‘It’s like there’s nobody who wants to take responsibility’

Quebec residents urge feds to address decades of erosion caused by large ships

Every year, 100-year-old Angélique Beauchemin watches more of her land crumble into the St. Lawrence River.

From her home along a busy stretch of river in Verchères, Que., on Montreal’s South Shore, she watches waves from passing ships crash into the rock wall at the base of her property, sweeping chunks away and eating into the unprotected banks from below.

The higher parts of her land, she said, are sinking an inch or two a year as they slope ever more steeply toward the river. While she’s not a scientist, she says her biggest fear is that one day there will be a landslide and the white house at the top of the hill where she’s lived for decades will tumble down.

“It could go completely,” she said. Despite her age, she made the steep hike down the slope to the river, wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, with the help of a cane. At the bottom, she pointed to places where the water has carved bays into the shore since her last visit.

“This is even worse than it was,” she said. “It’s not reassuring.”

Beauchemin says the area below the wall used to be a small sandy beach where people could swim. Now, she feels the rest of the rock wall — along with the remnants of the concrete sidewalk that used to allow residents to wander from town to town — will wash away before the end of the summer.

Beauchemin is part of a group of people who live in towns along Montreal’s South Shore who are urging the federal government to counter the effects of shoreline erosion that they say is affecting animals and vegetation and damaging their land. The culprits, they say, are the waves from the large ships that pass through the narrow stretch of the St. Lawrence, eating away at rock walls and pulling cloudy swirls of soil away.

Micheline Lagarde, the president of a committee of residents formed in 2019, pulls out old articles showing that the federal government built antierosion infrastructure along the river in the 1960s and 1970s. But the federal program that funded wall maintenance was eventually scaled back and eliminated entirely in 1997. The walls, she said, have been crumbling ever since.

In an interview in her kitchen overlooking the river, Lagarde said people feel “completely abandoned” in the face of ongoing property damage. “It’s like there’s nobody who wants to take responsibility,” she said.

Transport Canada said it is aware of erosion problems in the area and is following the issue with other partners. “In order to protect the banks, funds were granted by the federal government in the 1960s to build protective structures; this program has since ended,” it wrote.

Transport Canada said it has taken steps to reduce the impact of ship-generated waves, including issuing navigation notices based on water levels, monitoring ship speed and instituting voluntary speed reduction measures that came into effect in 2000.