Chris Turner’s new book, The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands, opens with a story about ducks.

Actually, in the context of the oilsands, it’s the story about ducks: more than 1,600 ducks migrating through northern Alberta died after landing on a tailings pond in 2008. It brought worldwide condemnation of the industry, and acted as a catalyst for environmental protests that are ongoing today.

The Patch is the story of what happened long before, and since, the turning point brought about by the ducks: how the industry came to be, how it scraped by through its infancy to become the roaring engine of Canadian industry in the early 2000’s; how its cycles of boom and bust have built fortunes and shifted the gravitational centre of Canada to a once-quiet patch of Boreal forest; and how the same ambitious industrial vision that stoked the fire may yet snuff it out.

Turner’s focus on the people of the Patch makes it unique among the multitude of books on the subject. He brings us into the lives of assortment of characters who have been drawn to the industry: driving first class buses and what were once the biggest dump trucks in the world; pulling a boat out of the water in PEI in time to catch the next morning’s shift in Fort McMurray; and doing shots of vodka with Soviet engineers after touring the subterranean death traps that would be adapted into a high-tech solution for mining underground oilsands deposits.

We spoke to Turner about his new book.

You open the book with the anecdote about the ducks. How important of a moment was that for the oilsands?

The reason I opened with that is because it represented a pivot point. From the industry’s point of view, this looked like another minor little hiccup along the way — business as usual, which at that moment was a roaring success. And the industry had always had local environmental problems, some worse than others, and it was a lot of ducks, but it was still seen as, ‘okay, these things happen, it’s a terrible tragedy but we’ll move on.’

What I was trying to get at by beginning the book with it was to say, this was the moment where the industry’s understanding of itself in a greater conversation nationally and internationally was beginning to shift forever.

What I call in the book this High Modern industrial triumph story was now going to become this ecological tragedy story. They didn’t see that shift coming, and that was part of why I think the duck incident resonated the way it did. It indicated how much the broad general public’s tolerance for that kind of environmental damage had changed. Why do you think the conversation was changing at that point?

To some degree, the global conversation about climate change was finally maturing. The clarity of the argument was beginning to emerge: that this was about fossil fuels, and about needing to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

That didn’t happen all at once and certainly it didn’t all happen in 2008 — it was still ongoing. But it was the end of the necessity argument, which particularly for the oil business, has long been, and still to some degree remains, their main point: you need us.

I think that what we’re seeing, as the climate change debate has matured, is a direct challenge to that point. To say, maybe we don’t need you. Not only maybe not, but maybe in fact the last thing we need is more fossil fuel. The beginning of that collision in essence was some random duck incident in 2008. You mentioned the High Modern period, or spirit; what is it about the High Modern that allows or encourages the development of this huge project? 

It creates kind of the broad logic. You can go all the way back to the beginning of the 1900s, where you see pretty broad support; it was understood as a universal good that there was an oil deposit there.

There were these technical questions of how do you unlock it, but the general idea of progress was that you find a resource, particularly one as valuable as oil, you find a way to turn it into a commodity, money is made, work is done, this is the greater good. This is the purpose of an advanced industrial society.

That created the logic or justification for the oilsands, despite all the barriers, despite how long it took to develop it as a viable resource. That consensus was what I refer to as the High Modern worldview: whatever your political stripe, a resource of that value should be exploited. The technology for SAGD (Steam-assisted gravity drainage) came from the Soviet Union, which was known for its megaprojects. How similar are the giant capitalist oilsands operations and the giant communist megaprojects?

Probably more similar than a lot of the people in the industry like to think even now…in the sense that it really was a government-driven enterprise for generations. You can look at something like Syncrude; when the initial funding for Syncrude nearly collapsed in 1974, it was three governments — the Alberta, Ontario, and federal governments — all stepped up with money. So it was a kind of quasi-Crown corporation at its founding in some sense, although not directed by government, just funded by it.

