Quebec music festival cancelled after band makes censorship accusation

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MONTREAL — A music festival in northwestern Quebec has been cancelled after a local band accused organizers of rescinding an invitation to perform because of its criticism of an arsenic-emitting copper smelter in the region.

The 2023 album for metal band Guhn Twei is called"Glencorruption" and is replete with lyrics that denounce the Horne Smelter and its owner, Switzerland-based Glencore. Lyrics to the title track refer to the company as"thieves in ties,""capitalist parasites" and"rapists of the planet."

Métal Marquis is asupplier of the Horne Smelter in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., located about 60 kilometres south of La Sarre, which in recent years has come under intense media and political scrutiny for arsenic emissions that Quebec had allowed to be 33 times the provincewide standard. In 2022 the province said it would permit the smelter to emit arsenic levels five times the norm.

"To censor a local artist whose cancer has cost him a leg, and who denounces the poisoning of his fellow citizens in his songs so as not to displease an ecocidal multinational is the complete antithesis of the punk movement," Turcotte wrote in a Facebook post on March 28. The organizers said they made the decision to end the festival without interference from sponsors."It was rather the imposing load on the shoulders of the three volunteer that prevented the staging of this family-friendly alternative music event," the release reads.

Horne Smelter spokesperson Cindy Caouette said Thursday the company had no involvement in the festival and was not familiar with Guhn Twei's criticism of the event. "It's the festival itself that's being criticized, though it's really the climate of fear that everyone seems to have in our cultural milieu in Abitibi in the face of the smelter."

 

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