Thank you.
First of all, I want to start by thanking the Liberals and the Conservatives, all of the last governments, because they have created something for municipalities that we really appreciate, which is stable, predictable and long-term funding for water infrastructure.
I am with the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence cities initiative, which takes me to Ontario and to visit cities in the States. I see that they do not have this kind of funding. It is a lot harder for them, so I thank you for investing in our water infrastructure. Being responsible for water in the metropolis of Montreal, I can say “thank you”, but it's not enough.
I guess you know everyone always asks for more, but that is not the point here.
The reason I have come here is to talk to you about the technological innovations of the City of Montreal that we've done at the Jean-R. Marcotte sewer plant. Our sewer plant is the third-largest in the world. It filters 45% of our province's water.
When it was built in the 1980s, that plant was built to disinfect the water with chlorine. Even in the eighties, that was deemed a no go. You cannot do that. It is bad for our environment, so we had to figure out how else we were going to disinfect the water. In about 2005, we decided to do it with ozone—not with ultraviolet, but with ozone—because with ozone, once the system is built, we will be able to kill 99.9% of bacteria, 96% of viruses and 75% to 90% of emerging contaminants. That is huge. We are almost there.
You have to know that in 2009, when we sealed the agreement with the federal government to partner with us on this huge, beneficial project.... It's not really beneficial for Montreal, because it's at the tip of our island, but it is good for the St. Lawrence River and for all the cities that are downstream from us. We're doing this for the common good.
The government said it was going to give us $324 million. That was the deal. The project was estimated not too long ago to be $600 million.
There are huge challenges. We have to apply this new technology to ancient infrastructure. It's old. We have to do a retrofit. That was very hard. There were a lot of challenges. I will spare you everything we had to go through, but we are almost there. Certain parts still need to be connected. It will be functioning in a few years.
Right now, its estimated worth is $1 billion, and we only have $300 million. We only get 8¢ per dollar. Our municipalities have very little money, and we're doing this huge project.
This is to say we would like to see it capped. When we do a big, innovative project, maybe you could be our partner and re-evaluate the money you give in the long run. That is our first ask.
The second thing we do at the sewer plant is have four huge incinerators that burn 800 tonnes of pooh every day. We call it sludge. That is something that is done every day, and it creates 40% of the greenhouse gas effect for Montreal. That's 40% done by this. Now we have to change them. They're at their end of life.
We need to do studies for this. We need to study how we can change it. We know, as initial prefeasibility studies are saying, we could reduce this greenhouse gas effect to zero if we did biomethanization, which digests it and produces natural gas. However, we don't have millions of dollars to do this, and the government doesn't fund us to do this research. You fund us just when we do the project.
Cities cannot be in a deficit. We have only a limited operational budget. This is something we need.
People were talking about PFAS. We checked PFAS for Montreal, and we're at the limit. Let's say that the water all of a sudden becomes more concentrated because somebody takes our water away, or climate change...let's say the situation changes and we have too much PFAS in our water. It's almost impossible for the City of Montreal to invest in changing our filtration plant. Right now, we would need 45 tonnes of active carbon a day to take the PFAS out.
I'll say one last thing: It's better not to pollute than to make cities pay to depollute, because it's a huge cost. We spent $700 million in investment in infrastructure. We would need to spend $1.2 billion for the next 10 years and we do not have it.
Thank you.