Background

In April of 2003, at the invitation of the group I.C.I Environnement, the management of the Service des infrastructures, transport et environnement (SITE) of the City of Montreal participated in a meeting with the theme: Plan for the creation of the water centre in Montreal. This meeting brought together a number of public sector, academic and private sector interveners connected with the water domain.

At about the same time, SITE management, following up on a commitment made by the Mayor of the City of Montreal at the 2002 Montreal Summit, awarded the firm of Enviro-Accès inc. a contract to conduct a feasibility study aimed at establishing a centre of excellence for water in Montreal. In June of 2003, the Centre pour l’avancement des technologies environnementales, referred to as Enviro-Accès inc., submitted its final report to SITE management. The results of this study, which was conducted in the form of a questionnaire and interviews among 42 interveners, can be summarized as follows:

• What unites the participants: to make the “centre” a place to promote public awareness and to share information, to exercise vigilance, to showcase technology and to encourage dialogue on the use of water in all its forms;
• The most important consideration: to ensure that the “centre” does not duplicate the activities of existing interveners; for example, training or infrastructure R&D, or, like the Biosphere, animation and public awareness. Respondents suggest that, in order to achieve this, the term “excellence” not be used in any future reference to the “centre”, as this notion is generally reserved, among other things, for specialized domains like research and development;
• The desired objective: that the “centre”, which will foster cohesion among existing organizations and project a unified image of water-related expertise, have a basic structure;
• The hope: that financing for the “centre”, even with its basic structure, will be the principal concern of the participants, since the creation and operation of the “centre” will depend on it. If the public sector contributes, in whole or in part, to the operations of the “centre”, such contributions should never, at any time, compromise the funding of existing organizations;
• What the “centre” should be: above all, a place for dialogue and the exchange of ideas with respect to the activities of the various partners, a place to promote these activities, not only locally, but also nationally and internationally, and, finally, a place open to raising public awareness on the components of water in all its dimensions.

While these steps were being taken, the major actors in water treatment in Montreal (universities, equipment manufacturers, research centres, plant operators and service providers) gathered, in the spring of 2003, to set up a regional centre of excellence for research into water treatment technologies based on sustainable development. This group, called the Centre de recherche, de développement et de validation des technologies et procédés de traitement des eaux, or CREDEAU led by École Polytechnique de Montréal was founded in the spring of 2004.

In light of the final report of Enviro-Accès inc., SITE management developed a proposal, during 2004, for the creation of a water centre with the provisional name of Aqua Centrum, and, towards the end of that year, began the process of validating the project among numerous actors in the domain. In February of 2005, on learning that an approach similar to theirs was being undertaken, SITE management agreed with the management of I.C.I Environnement (an organization representing 14 Québec universities) to harmonize their plans with a view to more effectively uniting the forces active in the domain. In the fall of 2005, the first meeting was held, organized jointly by the City of Montréal and I.C.I Environnement, bringing together around twenty organizations from all areas of society working in the water domain. A few months later, Aqua Centrum, the Water Centre, was officially founded in Montreal.