The Council of Canadians called on the federal government Tuesday to implement regulation of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Canada. The process, widely used for unconventional oil and gas recovery in western Canada, is linked to numerous human and environmental health threats and currently faces bans or moratoria in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador. 

“The next Oka in Canadian history is going to be in B.C. and it’s going to be about energy,” indigenous lawyer Caleb Behn said during a press conference in Ottawa addressing the fracking boom in northern British Columbia and other parts of western Canada. 

“I guarantee it. The writing is on the wall. It is just a question of when in my view. That is why the regulators need to step up.”

Behn, who is Eh Cho Dene and Dunne-Za from Treaty 8 Territory in northeastern B.C., and Dr. Kathleen Nolan, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, joined the Council of Canadians today in calling on the federal government to safeguard Canadians and their drinking water from the controversial method of releasing natural gas and oil trapped in rock-like shale.

“We need a national water policy that addresses threats to water such as fracking,” Emma Lui, water campaigner with the Council of Canadians, told the press conference this morning at Parliament’s Centre Block.

“With the upcoming federal election, the Council of Canadians hopes to see real federal leadership and commitments to protect our communities, health, water and our water sources from fracking,” she said.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves drilling underground wells 200 to 3,000 metres vertically and another 1,000 metres or more horizontally to penetrate the rock-like shale. Pressurized water mixed with hundreds of toxic substances (including benzene, hydrochloric acid, mercury and formaldehyde) is shot down the well to penetrate the rock and force natural gas or oil to the surface.

A single fracked well consumes anywhere between seven to 23 million litres of water. Poorly constructed or cracked concrete wells have led to the contamination of groundwater with fracking chemicals or methane, a main component of natural gas.

“There are roughly 200 chemicals used in fracking that we know about that have not been assessed by Health Canada or Environment Canada,” Lui explained.

“There is a rapidly emerging body of evidence that shows harms from this activity (fracking) at every stage of the process. With contamination of air, water and social,” Dr. Nolan said.

“People are getting sick.”

Headaches, disorientation, rashes, seizures and asthma are some of the immediate health impacts airborne contaminants from fracking operations can have on people living nearby, Nolan said.

“With water contamination there’s a lag time between the time the contaminants enter the water and then enters the person and then the person gets ill….it could take years or decades before the contaminants reach people,” she said.

“What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg and that the people who are sick now are basically our biomarkers.”

Behn fears his home territory, which is located in and around Fort Nelson, B.C., and which is at the centre of the Fractured Land documentary, will be destroyed if federal and provincial regulators do not take significant steps to determine the impact fracking operations have on local populations and the environment.

“Absence of proof of harm is not proof of the absence of harm,” Behn said.

A report commissioned and released by Environment Canada last year concluded the potential threat of fracking operations on groundwater “cannot be assessed because of a lack of scientific data and understanding."

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When the Suncor Energy Inc. plant in Port Moody, BC, spilled 225 barrels of R100 biodiesel fuel, Suncor spokespeople couldn’t answer what was arguably the most pressing question: how will the spill affect the environment? The substance spilled was odourless and colourless, and most of it stayed on land at the Suncor plant while a small amount hit the waters of the Burrard Inlet.

While emissions from biofuels may do less harm to the environment than those of conventional fuels, executive director of BC Sustainable Energy Association Nigel Protter cautions against jumping to the conclusion that biofuels are safer because it’s biodegradable. Just because a substance may be less toxic than conventional fuel, he says, doesn’t mean it should be treated as if it’s harmless.

“The carbon neutral footprint doesn’t mean the substance itself doesn’t have an impact on the things with which it comes in contact.”

The logic behind biofuels, Protter said, is that instead of burning carbon that has been tucked deep underground for millions of years—fossil fuels or what Protter refers to as epochal carbon—it burns matter whose carbon dioxide would have be released anyway when that organism died.

“Fuel burning in an engine is just a very rapid form of the same things that happens when any carbon-based biological creature or plant decomposes,” he said. Whether it’s a blade of grass that lasts a year or a tree that lasts a hundreds or more, eventually those things will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“That carbon is going in and out of the biosphere constantly,” Protter said, but added that the jury is still out on the long-term viability of biofuels, and in some cases, the evidence comes down against it.

The spill in Port Moody was small in the grand scheme of oil spills, but there are other, less direct environmental considerations to make when it comes to evaluating biofuels. Much of it is made from palm oil, a material that requires the clearing of large swaths of rainforest as well as the use of land that would otherwise be available for growing food, particularly in developing countries.

Kevin Ganshorn, a biologist with Ecofish Research Ltd., said there’s a reason the answer to question of environmental impact is hard to come by. It doesn’t fully exist yet. He said it’s extremely common for chemicals to be introduced into daily life with little assurance they’re safe for the environment.

