La tourbière qui se souvient

A broad file, not a legend.

The broadest portrait that open sources allow us to write in 2026: the people, the peat bog, the surrounding water territories, the species. The thickness is over time. Nothing is invented to fill a silence.

A flat country, between river and mountain.

Blainville is a city in the Lower Laurentians, on the north shore of Montreal, in the MRC (regional county municipality) de Thérèse-De Blainville (Thérèse-De Blainville regional county municipality) and the Metropolitan Community of Montreal. It is located around 45°40′ north latitude and 73°53′ west longitude. Area: approximately 55 km². Population: 59,819 inhabitants at the 2021 census; 61,114 in 2024, according to the current encyclopedic record. Kind: Blainvillois, Blainvilloise. Mayor in 2026: Liza Poulin.

It’s not yet the mountain. This is the plain of the St. Lawrence Lowlands: marine clays, almost zero slope, water that does not find its slope. The Rivière aux Chiens, a tributary of the Rivière des Mille Îles, borders the south of the city. To the north and east, the wooded area continues towards Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines. To the west: Boisbriand, Sainte-Thérèse, then Saint-Eustache, Lac des Deux Montagnes, Oka and Kanehsatà:ke. To the south, on the other side of the river: Laval, Île Jésus.

Source: Environment page of the Ville de Blainville (City of Blainville). Woodlands and wetlands partly overlap: a wooded peat bog can count in both.

Before names, there was a sea.

The bog was not “always there”. It is the last state of a hollow left by the ice, then by the sea, then by a lake.

The ministry writes that, in addition to habitat, hydrological regulation, sediment capture, screening against wind and sun, and the landscape, “one of the important ecological functions to preserve is that of a carbon sink”. He adds that the planned activities threaten the sustainability of adjacent wetlands: hydrology, plant and microbial communities, water chemistry, soil quality. A specialist cited by Le Devoir recalls that visible degradation is very difficult to reverse, and that the disappearance of the complex could release the already sequestered carbon. The exact quantitative assessment of the tonnage of carbon stored in this complex is part of the independent environmental studies still to be investigated.

Several nations, the same country of water.

Two errors respond to each other. Assign the bog to a single people. Or start the story in 1683, with a lordship. A third would be to invent an oral story that no public source contains.

What “unassigned” means here

For the island of Montreal and the south of the Laurentians, there is no numbered treaty by which a nation ceded its title to the Crown, as in part of the West. The French lordships were granted without the consent that contemporary law would recognize. Kanien’kehá:ka traditional authorities maintain that their traditional territory was never ceded. The press, for the Kahnawà:ke nation, describes it as extending from the St. Lawrence Valley to the Adirondacks and northern New York State, including the Montreal region. McGill University, in its territorial recognition, names the Kanien’kehá:ka guardians of the lands and waters of Tiohtià:ke. An educational document from UQTR places the south of the Laurentians in the Kanien’kehá:ka ancestral territory, and the Weskarini, an Anishinabe group, further north, in the Hautes-Laurentides.

No court judgment says: “the peat bog lot belongs to such and such a community”. The fact, historical and political, is simpler. This country was not ceded by treaty. Several nations have attachments to it that overlap in time. Making it an exclusive queue would be wrong.

Pronounce

These pronunciations are benchmarks for a French-speaking ear, not a linguistic transcription. The spelling varies: Kanien’kehá:ka, Kanien’kéha, Kanehsatà:ke, Kanesatake, Kannosonhkwe’ón:we.

An indigenous timeline of the country around

Understanding colonial archives and honoring indigenous memory.

Plants of the humid country, ancestral knowledge of the North-East

This table presents the ethnobotanical procession traditionally documented within several nations of the North-East for the species characteristic of these humid habitats:

Makigôtekw, the road that holds the whole country together.

The Mille Îles River is an outlet from Lac des Deux Montagnes, therefore from the Outaouais, to the Rivière des Prairies. Around 42 kilometers, a drop of around fifteen meters, around a hundred islands covering around 350 hectares. It forms the northern limit of Île Jésus. Without it, the peat bog is just a basin. With it, the Blainville wetland complex belongs to a living corridor, from Oka to Terrebonne.

In European sources, it was called the Saint-Jean River from the Relation of 1637, then the Jesus River, the La Chesnaye River, the Repentigny River, and Branch of the River Ottawa. The French name comes from “Mil Isles”, the archipelago between the lake and Terrebonne, fixed as the name of a watercourse in the 18th century. Boucault wrote “Milse Isle” in 1754. The Abenaki name, Makigôtekw, rakes river, is older than the seigneury. The "rakes" have been read as fisheries, or as the comb shape of channels between islands. Both readings remain glosses.

