Environment Canada scientist Phil Thomas recently texted me a photo of him working in the field. The image shows him gloved, crouched before a strip of bloodied flesh that is hanging from a thin rope. From the top of the creaturely thing protrudes a strange-looking tail.

“What IS this?” I texted back.

“Lmao,” he replied. “Trappers usually bring me their carcasses to skin … I skin them for them. They keep the hide, I keep the tissues. This is an otter … Or was an otter.”

The profundity of this interaction, while not apparent on its head, can’t be overstated.

Here I am, a journalist, chatting freely and casually via text message with a federal scientist about his work.

Two years ago Thomas and I were having what felt like cloak and dagger conversations, entirely off the record and at his occupational peril.

Back in Canada’s Harper days, before the “Great Unmuzzling,” it was next to impossible to conduct a real-deal interview with a federal scientist. The idea of having casual, on-the-record conversations that were entirely un-chaperoned seemed like a fairy tale.

Phil Thomas with what "was an otter." Photo provided by Phil Thomas.

In fact, after Thomas and I first connected in late 2012 about his work testing toxicity levels in fur-bearing mammals in the Alberta oilsands region, we secretly hatched a plan to beat the system.

In a series of confidential phone calls, Thomas coached me on how to approach Environment Canada communications staff and gave me advice for sending in technical questions only he could answer.

Our hope was that it would become clear that Thomas was the only expert who could answer my questions, and that my interview request would be granted.

How wrong we were.

Months after I submitted my interview request, it was officially denied. About one year and two Access to Information requests later, I learned the interview request was sent all the way up to the Privy Council Office and eventually denied at the ministerial level. You can read all about that story, and what the Access to Information documents revealed, here.

So now, well on the other side of a new government that has very different ideas about transparency, Thomas and I are free to talk and discuss his work like … two normal people.

Thomas said the massive change to federal science communications protocols is, strangely enough, hardly noticeable on the ground.

“People are happy they can speak to media, which is important, but in terms of our relationship with management or our work, nothing has really changed,” he said, saying the important research he was doing then, continues on.

“We’re out there doing work with the people.”

Thomas spearheaded a first-ever contaminants monitoring program to determine what effects industrial development, including mining and extraction in the Alberta oilsands, is having on fur-bearing mammals.

Phil Thomas at a makeshift lab in the field. Photo provided by Phil Thomas.

“Contaminants in furbearers have never been done before in Northern Alberta. So I really had no baseline to compare it to,” he said.

“Furbearers have been studied before but never in the context that we’ve studied in Northern Alberta and never for a broad contaminants monitoring program.”

Thomas is working with local trappers and First Nations communities to collect samples of beavers, martens, fishers and other animals for the creation of a national specimen databank.

His work, he said, has really relied on the help and expertise of local stakeholders and especially First Nations.

Together with over 50 trappers from five different communities in Alberta, Thomas has collected over 1700 samples that are examined for hydrocarbons and heavy metals.

Hydrocarbons, he said, are an especially challenging group of compounds to work with.

“The thing with hydrocarbons is they’re metabolized,” he explained. “They have short half lives, they are volatile.”

“They’re activated by your own body into a more toxic form. These intermediary metabolites will bind with DNA and create cancers and tumors and stuff like that.”

Phil Thomas in the field. Photo provided by Phil Thomas.

He said a contaminated tissue sample won’t necessarily contain high levels of hydrocarbons.

“So what you really need to be screening it for is fingerprints,” he said.

“We look at health effects and try to correlate these to residual hydrocarbon signatures in the tissues and hydrocarbon signatures that we’re obtaining from water, sediment, air and stuff like that.”

Thomas said working with the community has strengthened his research.

“We’ve been really good at working on the ground with people and listening to the people and involving them in our decision-making,” he said.

While working in the field, Thomas said locals not only aided his research but fed and housed him. He was invited to stay in homes and remote cabins.

“I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with these guys,” he said.

One of the cabins Phil Thomas stayed in while conducting research. Photo provided by Phil Thomas.