So there’s probably more in common than anyone would like to think. And I think that speaks to the scale and scope of the energy industry. As much as we like to think of it as these wildcatters and entrepreneurs, like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, clawing the oil from the earth with his bare hands practically, the growth and the endurance of the industry has always involved huge public-supported backing.

Whether you were in the Soviet Union or in Canada, the way you did it was not all that different. It was similar scale, you were going to need a lot of public support and public money. The oilsands project has always been dogged by this issue of commercial viability. As you mentioned, that’s what set it back decades, and is still a problem. How has that extra cost influenced the development of the oilsands? 

It became a very technology-driven, engineering-driven enterprise. The conventional oil business, the basic kind of apparatus of getting the oil out of the ground has gotten much more efficient or that much more sophisticated, but it’s still, ‘you drill a well and you pump the oil.’ To make the oilsands viable required inventing or adapting all this technology. You needed — and still need — fleets of engineers to monitor and upgrade and improve and tweak and try new stuff.

The culture of the oilsands, I think, is uniquely a culture of engineers. There’s a strong sense of whatever the problem is, we can fix it, we can figure it out, we just need to put the right tools in place; but then also, people I talked to in the industry have said, part of the reason why we’ve been very bad at responding to criticism is that engineers by their nature don’t think in these public-relations terms very well. They’re not very good at emotional appeals, and storytelling and that sort of thing.

“You don’t start over from zero, today. We don’t begin the conversation about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with the fact of the thing itself. There are decades of history…distrust and political issues.” https://t.co/rn5LOxLoqW #oilsands #thepatch #cdnpoli @theturner

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 23, 2017

You set the whole book up as sort of a conflict between engineers and their worldview and that of environmentalists and people who think we should be leaving the whole thing in the ground. Can those two worldviews be reconciled when it comes to the oilsands? 

It’s an open question whether they can. I think there is a version of the story, and it’s one that Rachel Notley likes to tell, and some folks in Trudeau’s government like to tell, and some people in the industry, and some people who work in the more policy-wonky and less activist part of the environmental NGOs…which goes, okay, we unlocked this resource, it’s up and running, it’s producing soon to be three million barrels of oil a day, that is an enormous economic boom that will be an excellent stabilizer for the Canadian economy as it transitions to a low-carbon economy and does so in as neat and orderly a way as possible.

And that story is, I don’t think, entirely false.

The messy bit is you don’t start over from zero, today. We don’t begin the conversation about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with the fact of the thing itself. There are decades of history, there are decades of distrust and political issues and in the case of First Nations, legal issues, which are all sort of tangled up in what would otherwise be an easier thing to negotiate a compromise on.

So I think there is a middle path there, and probably that’s kind of the path we’ll more or less take, there will probably just be an enormous amount of push and pull from the more dug-in partisans on either side as it goes forward. You describe the pipelines as having become proxies for protests of the carbon economy generally. The fairness of that aside, how effective has it been in achieving the goals of the movements? 

From my observer’s point of view, it seems that the one thing about the pipeline protests and pipeline politics is that it’s extraordinarily effective as an organizing tool.

So you look at how Keystone XL itself was chosen as the target for protest, and what made it so attractive was that you could get such broad agreement. You had the hardcore climate activist NGOs, but then you also had regional environmental groups who were worried about regional environmental impacts; First Nations and other Indigenous people who were worried about encroachment on their land; ranchers; people worried about aquifers; people worried in the case of Trans Mountain about tanker traffic and its impact on wildlife.

There’s nothing else we’ve seen in the kind of climate change activism world that’s as good at galvanizing resistance and organizing resistance.

How effective is it if the ultimate goal is reducing CO2 emissions, if that’s the main point of it? I get a little less rosy in my assessment, because as long as the global economics of fossil fuels are what they are, whether a particular 500 or 800,000 barrels of oil a day moves down this pipeline or that pipeline is not going to be conclusive, and may not even be the first domino knocked over in a whole series of them. It might be just a one-off proxy war off to the side. In this current era of protests, carbon taxes, low oil prices, some seemingly intractable problems like tailings, how optimistic are you about the future of the oilsands?

