There are two things getting mixed up here.
In the summer of 2022, I informed the ministry of the environment that the concentration of PFAS in La Baie was abnormally high. This was not in the paper that had already been published. I knew that I would be working on a paper that would be published very shorty, but I wanted to inform the ministry, because this was a question of public health.
However, at that time, the quality criteria for PFAS in the United States and Health Canada's recommendations about this had not yet been released. So we were in a situation where a water system contained a higher concentration of these substances than the others, but we had no threshold for making comparisons and stating that this was a disaster.
However, that information was released in February and March 2023. Once Health Canada launched its consultation to seek comments on its recommended standard of 30 nanograms per litre, stating specifically that the United States recommended four nanograms per litre, it became apparent that we were looking at a site where the proposed standard had been exceeded.