In 2016, La Revue de Terrebonne recalled an often cited figure: 99.9% of the Canadian population of American carmantine, a bank plant, is found along this watercourse. This is a widely publicized conservation fact. Before legal use, it remains to be re-verified in the official CDPNQ records.

Éco-Nature suggests that the Mille Îles River is home to more animal and plant species than Mont-Tremblant National Park. Mediation formula, not a statistical table reproduced here. The intuition holds: the wealth is in the islands, the seagrass beds and the riverside marshes, not in the altitude.

The soft soil protected the bog. A time.

The seigneury of Mille-Îles encompasses what will become Saint-Eustache, Bois-des-Filion, Lorraine, Rosemère, Boisbriand, Sainte-Thérèse and Blainville. The City writes that it was necessary to wait until the second half of the 18th century for the territory of Blainville to open up, very gradually, under the leadership of Marie-Thérèse de Blainville, daughter of Louis-Jean-Baptiste Céloron de Blainville, and her husband Jean-Marie Nolan Lamarque. The first inhabitant often cited, along the river, is Joseph Phillion, whose name moved towards Bois-des-Filion.

Why so late, when Montreal was founded in 1642? Because it’s not easy wheat growing land. Forest, clay, stagnant water, distance and, in the 17th century, military insecurity. Peatlands are the last plots that agriculture desires. You don't plow a carpet of sphagnum moss. We bypass it, we drain it if we can, we despise it.

The name of the city does not come from an indigenous toponym. It comes from an officer, Jean-Baptiste Céloron de Blainville. Renaming does not erase the previous country. This only makes it unreadable on signs.

What we do with land deemed worthless.

The big turning point was not 1968. It was 1941. The federal government expropriated, in a few weeks, a huge piece of land in the parish to set up Plan Bouchard, a munitions filling complex. It is not an explosives factory in the strict sense, but an assembly workshop: tracer bullets, shells, bombs, mines, depth charges, torpedoes. Local sources speak of approximately 6,000 acres, some 339 buildings, and 6,000 to 8,000 workers. The Canadian Encyclopedia records 1939 and 6,000 employees. The numbers vary. The scale, no. A temporary industrial town grows in the damp woodland.

The war ended in 1945. The complex became Camp Bouchard, a depot and training camp, until around 1969 according to the encyclopedia. In 1981, the City acquired other federal acres and sold part of them to Stablex. Local heritage notices speak of 12 acres. The military site was decontaminated around 1995. This does not resolve the chemical story that begins next door.

There is a continuity, moral as well as administrative, between the seigneurial judgment (“useless for the plow”), the military judgment (“perfect for explosives, no one lives there”) and the industrial judgment (“site already disturbed, low value”). The BAPE and the studies commissioned by the company itself have cracked this latest judgment. They did not prevent it from becoming law.

The species, with their degree of proof.

Each sheet carries its degree of proof. A magnificent plant cited in a petition does not have the weight of a fish counted in a report submitted to the ministry. Both deserve to be named. Not in the same voice.

What the number “742 species” cannot carry

A citizen mobilization in April 2025 claims that 742 species have been listed in the cell 6 sector. The figure is circulating. There is no official total in the ministerial documents cited by the press. The solid public totals are other: nearly 200 birds in the sector, 132 on the site in a report, nine fish mentioned in the sector, three species named in the catch correction, 97 hectares and more than 100 birds at Fauvel lakes, 92 species with status in the riverine refuge. A broad citizen inventory can be true without being quotable as a state figure. To reject it out of contempt, or to engrave it as truth, are two lazinesses.

Why is this living being “from the south” and “from the north” at the same time?

The peat bogs of the alluvial plain, like those of Lanoraie further east on the north shore, are refuges: they keep northern plants (dwarf birch, low willows) and southern plants (Virginia woodwardie) far from the heart of their area. Blainville is in the same natural province. This is why a suburban peat bog can contain flora that you would think were boreal, next to a highway. The comparison with the Tourbières-de-Lanoraie ecological reserve is the best mirror available: same family of environments, real protection there, industrial file here.

The country does not stop at the city sign.

2023–2026: the peat bog enters history through injury.

The government's position, to be fair, can be summed up in three sentences. Quebec would need a capacity to bury stabilized hazardous materials, with cell 5 approaching its end. The land belonging to the City would, according to the minister, already be industrial. The special law would avoid a “break in service”. The position of the studies, including those of the ministry and the company's agent, is based on three others. There is peat bog on and around the lot. It is exceptional on the scale of the Lowlands. Destroying it or drying it out is not reversible on the scale of a human life, or even several.