“With all this muzzling I feel like this is the saddest part: all those positive collaborative relationships are not being spoken about.”

The research is “near and dear to a lot of people’s hearts,” he said.

Remote First Nations like the Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree and Metis locals live more closely with the land, offering long-term insights into the species that end up in his laboratory in Ottawa.

“For a lot of these First Nations communities I work with like Fort Chipewyan, they’re not serviced by a main highway. They have their ice road in the winter time but for the main part a lot of these First Nations communities are living traditional lifestyles, living of the land.”

Concerns about the safety of consuming animals and water from the region are ever present, he said. “They’re always asking us, is this safe to eat, is this water good to drink?”

“This is where monitoring programs such as this are important because they can provide the context to frame these answers or at least a launching point to address these human consumption issues.”

Many of those questions can’t be answered yet, Thomas said.

“You can look at levels all you want and compare them to guidelines. But more importantly is monitoring these levels, seeing if they’re going up or down. That’s the important question.”

Thomas said he takes his responsibility to the public seriously.

“I’m a scientists but I’m also a public servant,” he said.

“Without sounding too corny, I feel like I answer to the government, my employer, but I work for the taxpayer.”

“What this project has really accomplished is working closely with interested parties and answering common questions that are of concern to these people. And these are legitimate concerns.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Documents obtained by DeSmog Canada reveal that Canada’s Ministry of Environment vetoed an interview request on toxins in fur-bearing animals in the oilsands, even though the federal scientist was “media trained and interested in doing the interview.”

The Environment Canada scientist in question, Philippe Thomas, had asked members of the Alberta Trappers Association to send him samples of fur-bearing animals caught across Alberta in 2012. Thomas needed a broad range of samples to gain deeper insight into the contaminant load in animals living near the oilsands.

In late 2012, DeSmog Canada submitted a request to interview Thomas, and provided several written questions to Environment Canada to review.

Documents obtained via Access to Information legislation show that pre-scripted responses were prepared for Thomas should the interview be approved at the upper levels. The request was approved at the deputy general level, but denied in the office of former Environment Minister Peter Kent.

The request was also sent to the Privy Council Office for review, but was denied by the minister before requiring a decision by the prime minister’s top-level advisors.

Media requests involving controversial subjects such as the Alberta oilsands, climate change or species at risk are often subject to upper level political review and are routinely approved or denied at the ministerial level or in the Privy Council Office.

Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is currently investigating the 'muzzling of scientists' after a formal request was made by the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria and citizen advocacy group Democracy Watch. The groups asked the commissioner to investigate “the systematic efforts by the Government of Canada to obstruct the right of the media — and through them, the Canadian public — to timely access to government scientists.” That investigation is ongoing. 

Sean Holman, founder of Public Eye and professor of journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said denied requests of this kind remind Canadians just how frustrated and undemocratic our access to information process really is.

“We have a Father Knows Best approach to government in Canada,” Holman told DeSmog Canada.

“Our elected and unelected officials have vast powers to withhold information from the citizenry — whether it’s because they feel that’s in the public interest or their partisan interest.”

“That’s undemocratic,” he said, adding, “but that’s why they feel they have the right to violate our right to know – frustrating access to information we have paid for.”

The internal documents from Environment Canada also show personnel were asked to keep DeSmog Canada’s previous reporting on oilsands’ science “in mind when preparing” responses to questions.

According to Holman, “it’s understandable communications staff would want to know who is asking for information from the government…from a public relations standpoint.”

“But,” he added, “from a democratic standpoint, do we want communications staff to be providing different or better access to that information depending on the requester?”

In doing so, what Environment Canada staff appear to be saying, Holman said, “is that not everyone has the same right to hold government to account since knowledge is a necessary precursor to that process.”

The research, carried out as part of the Joint Canada-Alberta Plan for Oil Sands Monitoring, is the first of its kind, and brings to light the lack of data to date regarding contaminants in fur-bearing animals — some of which are a source of food for communities and First Nations — in the oilsands area.