The case for them is only going to get tougher. That seems to be broadly understood in a lot of the industry.

I think it’s understood more and more that there was this crazy 10-year boom, give or take, and that led to this unprecedented and unsustainable level of growth — and that that is now the past. The future is still an open question.

Folks in the industry will talk about their ability to innovate, their ability to reduce the carbon intensity of a barrel, their ability to attack and solve all the environmental questions. I don’t think that’s just window dressing; I think there is serious thought and effort being put into that. Can they do that in such a way and at a fast enough clip to stay competitive as fracking spreads worldwide, as demand maybe before too long begins to significantly be impacted by things like electric cars and renewable energy sources of all types? It’s a really difficult question.

There are still people who I think are aware of all these variables willing to put money into the industry…For example, you just saw Suncor announcing a new project of 40,000 barrels of SAGD. So a small expansion of a SAGD project, rather than these big, 200, 300,000 barrel-per-day mines. I think that’s the direction the industry is going.

And then there’s a whole bunch of variables that could completely change the industry in five or 10 years. Why did you want to work on this book? 

I’m a Calgarian. It is sort of my backyard.

It’s a story that hadn’t really been told for a general audience without a really significant slant to it. It’s a really compelling story; the backstory, the history of how it came to be is absolutely fascinating. Just a weird chapter in Canadian industrial history that’s never been told in a single story before. If I had had 100 more pages I would have happily gone deeper into the history.

The other thing was, I’ve written and spoken and done a lot of work on the energy transition from the green side — here’s this very exciting new economic basis and movement that’s emerging, and this is going to be a hugely compelling place for people to invest their energy and time and money for many years to come in solving the climate problem…What does it mean to a significant subset of the oil industry in northern Alberta that this shift is underway, and what does the energy transition look like from there?

Probably more importantly, if we are going to talk in some sort of consensus-building way about how Canada manages that energy transition, I think it’s important to understand that side of it as well. So a big part of what I was hoping to do with the book was, if you come into it hating the oilsands and thinking they should be shut down tomorrow, maybe you’ll understand a little bit more about how they came to be and why people are still invested in making them viable. If you come into it as a huge champion of the industry who’s had it up to here with the protests, maybe you’ll understand a little bit more about where that part of it came from as well.

I think the fence is not a weird place to be on this one.

There’s really compelling arguments for and against. Some of the rhetoric that came out of the anti-pipeline movement kind of painted over this notion that it could be very quickly scaled down. If the prime minister woke up tomorrow and thought, ‘We need to shut that thing down in five years,’ how would you ever compensate for that economically, not to mention politically? How would you absorb that shock? And if you don’t have a viable answer for that, then maybe you haven’t thought it all the way through.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Connecting extreme weather events with climate change isn’t exactly a new thing.

After Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in 2012, Bloomberg published a front page spread proclaiming, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

For years, major storms, droughts, floods and fires have been connected to climate change. The climate angle was even fair game during last summer’s wildfires in western Canada.

So how did the climate conversation around the still-raging Fort McMurray wildfire that destroyed thousands of homes become so befuddling-ly messed up?

Conversations about climate change as a factor in the wildfires has garnered about as much attention as the wildfires themselves. For a recap of the “middle-finger salutes,” schadenfreude and #tinyviolins mock-sympathy for the people of Fort McMurray, check out this article on Slate.

(Add in, May 12: It's worthwhile to point out that while there were a lot of unfortunate aspects of the public conversation about the fire, many environmental NGOs rallied their organizational capacity to raise money and basic support for evacuees. The executive directors of Canada's most prominent environmental groups including the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Ecology Ottawa, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, Greenpeace, LeadNow, Sierra Club, Stand and West Coast Environmental Law urged support for evacuees in a joint press release published Friday, May 6.)

