This is the third instalment in 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 2.

After the story of Fort Chip’s health problems broke, Health Canada sent physicians out to the small, northern community.

Dr. John O’Connor said one of the Health Canada doctors went into the local nursing station and, in front of a reporter, filled a mug with Fort Chip water and drank from it, saying, ‘See, there’s nothing wrong with it.’

“That was such a kick in the face for everyone,” O’Connor said. “Just a complete dismissal of their concerns.”

Health Canada eventually requested the charts of the patients who had died. Six weeks later they announced the findings of a report that concluded cancer rates were no higher in Fort Chip than expected.

For O’Connor, however, the numbers “just didn’t match up.”

The small town of Fort Chipewyan can reached by plane all year round. In the summer the community can be reached by boat or by ice road during the colder winter months. Photo: Kris Krug

A sign in the Fort Chip airport terminal welcomes visitors to the “oldest settlement in Alberta.” Photo: Kris Krug

In March of 2007 O’Connor received a letter of complaint from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta that accused him of raising “undue alarm.” Three physicians from Health Canada lodged four complaints with the college against O’Connor, claiming he had failed to provide files in a timely fashion and withheld information. They accused him of engendering mistrust.

O’Connor admits that a minor scandal involving a male nurse in Fort Chip who had been stealing morphine and threatening female nurses didn’t help with submitting paperwork. But, he said, the charges were overblown, also including accusations of billing irregularities and ‘double-dipping’ on contracts.

What followed was a nationwide two-year public trial. O’Connor’s name was publicly dragged through the mud while the town of Fort Chip and members of his profession fought to defend him. The attacks on his credibility were widely seen as politicized, leading the Canadian Medical Association to pass resolution #103, to provide protection for whistleblowers like O’Connor.

In 2009, the College of Physicians officially cleared him of any wrong doing, handing along a massive summary file with the word “confidential” stamped across the front. Since then, he’s been heralded as a heroic Canadian whistleblower.

During the ordeal, O’Connor moved back to Nova Scotia for a break while another physician took over his work in Fort Chip.

“I’ve got a very strong wife. My rock. Charlene is just amazing. I don’t think I would have survived if it wasn’t for her,” O’Connor said. “I’m a much tougher person now than what I was. It was hell but I went through it.”

In the interim, a scientist had overseen testing in November of 2007 that warned of high concentrations of arsenic and mercury in the water and traditional foods. A doctor later publicly recommended pregnant women and children not eat any fish from the lake or play in the water.

Health Canada followed up on the recommendation, saying they had already recommended something similar, but the community said it hadn’t been informed.

Then in 2009 an Alberta Cancer Board study was finally released that stated the community had 30 per cent higher rare cancer rates than should be expected. The report amended the Health Canada findings from 2006 that suggested cancer rates were no higher than expected.

In light of this new report, a scientific team was assembled to put together a new study. O’Connor was asked to be a part of the team.

“The fact that we were going to have a health study at Fort Chip [was] very encouraging,” he said.

The frozen expanse of Lake Athabasca. Photo: Kris Krug

But things soon fell apart after a clause in the template of the health study mandated the oil industry be part of the management oversight committee of the research.

The community was outraged, O’Connor said, and the fissure that formed then has, even five years later, still not been mended.

Good intentions

To this day, independent, comprehensive baseline studies of the community of Fort Chip have still not been conducted.

However, last month the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree First Nation, both local to Fort Chip, released a study conducted in collaboration with scientists from the University of Manitoba. The research showed health impacts downstream of the oilsands are “positively associated” with the development and the consumption of traditional foods.

In 2011, O’Connor was asked to participate in an Alberta government study, one of which will take place in Fort MacKay. The announcement was made publicly, among much publicity, he said. Some of the work being done in Fort MacKay was supposed to act as a template for future Fort Chip research, he said.

A signpost in Fort Chip shows distances and direction to cities across Canada. Photo: Kris Krug

But since then the study has lagged, and, according to O’Connor, his letters and phone calls to the Alberta Health Minister go unanswered. Comprehensive studies of both Fort MacKay and Fort Chip are still pending.

The community members of Fort Chip and O’Connor himself are “demanding the government keep its promise of a health study, but we’re getting nowhere with that,” he said.

Going it alone

O’Connor said for now he’s relying on the independent scientific studies that are being done in the environment downstream of the oilsands. A February 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a cancer-causing pollutant released during the extraction of bitumen in the oilsands, were likely two to three times higher than government and industry estimates.