Environment Canada told DeSmog Canada the request to speak with Thomas “could not be accommodated.”

When pressed for a reason why, Environment Canada staff responded, “due to the nature of your request, a written response was more appropriate.”

The written responses provided to DeSmog Canada were not attributed to Thomas, however. In response to questions regarding the authorship of the answers, Environment Canada said “a number of Environment Canada staff contributed.”

Environment Canada confirmed beavers, fishers, martens, lynx and river otters have been tested for naphthenic acid, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and a suite of approximately 28 metals and inorganic compounds, pollutants that “have been identified as contaminants produced as a result of industrial activity in the Oil Sands region.”

Data collected in the samples will be “compared to existing guidelines for human consumption.”

DeSmog Canada is partnering with the Politics of Evidence Working Group to promote Write2Know Week from March 23-27. If you would like to write a letter to Environment Canada regarding the monitoring of contaminants in the oilsands area, and to let scientists know you value their work, visit Write2Know for an easy guide. 

Image Credit: Brandon T. Brown Nature Photography

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the second instalment of a three-part series on Dr. John O’Connor, the family physician to first identify higher-than-average cancer rates and rare forms of cancer in communities downstream of the Alberta oilsands. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

When Dr. John O’Connor arrived in Fort Chipewyan in 2000, it took him a little while to get familiar with the population.

The town was a bit larger than his previous post of Fort MacKay, with a population of around 1,000 at that time. Locals had few options when it came to medical care. Their town was 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray and accessible only by plane in the summer or by ice road for a few of the colder months.

O’Connor recognized it was a close-knit community and yet hard to get a foothold in.

“You had to be trusted to gain their respect, I guess,” he said.

Most doctors hadn’t established a continuous practice up there, O’Connor said, so the community hadn’t received continuous care by the same medical expert for many years.

“What they were looking for was one pair of eyes, one pair of hands. Consistency,” he recounts.

“That was one of the reasons why I was approached to provide service. So that made it easier to get to know people and for them to get to know me.”

O’Connor immediately began poring over patient files, piecing together what a series of seasonal doctors had left behind. Patients there felt there was no continuity between what rotating doctors would say about their symptoms.

Yet, to O’Connor, the files coupled with his continuous care of individuals began to paint one alarming picture.

“What had been documented before from the patients was quite concerning. I got to know people then and people come in for various symptoms, from the day-to-day bread and butter type of practice to more serious stuff. I began to see that there are issues in Fort Chip that I shouldn’t be seeing at a practice even in Fort McMurray, with 4,000 to 5,000 patients. I wasn’t seeing anything like the pathology I was seeing in Fort Chip.”

What O’Connor discovered was a strikingly high concentration of cancer in the small community. The files were actually well organized, O’Connor said, and he began to add to them, ordering new tests and gaining new patients.

“The numbers just started to mount up,” he said. “It just didn’t make sense.”

O’Connor began reaching out to other doctors and specialists, asking them if they also thought the pathologies in Fort Chip were notable. Even at that early time, O’Connor said, “there was a general agreement” that the cancer rates and rates of other illnesses were unusually high. O’Connor cautioned, though, that those were the early days: “of course, at that point, that was very early – early times of trying to figure out why.”

“And I guess, in many respects we’re still trying to figure that out, because no studies have ever been done,” he said.

“The thing that was really striking was that Fort Chip is way off the beaten track,” O’Connor said. “It’s right on the edge of the Canadian shield, in a gorgeous location. The population — less so now — but back then, probably 80 per cent of the community in one way or another subsisted off the land.”

Located in the muskeg of Canada’s expansive boreal forest, Fort Chip is located on the shores of Lake Athabasca and is surrounded by prime hunting lands. Throughout history, traditional peoples have fed themselves on a steady diet of moose, caribou, fish and other local fauna.

A river meanders through the muskeg of the Boreal Forest. Photo: Kris Krug

The frozen shore of Lake Athabasca. The Athabasca River flows north through the oilsands region and drains directly into Lake Athabasca. Photo: Kris Krug

But by the early 2000s the locals began noticing disturbing changes in the local environment.

