Quebec’s environment minister has acknowledged the government changed its rules before approving the building of an electric battery plant and says an evaluation by Quebec’s environmental watchdog would have sent Northvolt and its $7-billion project elsewhere.
Experts say this lack of transparency is hurting public trust in the province.
“It’s not a good look for the government to be tweaking the rules,” said Mark Purdon, the chair in decarbonization at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).
“It does suggest that there was some fiddling with regulations to let this project go through.”
Last February, the province increased the cathodes threshold to trigger an independent environmental