Cara Pike, climate communications expert with Climate Access, says the urge to link what’s happening in Fort McMurray to climate change should be tempered by a keen sensitivity to the very real human suffering on the ground.

“We need to lead with our humanity,” Pike told DeSmog Canada. “This is a good time to listen very, very hard to what people are dealing with, what they care about, what they want for their futures and try to find those common places.”

The rush to draw the connection between the Fort Mac fires and climate change could come across as blaming, Pike said, adding “I really personally question the timing and how best to have that conversation.”

How the #FortMcMurray #Climate Conversation Went Down in Flames https://t.co/mW2XSHVfYG #fortmacfire #ableg #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 10, 2016

Canada is still behind the U.S. when it comes to understanding that climate impacts are happening here and now, Pike says. In the U.S., major hurricanes such as Katrina, Irene and Sandy, massive wildfires and long-term drought brought the climate change message to the forefront.

Pike was vice president of communications at Earth Justice during Hurricane Katrina and notes many local environmental groups were criticized for using the disaster to advance their campaigns.

“What happened there with Katrina is a parallel of what we’re seeing now with Fort McMurray,” she said.

In the case of Fort McMurray, the conversation is made “more visceral” by the tragedy occurring in an oil-producing region, Pike said.

“It creates so much more discomfort when trying to have that conversation because it inherently brings us to a place where people feel judged and blamed,” she said.

“The truth is that everyone is tied to oil and unfortunately in environmental communications there is often this dominant tone of self-righteousness. And in these crisis moments, when people put on their professional hats and go talk about these issues, it’s like they lose their humanity.”

Part of the problem lies in the polarization that infiltrates nearly every energy and environment debate in Canada — and which has emotions roiling at the surface, unleashed at the slightest provocation.

“There’s no formula for when it’s appropriate to talk about climate change,” Simon Donner, associate professor of Climatology at the University of British Columbia, told DeSmog Canada. “I think it just really depends on the circumstances of any extreme event.”

“It’s not a good idea to use people’s suffering to push an agenda, even if that agenda is scientifically defensible,” Donner said.

Underlining the current debate is the fact the fires are happening in the heart of Canada’s oilsands.

“Everyone knows what the industry is in Fort McMurray. Everyone knows that’s a source of opposition to climate policy in Canada and underneath a lot of people’s good intentions is a sense of ‘I told you so.’ What I’m saying is, let’s be nice to folks, you don’t have to be self-righteous about it.”

As a climate communicator, Donner said it’s always crucial to consider your audience.

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“If your goal for talking about climate change after an extreme event is to engage people in that community, but the community that was affected by the event is suspicious about the science of climate change, pivoting in the media to climate change while their homes are burning is just going to alienate people,” Donner said.

“It doesn’t seem like a smart way to engage the part of Canada that is resistant to action to combat climate change,” Donner added. “We need to ask: what’s effective?”

Renee Lertzman, an expert in the psychology of environmental education, said it really isn’t a question of whether we make the connection between the fires and climate change but how.

“This conversation needs to happen, but it doesn’t need to be polarizing,” Lertzman told DeSmog Canada. “The question is how can we communicate and engage with people in the most constructive and productive and effective ways?”

“We’re designed to resist challenging, threatening news and information that can potentially challenge our worldview.” Lertzman noted.

She said it can be frustrating to see climate communications that seem to “miss entirely how humans process information, particularly distressing and stressful information.”

“Climate change is really complicated in what it brings up for us. It really is, in a way, in its own category.”

That doesn’t mean it’s always inappropriate to discuss climate change in the context of disaster or tragedy.

By focusing on how all affected parties can work together to avoid tragedy, you generate feelings of inclusion and sensitivity, Lertzman said — opening the space for compassionate communications.

