Greenpeace dresses Mount Royal cross with banners

Six Greenpeace activists unfurled two banners on the foremost icon in Montreal's skyline, the Mount Royal cross, early Tuesday morning.

The action stems from Greenpeace's concerns with pulp and paper manufacturer Resolute Forest Products over its operations in the Boreal Forest. Resolute has its headquarters in Montreal.

Greenpeace's Quebec director Nicolas Mainville said the banners were meant to appear as "scales of justice."

"We want to re-establish the balance between the logging practices and the protection of our public forests," Mainville said.

Seth Kursman, Resolute's vice-president of communications, says the battle between the company and Greenpeace has continued for some time. He called today's protest just another step in Greenpeace's “outrageous, inaccurate and deceptive allegations against Resolute.”

He said the Boreal Forest has plenty of protected areas that are off-limits to the forestry industry. 

Mainville said Resolute's activities in the Boreal Forest in Quebec and Ontario were threatening caribou habitats and indigenous populations, and that the company had lost an important environmental certification recently.

Internationally recognized

Kursman said it was true the company had three of its forest management certificates temporarily suspended, and said a dispute between the Innu and Cree in Quebec was currently being handled by the province, but he maintained Resolute was environmentally and socially responsible.

“One-hundred per cent of our lands that we manage are certified to one or more internationally recognized certification regimes,” he said.

In November, a group of Greenpeace activists scaled the Biosphère in Montreal, affixing a banner to it demanding the release of the Arctic 30.

The Arctic 30 was a group of Greenpeace activists arrested in Russia after some members scaled an oil drilling platform in the Pechora Sea, in the Arctic Ocean.