Knowledge and data to deepen together.

A program, if anyone wants to continue

Where does each floor come from?

Research stopped on September 25, 2026. Open sources, in French and English. The PDFs of the environmental register and the BAPE vault are cited by the public extracts and by the articles which reproduce them. They have not all been reread page by page.

• Ville de Blainville, pages History, Environment, Blainville tells. Concession of 1683, city status on June 29, 1968, 19.2 km² of wooded areas, 9.86 km² of wetlands, peat bogs “which could date back almost 6,000 years”.
• Statistics Canada, 2021 census, Blainville subdivision: 59,819 inhabitants, 54.97 km² of land area in the file consulted.
• Le Devoir, Alexandre Shields, March to April 2025, notably the articles of March 19, March 28, April 2, April 3 and April 8, 2025, on wetlands, fish, birds, the ministerial report and the 6,000-year-old peat bog. Article from June 12, 2026 on metals in citizen samples.
• Ministry of the Environment, environmental analysis report and expert opinion of June 2024, file 3211-21-014, cited by Le Devoir. 622.7 ha complex, high ecological value, Lowlands Atlas, carbon sink, 15-year monitoring.
• Englobe, 2023-2024 characterizations filed for Stablex, cited by Le Devoir and the register: 278,046 m² of wetlands including 97,237 m² of peat bogs; high ecological functions; potential habitats for woodwardie, follicle sedge, Virginia St. John's wort.
• Correction to the file, environmental register, document 3211-21-014-13: catches of fathead minnow (49), mud umbre (4), five-spined stickleback (1); no brook trout.
• BAPE, report 371, investigation into cell 6, submitted in September 2023. Recommendation not to authorize; fragmentation of a corridor between two exceptional complexes. Vault of BAPE.
• La Presse, Valérie Simard, July 3, 2026, “Protection of a peat bog in Blainville. A teenager's fight at the UN.
• Les As de l’info, July 17, 2026, interview with William Guindon; four-toed salamander and bobolink.
• Radio-Canada / RCI, 2016, Fauvel lakes, four-toed salamander, chimney swift. Echo of the North Shore, 2014 cleanup. Hydro-Québec Foundation and Nature-Action Québec, 2017 inauguration.
• Stories from home / Virtual museum, Prairie and Thousand Islands rivers: Dalmas 1674, Algonquin cabin, artifacts.
• Wikiworld and toponymic notices, Mille Îles River: Makigôtekw, artifacts estimated from 3000 BCE to 1000, to be treated as secondary synthesis.
• Wikipedia and municipal notices of Oka; pages on Kanesatake and the 1990 crisis; Kahnawake, claim to the seigneury of Sault-Saint-Louis and unceded traditional territory, Radio-Canada Indigenous Spaces, 2021.
• McGill, Indigenous Initiatives, recognition of Tiohtià:ke. UQTR, educational document Laurentides 2025, Weskarini and Kanien’kehá:ka ancestral territory to the south.
• Tourism Basses-Laurentides, pages on Kanehsatà:ke. Politics of Tioweró:ton, Kahnawà:ke.
• 1837.qc.ca and chronologies of the Patriots: march of November 30, 1837 towards Oka, expedition towards Kahnawà:ke, battle of Saint-Eustache on December 14.
• Rivière-des-Mille-Îles Wildlife Refuge, Wikipedia and Éco-Nature; DFO advice on critical habitat for the copper redhorse.
• Tourbières-de-Lanoraie ecological reserve, file MELCCFP (Québec Ministry of the Environment, the Fight against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks), as a protected analogue.
• Payette and Rochefort (dir.), Ecology of Quebec-Labrador peatlands, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2001. Occhietti and Richard, 2003, chronology of the Champlain Sea. Archéo-Québec, prehistory of Quebec. Marie-Victorin, Flore laurentienne, 1935, for the name of the Hochelaga archipelago.
• Change.org and citizen pages of the Grande Tourbière: lists of species, to be read as reports, not as a certified inventory. The figure of 742 species remains unverified.
• Waymarking and local heritage notices on the Bouchard Plan: useful for the scale of the military complex, to be cross-checked with federal archives before specific historical use.
• Édith Mora Castelan, direct details on traditional Kanien'kehá:ka governance, the fundamental distinction between the Longhouse (Clan Mothers, Kanonsonnkweonkwe / Kannosonhkwe'ón:we) and the band system imposed by the Indian Act, and explanatory webinar (video recording ↗). ↗