“It’s not about whether we make those connections, it’s about thinking through how humans deal with the trauma and acknowledging profound horror and devastation.”

Image: Fort McMurray Fire Pictures/Facebook

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By Ed Struzik for The Tyee.

A sudden shift in the wind at a critical time of day was all it took to send a wildfire out of control through Fort McMurray, forcing more than 80,000 people out of their homes in what has become the biggest natural disaster in Canadian history.

Earlier this week, Darby Allen, the regional fire chief for the area, minced no words when he was asked what might happen now that more than 1,600 homes have been destroyed.

''This is a really dirty fire,'' he said. ''There are certainly areas within the city which have not been burned, but this fire will look for them and it will take them.''

The media line now is that fire experts saw this coming five years ago when one of the Flattop Complex fires tore through the Alberta town of Slave Lake in 2011, forcing everyone to leave on a moment's notice. A report released shortly after predicted that something similar could happen again, and its authors made 21 recommendations to prepare for the possibility.

But fire scientists and fire managers actually saw this coming back in 2009 when 70 of them gathered in Victoria to address the issue of climate change and what impact it was going to have on the forest fire situation in Canada. Each one of them was already well aware that fires were burning bigger, hotter, faster, and in more unpredictable ways than ever before.

''We're exceeding thresholds all the time,'' said Mike Flannigan, who was at the time a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. ''We'd better start acting soon.''

''We let 150 wildfires burn each year and we need to be more transparent about that,'' said Judi Beck, Manager of Fire Management for BC Wildfire Management Branch. ''The public needs to know what we can and can't do.''


Gordon Miller, a director general with the Canadian Forest Service, summed it up succinctly, saying, ''More fires mean more communities will be at risk.''

'Strongest Signal Yet'

Flannigan is now a professor and research scientist at the University of Alberta. He remembers the meeting well because the participants were so bluntly honest about what they knew, what they didn't know, and what needed to be done.

''Many of us saw a Fort McMurray-like situation coming back then and even earlier, but frankly none of us expected anything as horrific as what has happened there this week. This is a signal, one of many, and the strongest we've seen yet, that suggests that the fire situation is going to get a lot worse, and that in some cases, there will not be much we can do about it other than evacuate communities.''

Flannigan declined to say whether enough has been done to prevent or better manage what has happened in Fort McMurray. ''Things are much too raw right now,'' he said, ''and we don't have all of the information and facts yet.''

But some Fort McMurray residents are beginning to question why it happened and why it took so long to tell people to get out. ''They evacuated us so late,'' resident Crystal Mercredi told CBC's The Current. ''So late that people were stuck in traffic and people were calling the radio station, saying… 'We're bumper-to-bumper. We can't move. Come and save us…we're sitting ducks.''' Another woman couldn't believe the elementary school that her child attended was evacuated just an hour before it burned down.

It's not that no one has been listening. This year, governments started preparing for the fire season a month earlier, as the Flattop report recommended. And efforts are underway to make many communities fire smart.

$9 Billion Catastrophe

But the fact is many decision-makers have been in denial or slow to move in addressing the fact that climate change is the new dragon in the forest, and that El Niño events like this year's make these dragons more volatile. The Alberta government this year reduced the fire prevention and management budget by $14.6 million.

Along with B.C. Premier Christy Clark, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall wants a national fire strategy but he refuses to accept the fact that something needs to be done to address climate change, which is the main reason why the area burned in Canada each year has doubled since the 1970s and why the number of fires is likely to double or even triple in the decades to come. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is sincere about addressing climate change, but not at the expense of ramping up oilsands and fossil fuel production, which is driving climate change.

It's skewed logic when you look at the numbers the Bank of Montreal put out on Thursday. Its economists predict that insurance claims arising from the Fort McMurray fires could be as high as $9 billion. And that's just a small part of a bigger picture that's been emerging.