As O’Connor documented case after case of cancer and other illnesses, he also began hearing more stories of a changing local landscape.

“I had a lot of concerns expressed by especially the elders,” O’Connor recounted, “about the changes that they’ve seen in their environment around Fort Chip in the, probably, 10 plus years, prior to me coming in.”

The thing he heard elders talking the most about, he said, was water.

“They talked about the fishing and going out on Lake Athabasca to fish, and then stopping at one of the many islands in the lake and … camping for a day or two, being able to drink the water directly from the lake and how fresh it tasted. It was really good water, and they’d use it to make tea and make soup and stuff like that. And they could no longer do it.”

O’Connor says elders described a “constant sheen of oil” atop the water, the colours of the rainbow and attributed the water’s foul taste to that. It wasn’t long before locals began asking if the sheen was connected to what was going on upstream, O’Connor said.

What sounded the alarm were the strange fish.

“They talked about the fish that they were catching with increasing regularity,” O’Connor said. “These fish had deformities and missing parts and extra parts. Fish with red blotches all over them. Fish didn’t taste the same. Many of the elders, traditional food consumers, threw the fish back into the lake.”

Robert Grandjambe Jr., a trapper and fisher in Fort Chipewyan, shows sick fish from Lake Athabasca. He explains he feeds strange-looking fish to his dogs. Photo: Kris Krug

After that the local muskrat population died off. Muskrat were consumed by locals and their pelts used or traded. Eventually they became harder to find. And when they were found, they were often dead or the meat would smell like oil and taste bad.

Plants used in traditional medicine began to disappear too. The rat root from the shore of Lake Athabasca became increasingly scarce.

O’Connor remembers one elder, Mary Rose Waquan who only recently passed away, who told him of the ducks her sons used to hunt.

“Mary Rose was a very traditional … She would eat lots. There’s very little that she would not eat. But she said the meat was bad, and she had to throw the ducks out.”

Mary Rose’s son, Archie Waquan, went on to become chief of the Mikisew Cree Nation in Fort Chip. Archie, who now owns a bed and breakfast that O’Connor frequents, has said the same thing over many late-night conversations or morning cups of coffee.

O’Connor said the community of Fort Chip, although it was suffering, hesitated to “point fingers.”

A derelict fishing boat near the shore of Lake Athabasca. Photo: Kris Krug

“They largely didn’t suggest that there was a connection with industry, but they wondered,” O’Connor said. “Most of their concern was trying to get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

O’Connor said that the community’s multiple attempts to have fish tested by Fish and Wildlife for analysis were bungled, with samples forgotten, decayed and unfit for testing.

What was once a thriving fishery eventually disappeared.

The fishing wharf in Fort Chipewyan on the shores of Lake Athabasca. Photo: Kris Krug

Sounding the alarm

In 2003, another physician with experience in Fort Chip, Dr. Michael Sauvé, spoke up at a hearing about unusually high disease rates in First Nation communities. Afterwards the provincial Energy and Utilities Board recommended a study, funded by industry, be conducted in communities of concern, but the recommendation was never followed.

By 2004 O’Connor was leaving messages with Health Canada about what he was seeing in Fort Chip.

Things changed after an elderly patient, a school bus driver, who had lived a relatively healthy life came in to see O’Connor one day at lunchtime. All the other medical staff were out to lunch so it was just the two of them.

“I was still behind the front desk in the waiting room doing paperwork and he walked in. The lights were turned off…I saw him walking in and I came to the door and I said, ‘How are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m not feeling well, so we just need to make an appointment to see you.’ And in the dim light — there was one light on behind the front desk — he looked odd. I knew him. I’d seen him probably a few weeks before for something minor. And I turned on the light and realized he was jaundiced. I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ He told me he just didn’t feel well. He lost a bit of weight. His appetite was off, felt a bit nauseous. So I said, ‘No, let’s get you into the examining room now.’