In November of 2012 federal scientists from Environment Canada presented research that found PAHs from oilsands extraction and processing were accumulating in bodies of water up to 100 kilometres away. Yet another federal study found tailings ponds, which cover an area larger than 176 square kilometres, are seeping waste water and mining-related toxins into local groundwater.

Steam rises from a tailings pond in the Fort McMurray region. Industry estimates there are 176 square kilometres of tailings ponds. Photo: Kris Krug

O’Connor said, put together, these studies paint a disturbing picture. “And you know, all they are telling me completely contradicted what government and industry have been saying for years: that there’s no impact, no evidence of contributions, degradation to the environment from industry.”

Even the release of new research, he says, hasn’t been enough to trigger new health studies.

“So we’re trying to go it alone,” he said.

O’Connor has assembled a team of science and health experts to examine the industrial impacts in Fort MacKay and hopes he can eventually include Fort Chip.

At this point, O’Connor said, neither Fort MacKay nor Fort Chip are in any position to accept a government study on the health impacts of industry. The necessary trust relationships at this point are nonexistent.

An advocate become activist

For O’Connor, his experience working with the community of Fort Chip, and his efforts to find some accountability for their plight, has been something of a transformative experience.

“All I’m doing is my job,” he said. “I’m just… As a physician, I’m an advocate for my patients. I never realized how….” He paused, “exactly what the job meant until Fort Chip.”

O’Connor said he’ll continue fighting for the community of Fort Chip. But beyond that, O’Connor now sees himself as more than just as an advocate for his patients: he’s an activist.

“I’m now – thanks to the Alberta government and the federal government – I’m now a dyed-in-the-wool advocate. I’m an activist for my patients. Never imagined I would be doing this and I’ll do it ‘til the day I die.”

In February 2014, O’Connor traveled to Washington to testify on the affects of the oilsands industry, in light of the U.S.’s pending decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which will connect Alberta to refineries and export facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. He was invited by Senator Barbara Boxer.

Dr. John O’Connor speaking on the negative impacts of oilsands development at a press conference in Washington. Photo: EWPChairBoxer / Flickr

“It was gratifying to get the invitation from Senator Boxer’s office,” O’Connor said. “The reception there was incredible. The information that was already known. I was very happy that I was walking into a setting where I wasn’t having to start from scratch.”

O’Connor added, “I made it very firm that I’m not saying to shut things down … But there has to be a sort of a middle ground.”

He added, “I certainly hold the governments to account … But government has failed, completely failed people, betrayed people.”

Read part 1 of The Oilsands Cancer Story: Dr. John O’Connor and the Dawn of a New Oilsands Era and part 2: Deformed Fish, Dying Muskrats Cause Doctor to Sound Alarm.

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.

Organizers of the Tar Sands Healing Walk, a 14-kilometre spiritual walk through lands impacted by oilsands (also called tar sands) extraction in northern Alberta, have announced this year’s Healing Walk on June 28th will be the last.

“It was a difficult decision to make,” admits Jesse Cardinal, co-organizer of the Healing Walk. “We felt the original goals of the healing walk of letting local communities know that they had support for the issues of mass industry in the territory and gaining further attention of the issues of tar sands development in a way that was non-aggressive were achieved.”

“Our work will continue in the territory, with the people and communities, but, will look different, so I wouldn’t really call it an end, as a new beginning,” Cardinal told DeSmog Canada. Cardinal is a member of the Kikino Metis Settlement in northeastern Alberta.

The Healing Walk is the only grassroots event to bring people face to face with Canada’s oilsands, one of the largest oil reserves and industrial projects in the world. Participants in the annual event walk through the industrialized landscape, passing by active oilsands facilities releasing toxins into the air, chemical tailings ponds the size of lakes and a barren land in an otherwise lush and green region of Alberta's boreal forest.

But all this is secondary to the Healing Walk’s core theme: hope that the land, water and people drastically impacted by two decades of rapid oilsands extraction will one day heal.

Healing Walk is Not a Protest or a Rally

“We're not going out there for yet another protest, yet another rally. We're out there to be together, to heal, and those two things are very appealing in a context of seemingly endless struggle,” says Chelsea Flook, a Healing Walk organizer since 2010.

