MONTREAL — As planned, at least, the Northvolt battery production plant in Quebec is something of a greentech miracle. If and when it reaches full capacity in 2028 as scheduled, Northvolt Six gigafactory will produce enough batteries every year to power one million electric vehicles. The $7-billion plant will also recycle batteries—a crucial part of the EV battery circular economy. And how’s this for symbolism: a site that once produced dynamite and nitroglycerin from a coal-belching plant will now help power the trip towards a carbon-reduced future on a torrent of Quebec-made hydroelectric power.

Now, though, there are question marks around the Northvolt’s green-tinged plans, placed by an unlikely source: Quebec’s environmental movement. Last week, tree clearing on Northvolt’s 171-hectare site in McMasterville and Saint-Basile-le-Grand, about 30 kilometres east of Montreal, came to a halt after Quebec environmental group Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement (CQDE) and three citizens requested an injunction. 

Northvolt’s gigafactory, the group argued, will damage a crucial ecosystem and threaten the survival of several vulnerable species. The injunction bid failed—a Quebec Superior Court justice ruled on Friday that the province had acted reasonably in clearing the legal path for the project.

But by then opposition was snowballing. The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, whose community south of Montreal has opposed pipelines in the past, filed a suit demanding consultation over the project with federal and provincial governments, and said it plans to challenge Quebec’s laws around wetlands. More disturbingly, back at the site, an anarchist group spiked an undetermined number of trees to stymie their felling—a form of sabotage long deployed against pipeline expansions and logging operations. 

Call it green versus greentech. In the rush to build the infrastructure necessary for carbon reduction, governments and industry around the world increasingly find themselves at odds with the environmental movement. Whether it’s lithium mining in the U.S., graphite mining in Sweden, cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or a battery plant in Hungary, eco-activists are questioning the present-day fallout of building our allegedly green future. 

The common theme of their arguments: governments are so heavily invested in these projects they’re willing to run roughshod over their own environmental laws to get the job done. In the case of the Northvolt plant in Quebec, the argument is pretty damned compelling.

Shortly after it was announced in the fall of 2023, Quebec Premier François Legault called the plant “the most important industrial project in Quebec’s history.” While he might be guilty of hyperbole (the Robert-Bourassa dam, the province’s largest, would like a word), Northvolt ticked a lengthy column of governmental boxes. 

By choosing Quebec, the company became a bold-faced name in the province’s push to both produce EV batteries and extract the critical minerals they encase. It promised to employ 3,000 people in a place that, coincidentally or not, voted overwhelmingly for Legault’s party in the last two elections. The province beat out dozens of other potential sites, including in the U.S. Finally, the project was huge—the biggest private investment in Quebec’s history, according to the company. Quebec and the federal government each kicked in about $1.3 billion to Northvolt’s $4.3 billion.

There was just one snag. Because it would produce more than 50,000 tonnes of cathodes, the company was subject to an extensive environmental review known as a BAPE, which includes public consultations. Mysteriously, and with little notice until Radio-Canada dug it up last September, the government raised that threshold to 60,000 shortly before Northvolt bought the property, which was just shy of the company’s planned production of 56,000 tonnes of cathodes. One part of the project would still face a BAPE process, but only once the factory is operational. For the province’s purposes, the last box was checked.

CQDE lawyer Marc Bishai was circumspect when I asked him if he thought the government moved the legislative goalposts to accommodate Northvolt. “This is a question that deserves full attention,” he said the day before the court decision came down. 

The chronology the group presented in its request speaks for itself, though. A few months before Northvolt purchased the site, Quebec’s environment ministry denied a proposal for a housing development on it, citing deleterious impacts on wetlands and wildlife. Yet a few months later, the government approved Northvolt’s application even though it would bulldoze nearly double the amount of wetland than the earlier project. (Environment Minister Benoit Charette didn’t respond to my interview request, and the ministry refused to comment.)

The case has put the environmental movement in an awkward spot. Every group from the David Suzuki Foundation to Equiterre, the Montreal-based shop co-founded by current federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, has touted EVs as crucial to solving the climate crisis. Many, the Suzuki Foundation included, have advocated for accelerated EV sales targets that, arguably, make fast-tracking battery plants like Northvolt necessary, environmental reviews be damned. 

Yet the Suzuki Foundation, Equiterre and 11 other environmental groups have signed a petition demanding that the government hold Northvolt to an independent environmental review. Some might call this cognitive dissonance. Others might prefer the word “hypocrisy.”

Whatever you call it, the pushback has piqued the ire of Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon. “Let’s just say I’ve had discussions, and people were pretty clearly asking, ‘Are we welcome in Quebec?’” Fitzgibbon told Quebec radioman Paul Arcand recently. This is a familiar spiel from Fitzgibbon, the elbows-first minister tasked with bringing Big EV to the province. But it dripped with an unsettling undertone: don’t question the government, especially in court, because questioning the government is bad for business.

Though the injunction failed, it isn’t necessarily business as usual for Northvolt and the Quebec government. The Mohawk Council lawsuit is still on the horizon, while the CDQE says it is considering another injunction request to cease work on the site. And if history is any indication, groups who spike trees in the name of the environment don’t cower in the face of an unfavourable court decision. Often, they do just the opposite.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”