The patient was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare form of bile duct cancer, and died soon after.

O’Connor was intimately familiar with the rare disease — his own father, a book salesman, succumbed to it in 1993.

“I’d never thought I’d see it again,” O’Connor said, referencing the bile duct cancer. “And then turning up in Fort Chip, realizing how rare it was, it was a shock.”

Artificial flowers decorate graves in the Fort Chipewyan cemetery. Photo: Kris Krug

In retrospect, O’Connor said he feels being there to recognize that uncommon cancer is significant. “If I had to think of why, why did I come to Canada? This might sound corny or something [but] I truly believe that this was the reason.”

It was this experience with such a rare disease that led O’Connor to reach out to Health Canada. He said he wanted assurances that he shouldn’t be worried. “But there was never a response,” he said.

In 2006 a CBC reporter named Erik Denison was told to investigate the health of people from Fort Chip by a local businesswoman Frances Jean, according to O’Connor.

When that reporter contacted O’Connor, it was the first time he stated publicly that he felt what was happening in Fort Chip was a public health issue.

“He reported it and it went everywhere. It was the most astounding thing … life for me has never been the same since.”

Read Part 1 of this series: John O’Connor and the Dawn of a New Oilsands Era. Read Part 3: The Spotlight Turns on Fort Chip Doctor.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the first instalment of a three-part series on Dr. John O’Connor, the family physician to first identify higher-than-average cancer rates and rare forms of cancer in communities downstream of the Alberta oilsands. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

The day John O’Connor landed in Canada from his native Ireland,* he had no idea how much he would end up giving to this land, nor how much it would ultimately demand from him.

“I had no intention of staying in Canada,” he told DeSmog Canada in a recent interview. “The intention was to go back.”

“But I got enchanted with Canada.”

That was back in 1984 when O’Connor first arrived in Canada for a three-month locum.

With a large family practice already well established in Scotland, O’Connor had no real intention of settling in this foreign land where, in a few decades, he would find himself embroiled in a national conflict — a conflict that would pick at so many of our country’s deepest-running wounds involving oil, First Nations and the winners and losers of our resource race.

No, when O’Connor landed in Canada he was just planning to fill a temporary family physician position in Nova Scotia. Soon after his arrival, however, his light curiosity about Canada transformed into a newfound passion. He was hooked.

“It was just a perfect match for me.”

After nearly a decade, O’Connor decided a shift to Alberta made sense for him and his growing family. He travelled there in search of what so many still do: opportunity.

“The kids were getting to the point where I realized I would probably like to look at opportunities in terms of careers that may not have been available in the Maritimes. So I came out to Alberta in 1993.”

O’Connor landed in Edmonton, rented a car and explored four practices with openings for new physicians.

“Fort McMurray was the last destination, and it looked the most attractive of all of the options,” he said.

Back in ’93 Fort McMurray was an entirely different place. With a population of around 30,000 people, the community was far from a boom town. It was under-doctored, said O’Connor, and extremely friendly. Within a few weeks, the O’Connor family made friends with patients who had kids of a similar age. They joined sports teams and attended good schools.

“It was good. Don’t regret it for a second,” O’Connor said.

New beginnings

At the time, the oilsands were hardly a topic of conversation, O’Connor remembers.

“You could certainly see what was being emitted from the smokestacks in the distance,” he said. Once, O’Connor even drove toward the smoke, trying to catch a glimpse of the source, but he never spent much time thinking about it.

Emissions rise from industrial facilities in the oilsands region. Photo: Kris Krug

Many of his patients were working in the oilsands.

“I would listen to their descriptions of work and everything else. And it was fascinating, but I really didn’t have time and probably not, at that point, the interest in knowing more about it,” he said.

In 1998, O’Connor travelled out to Fort MacKay, home of the Fort MacKay First Nation, for the first time.

A road sign directs traffic to Syncrude operations and the community of Fort MacKay along the main highway in Fort McMurray. Photo: Kris Krug

“It was an eye-opener,” he said, “realizing how close the community was to development. How much the community depended on the tar sands.”