“[For participants] the focus on the space being primarily a healing space is a very strong draw,” Flook told DeSmog. Flook is originally from Ontario, but she is currently based in Edmonton and works for the Mother Earth Action Cooperative.

Organizers have been clear from the beginning that the Healing Walk is not a protest. No one shouts out political chants during the walk that takes place just north of Canada’s famous oil town, Fort McMurray. The only banner present is the one leading the procession with the words “Stop the Destruction. Start the Healing” painted on it.

Healing Walk procession in 2013. Photo by Zack Embree.

Instead, participants are led by First Nations elders along the so-called ‘Syncrude Loop’ (oilsands company Syncrude has an operation nearby) as they pray and make offerings in the four directions: north, south, east and west. To complete the loop on foot takes about six hours.

“Making prayers to the four directions woke up the spirit of the land, the water and the people. It has awoken a creative force within the people that will suffocate the destructive force that is the tar sands. That is a pretty powerful warrior to deal with,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller, MC of this year’s Healing Walk and Idle No More campaigner.

Clayton Thomas-Muller with Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (left) and Melina Laboucan-Massimo of the Lubicon Cree Nation (right). Photo by Zack Embree.

The Healing Walk is a 3-Day Gathering: Workshops, Communal Meals, Camping

The two days prior to the actual walk have the outward appearance of festival. Tents cluster together (camping is free for participants) in a field on the shores of Lake Gregoire, also called Willow Lake. Communal meals and workshops covering a wide range of oilsands-related issues, from First Nations treaty rights to pipelines, take place at the campsite — an hour’s drive from the starting point of the Healing Walk at Crane Lake Park.

“You come as an individual but you leave as part of the whole which is part of the beauty of the Healing Walk,” says Thomas-Mueller, who is a member of the Missinipi Ethinewak or Big River Cree in Manitoba.

A participant of last year's Healing Walk. Photo by Zack Embree.

“This year, we are focusing mainly on local voices. Some of the people we have speaking, have never been heard of before, but are concerned about what is happening in the Fort McMurray indigenous territory. So more going back to being a grassroots event,” Cardinal says.

Local indigenous voices will include Matthew Whitehead, a traditional knowledge carrier from Fort Chipewyan, Annette Campre and a resident of Fort McKay, who will lead workshops on education and spirituality. The physician who first noticed and researched high rates of cancer among Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation members – Dr. John O’Connor –will speak as part of a health panel.

Last year’s Healing Walk attracted well over 500 people, the largest turnout thus far. Internationally known speakers such as 350.org founder Bill McKibben and author Naomi Klein were among them.

Naomi Klein speaking at last year's Healing Walk event. Photo by Zack Embree.

“At last year’s walk, I saw a fundamental shift in energy that let me know we have already won,” Thomas-Muller told DeSmog Canada.

Will the land ever heal? Organizers are optimistic

For many a ‘win’ for First Nations as well as non-indigenous Canadians over the oilsands industry is hard to see. Despite a few pipeline project delays – notably Keystone XL in the U.S. and Northern Gateway in B.C. – the oilsands industry has expanded rapidly and relatively unimpeded under the current federal government.

And yet Healing Walk organizers believe one day the land they have guided hundreds of people through over the last four years will heal.

“I do believe so, but not in my lifetime," Cardinal says. "The destruction is too big. But way down the road when our existence here is different, and more people have demanded an energy future that isn't destructive to the land, air, water and all living beings will we achieve harmony." Cardinal is a coordinator with the Keepers of the Athabasca, the main organizing group behind the Healing Walk.

A sign designates an industrial area under restoration. Photo by Zack Embree.

“It will take a couple of lifetimes for the land to recover, but a metamorphosis will take place and create new life. Indigenous people will be a part of this and those who do not follow their lead will be left behind. The circle of life will continue,” Thomas-Muller says.

Healing Walk organizer Chelsea Flook, who is not indigenous, believes the only way to get there and avoid the catastrophic effects of runaway climate change at the same time is to follow the lead of indigenous peoples.

“We need to take direction from indigenous communities, to honour their ways of knowing and being. It might mean some awkward dancing between worldviews, it might entail some moments of discomfort,” she says.

“But by supporting Indigenous communities' struggle to protect the land [in the oilsands], we can also fight back against the 'business as usual' plans of industry that entail a six-degree climate warming scenario,” Flook said.

Image Credit: All photos by Zack Embree.

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.