“Every year there are hundreds if not thousands of new chemicals synthesized and being used for various applications with very little study done on the toxicity of the materials.” He said studies are typically far from comprehensive in scope.

“They’re generally limited to laboratory studies with one or two species and there are a lot of potential problems with that,” he said. Different species respond in different ways substances, and the specific ecosystems in which those substances appear also have an impact. “The toxicity of chemicals are often mediated by the condition under which animal or wildlife are exposed to it,” he said. “Local chemistry may reduce the toxic effect and sometimes it can increase it.”

He said that, for most chemicals, we generally know very little about the toxicity and yet continue to use them. The reasons for this gap in knowledge are the usual suspects and include time, money and the difficulty of tests.

“To be able to infer what will happen in the environment is something incredibly difficult to do and incredibly difficult to monitor,” he said. As a result, studies are generally limited as scientist work toward better ways of predicting toxicity in the environment.

“The original model they used was developed 20 years ago and there’s still debate about how effective it is,” Granshorn said, adding that he has been involved in reviewing an assessment model that could be used to test for toxicity associated with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline project.

He said it’s also common for the public at large to make assumptions about the safety of certain chemicals thanks to the connotations of certain buzzwords.

“Many products out there have bio or eco attached to their marketing, and it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something that will not have any harmful effects.” Consumers are learning to be skeptical of companies’ attempts at green washing household products like dish soap and printer paper. Why should people be any less critical of the labels on products used to make the big things run?

He echoed Protter’s sentiments regarding the word biodegradable and the false sense of security it can impart.

“Even if it is biodegradable, if it’s biodegradable and highly toxic, the biodegradable aspect becomes somewhat less relevant if there’s a large spill.”

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By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington. This post originally appeared in the Science Matters blog on the DSF website.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in 2010, killing 11 people and spewing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it cost more than $40 billion to mop up the mess. In Canada, an oil company would only be liable for only $30 million, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the rest.

That’s just one of a litany of flaws Canada’s environment commissioner identified with the government’s approach to environmental protection. According to environment and sustainable development commissioner Scott Vaughan, who released a final series of audits before stepping down, the federal government’s failure to protect the environment is putting Canadians’ health and economy at risk.

Vaughan says the government has no real plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and is not even on track to meet its own modest targets (already watered down from the widely accepted emission-levels baseline of 1990 to 2005). It is unprepared for tanker accidents and oil spills in coastal waters. It lacks regulations governing toxic chemicals used by the oil industry.

He noted the federal government does not even require the oil and gas industry to disclose chemicals it uses in fracking, which means there is no way to assess the risks. And despite the fact that Canada has committed to protecting 20 per cent of its oceans by 2020, we have less than one per cent protected now and are not likely to meet our goal within this century.

“We know that there is a boom in natural resources in this country and I think what we need now – given the gaps, given the problems we found – is a boom in environmental protection in this country as well,” Mr. Vaughan told the Globe and Mail. He added that not dealing with the risks will cause economic losses as well as damage to human health and the environment because it will cost more to clean up problems than prevent them.

Remember, this is not coming from a tree-hugging environmentalist but from the government’s own independent office of the auditor general. It should concern all Canadians. We have a beautiful country, blessed with a spectacular natural environment and a progressive, caring society. But we can’t take it for granted. Beijing was probably a nicer city when you could breathe the air without risking your life.

Often, the justification for failing to care for the environment is that it’s not economically feasible. It’s not a rational argument – after all, we can’t survive and be healthy ourselves if we degrade or destroy the air, water, soil and biodiversity that make it possible for us to live well. But Vaughan shows the folly of this way of thinking on a more basic level. Beyond the high costs of cleaning up after environmental contamination or disasters, he notes the government doesn’t even have a handle on some of the financial implications of its policies.

“The government does not know the actual cost of its support to the fossil fuel sector,” he reports, adding that it has no idea how much its sector-by-sector approach to greenhouse gas emissions will cost either, even though that was a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which the government bailed on, arguing it was too expensive.

The government has also steadfastly refused to consider putting a price on carbon, through a carbon tax and/or cap-and-trade, even though economists point to the ever-growing mountain of evidence that those are effective ways to reduce carbon emissions.

With an expected doubling of fracking wells, from 200,000 to 400,000, and tripling of tanker traffic off the West Coast, we can’t afford such a lax approach. Our prime minister has responded mostly with slogans and platitudes, but others in government say the issues will be addressed. For the sake of our country’s future, we must demand that they keep that promise and recognize the crucial role the environment commissioner has in analyzing Canada’s environmental practices and recommending improvements for environmental performance.

Given our government’s current record of ignoring scientific evidence and gutting environmental laws and programs, it will have to do a lot more to convince Canadians that it doesn’t see environmentalists and environmental regulation simply as impediments to fossil fuel development.

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