When he first arrived the medical centre was no more than two double-wide trailers pulled together. Within two or three years, the band had built an impressive new centre for the community.

“[There was] obviously a very important connection between the community of Fort MacKay and industry for socio-economic reasons,” O’Connor came to recognize.

It was the dawn of a new era for the region, O’Connor said. Things started to get busier.

“This was the beginning of the two or three booms that we’ve seen over the last about 14 years or so. Just to be there as an observer of this and not directly dependent on the mystery…” he said of the oilsands boom.

“But realizing its importance, that it was a…” O’Connor trailed off with a sigh.

He picked up again: “I’m going to write a book on this.”

“My wife has grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘Do it,’” he laughed.

“We’ve talked about it for a few years and that early time that I’m trying to describe to you, it was fascinating and very important for what came later.”

Dawn of a new oilsands era

The ’90s were a transformative time for the Alberta oilsands. New advancements in technology improved the economic prospects of extracting and processing the resource and led to an ambitious industry and government strategy to dramatically increase production in 1995.

Highway 63, also known as the “Highway of Death” for its dangerous and busy conditions, runs through Fort McMurray. Photo: Kris Krug

As a part of this new strategy the Canadian and Albertan governments dropped royalty and tax rates in an effort to generate interest in the resource.

What’s contained in the tarry sands of northern Alberta is a heavy hydrocarbon called bitumen. As industry describes it, unprocessed bitumen has the consistency of “peanut butter” and, as a result, requires tremendous amounts of energy to extract, process and upgrade into lighter fuels.

Before the technology existed to essentially melt the bitumen out of the sands, oil companies expressed little interest in the region.

But all that changed with new methods for extraction and upgrading and some of the lowest royalties and taxes in the world.

By 1995, Alberta announced a new goal of producing one million barrels a day from the oilsands by 2020. They passed that goal 16 years early in 2004. Plans now involve producing up to 5 million barrels a day by 2030.

Retired machinery forms part of a roadside display along the ‘Syncrude Loop’ in Fort McMurray. Photo: Kris Krug

While these transformations took place, O’Connor’s business steadily grew, as did the need for him in downstream and local communities, especially First Nation communities.

O’Connor began to see the oilsands at this time as a “two-edged sword.”

“Couldn’t possibly live without it,” he said, “but at the same time, having to contend with the fact — no doubt — about the impact; the adverse impact on environment and life in general.”

O’Connor said that in those early years the impact of development wasn’t yet visible, but by the early 2000s things started to change.

Read Part 2: Deformed Fish, Dying Muskrats Cause Doctor to Sound Alarm. Read Part 3: The Spotlight Turns on Fort Chip Doctor.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated O’Connor was from Scotland. Image Credit: In 2011 author Carol Linnitt travelled to the oilsands region and Fort Chipewyan with photographer Kris Krug. All photos by Kris Krug.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

If you ask an Environment Canada media spokesperson about contamination resulting from tar sands operations, they will not tell you the federal government has failed to adequately monitor the mega-project's effects on water.

They most certainly will not say outright that the federal government has failed to monitor the long term or cumulative environmental effects of the world's largest industrial project. They won't say it, but not because it isn't the case. 

The tar sands are contaminating hundreds of kilometres of land in northern Alberta with cancer-causing contaminants and neurotoxins.

And although federal scientists have confirmed this, they are prevented from sharing information about their research with the media. 

The result is an overly-monitored process that causes burdensome delays in media-scientist interactions. The overwhelming consequence is that the media has stopped talking to the country's national scientists.

No federal studies have researched contamination in furbearing mammals living near the tar sands, although species decline – as is evident in the disappearance of caribou – is becoming an increasing problem.

The Alberta Cancer Board confirmed in 2008 that higher than normal rates of rare cancer were present in the small community. The government refused to remove the charge of alarmism from O'Connor's file until late 2009, despite express wishes from the residents of Fort Chipewyan to have the accusation dropped.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.