 1998. Despite efforts to clean up the site, the contamination remained due to the YMCA’s deep basement, where TCE remained embedded in the soil and groundwater. Over the years, the city and developers took steps to address the issue, including excavating soil down to bedrock, injecting chemicals to break down TCE, and installing monitoring systems.

The cleanup process accelerated in the mid-2000s when the province imposed strict environmental requirements for a new courthouse and a proposed residential development. Contaminated soil was excavated to bedrock, and chemicals were injected to break down TCE. 

To prevent further contamination, the City installed underground barriers and a treatment system to capture and clean any remaining contaminated groundwater. These efforts, including a gravel trench and treatment facility, ensure the water is safely discharged into Oshawa Creek.

Vasseur explained that cleaning up PCBs and many other metals is often expensive, “can take quite a long time and in some cases, it's almost not possible.”

Although no single, well-established technology for PCB remediation has been developed, various methods have been explored by researchers worldwide. 

Some of the PCB removal methods.

(STUDY: Recent advances in PCB removal from historically contaminated environmental matrices)

A 2014 study found that electroremediation, pyrolysis, and incineration—thermal methods using heat—can remove more than 99 percent of PCBs from contaminated soils. Additionally, electrochemical methods for removing a type of PCB achieved similar levels of efficiency.

The problem, however, is that “there’s very little capacity” for PCB cleanups in Canada with only a few sites in the country licensed to process PCB-contaminated soils, Barker shared.

“It's a story of massive corporate irresponsibility,” she added.

In Canada, concerns about the potential hazards of PCBs emerged after their detection in the Great Lakes in 1966. It wasn't until 11 years later, in 1977, that growing environmental concerns prompted a North American ban on the manufacturing and importing of PCBs. However, the ban did not extend to PCBs that are already in use in electrical applications.

Under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which came into effect in 2004, countries must phase out PCB use in equipment by 2025 and manage PCB-contaminated waste by 2028. To date, 186 nations, including Canada, have ratified the treaty.

The Environmentally Sound Management of hazardous chemicals like PCBs plays a crucial role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

(UNEP)

A key piece of legislation enabling industries to evade accountability is Ontario’s Schedule 9 of Bill 132. Introduced by Prabmeet Sarkaria, then Associate Minister of Small Business and Red Tape Reduction, this law made it cheaper and easier for industries to pollute by capping fines at a maximum of $200,000 and eliminating daily penalties of $100,000.

This approach “runs exactly opposite to how to meaningfully hold polluters accountable,” Métis National Council senior policy advisor of conservation Kelsey Scarfone said in a statement.

In 2005, new regulations were introduced to increase the deterrence against polluting industries following a massive spill of 250,000 litres of volatile chemicals into the St. Clair River by Imperial Oil in Sarnia, Ontario.

“The contamination was so bad that it shut down drinking water intake systems in the surrounding community,” she said. “Imperial Oil was fined $300,000 for this contamination, but the impact that the pollution had on the surrounding ecosystem cannot be expressed in dollar amounts.”

Sarnia has been home to over 40 percent of Canada’s petrochemical industry and is one of the most severely polluted regions in the country. 

The Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the Chemical Valley face alarming levels of toxic air pollution, including benzene and sulfur dioxide which have been linked to elevated cancer risks, asthma—particularly in children—and other critical health problems. Benzene, a known carcinogen, has been detected in concentrations significantly higher than other parts of Ontario and even heavily industrialized areas in the United States. 

The pollution not only endangers health but also threatens the cultural identity of the Aamjiwnaang people. Their constitutionally protected Aboriginal and Treaty rights and their Anishinaabe way of life, rooted in their relationship with the land, are continuously undermined by industrial activity.

After years of witnessing the direct impacts of the fossil fuel industry, 29-year-old Beze Gray joined forces with Sophia Mathur to challenge Ontario government policies that have increased emissions in 2019, arguing they violate Charter rights designed to protect their safety.

“For me, this ties into my own personal responsibilities to my community,” they’d told The Pointer in a previous interview.

Similarly, for over 50 years, the people of Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) First Nation have borne the devastating consequences of mercury poisoning, recognized as one of Canada’s worst public health crises by Amnesty International. 

It originated in the 1960s when a paper mill in northern Ontario discharged over 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River system, contaminating the community's water. In the 1970s, the mill ceased using mercury in the 1970s but mercury levels in the river downstream remained alarmingly high in the years since.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Western Ontario revealed that while the wastewater from the Dryden mill no longer contains mercury, it still discharges sulphates and organic matter that exacerbate mercury contamination, and elevate the production of methylmercury, the most toxic form of mercury, in the Wabigoon River.

Map of the English–Wabigoon River system, spanning from Wabigoon Lake to Ball Lake near Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation.

(STUDY: Why the English–Wabigoon river system is still polluted by mercury 57 years after its contamination)

The study indicates that methylmercury levels in the river's fish—a dietary staple for the community—may be twice as high as they would be without the mill's discharge, thereby extending the community's prolonged exposure to this toxic pollutant.

The health impacts are staggering. It is estimated that 90 percent of the Grassy Narrows population suffers from some degree of mercury poisoning. The toxic effects span generations, as mercury is passed from mothers to their babies during pregnancy. This generational crisis has disproportionately affected Indigenous youth, who have taken a leading role in advocating for environmental justice and a healthy future for their community.

Dr. Elaine MacDonald, Program Director for Healthy Communities at the environmental law firm Ecojustice, acknowledges that while Grassy Narrows' long history of litigation may present some challenges and exceptions, the tools are available “for the provincial government to force polluters to clean up their sites.

Under Ontario’s Environmental Protection Act, the owner or controller of a spilled pollutant is responsible for cleaning it up. They must take all reasonable steps to prevent and eliminate the negative effects of the spill, including restoring the natural environment to its original state.

MacDonald believes, however, that governments often fail to act due to a “lack of political will.”

Successful remediation efforts, like those at the Deloro industrial site in Ontario, show that environmental cleanup is achievable when governments take decisive action. 

After 95 years of gold mining, mineral processing, and arsenic-based pesticide production, the site was severely contaminated with arsenic, cobalt, and nickel, generating an estimated 650,000 cubic meters of waste and releasing up to 3.5 tons of arsenic-rich leachates into nearby rivers annually. 

In 1979, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment took control of the site and implemented a comprehensive remediation plan, which included a collection system, treatment plant, excavation of contaminated materials, and capping of toxic tailings. 

Poplar trees planted on tailings area cover to support a recovering ecosystem.

(Government of Ontario)

By 1989, daily arsenic loadings had decreased from 35 kg to just 6.1 kg. Further studies of Moira Lake sediments in the region revealed the extent of the contamination and the positive effects of the cleanup.

Experts like MacDonald argue that such examples show how critical it is to strengthen enforcement and existing laws to ensure meaningful accountability.

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