Unheeded alarms, then exodus: Experts warned in 2009 that wildfire risks in Canada's boreal forests were hugely spiking. Alberta cut its firefighting budget this year. Source: RCMP Alberta.

Since 2011, boreal forest fires in Canada, the United States and Russia have destroyed more trees than all that were burned in the rainforests of the world. Canada and the U.S. now rank second and fourth among countries with the greatest amount of annual tree loss. Russia, which is home to the world's biggest boreal forest, tops the list.

The growing cost of fighting wildfires is already overwhelming the ability of governments to manage their forests. For the first time, the government of Alberta couldn't fight all of the fires it wanted to fight in 2015 even though it brought in help from Mexico and Australia at one point to save some oilsands operations. And for the first time in Canada, wildfire management costs associated with the fires of 2015 topped the $1-billion mark.

Climate Change: The Big Dry Out

There are a number of reasons why fires are going to burn bigger, hotter, faster, and more often in the future. There are more people living and working in the boreal forest, and like it or not, people start a lot of fires — more than half that occur in Canada. And in fighting fires so religiously to protect valuable timber, oilsands, pipelines and communities, we've created an unnaturally large amount of old growth forest in the boreal, where spruce and pine are prevalent and highly combustible.

But there isn't an expert out there who doubts that climate change is the biggest reason why we're losing the battle to control wildfires.

For every one degree of warming, there needs to be 15 per cent more precipitation to keep the fine combustible fuels on the ground sufficiently moist. So if temperatures rise by about three degrees by the end of the century, which is as conservative an estimate as there is, we'll need 45 per cent more rain. Flannigan says there is nothing in the climate models that suggest we'll come close. In fact, we're likely to get less precipitation in some areas.

More heat is also going to result in more lighting, which currently accounts for 85 per cent of the area burned in Canada. Typically, lightning occurs in clusters where there can be 50 to 100 strikes in a day. But increasingly we're seeing lightning events such as the one that occurred in Alaska last year when a slow-moving storm unleashed 50,000 lightning strikes in just five days. More than five million acres of trees were destroyed in a fire season that turned out to be second worst in the state's history. No one had ever seen anything like it.

What's more, insects like the mountain pine beetle and the spruce bark beetle that kill or weaken mature spruce and pine will continue to proliferate in these warmer environments, adding fuel for combustion.

A perfect firestorm: As climate change dries out forests, humans operating there hold back burns until conditions exist for huge conflagrations like this one ravaging Fort McMurray's environs. Source: Alberta RCMP.

One way to mitigate the problem is to let more fires burn. But in Alberta where there are so many oilsands, pipelines and fracking operations, that's almost impossible to do.

Letting fires burn in more remote places is also risky because there's the potential that it will get out of control. The only way to stop a fire like that is to light another one in front of it to starve it of fuel.

This can only be done when the winds are relatively calm and when there is a break in the topography that allows fire fighters to anchor in.

Will Oilsands Combust?

The chances of oilsands bitumen catching fire are remote because it is mixed with sand and very difficult to ignite. Most of it is buried in subterranean conditions where there is very little oxygen to feed a fire. What's more worrisome is the peat that lies beneath the boreal forest. If a forest fire is sufficiently hot enough, it can burn deep into the peat and smoulder through the winter, potentially destroying seedlings and re-igniting once the snow melts in spring.

Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires. If more fires begin to burn through layers of moss, leaves, and other organic materials that insulate permafrost from surface heat, says the Northern Arizona University scientist, they could release vast amounts of carbon as there is twice as much carbon trapped in permafrost as in the atmosphere.

''As more and more of this carbon is released from the permafrost, temperatures are going to rise even faster,'' he says. ''Permafrost carbon may not be as visible as changes in sea ice, but you can bet that big changes are happening there and it's going to have a big impact on the future.''

Some experts are now talking about the possibility of a 3.5-million-hectare fire that will exceed anything we have seen in North America in the past 150 years.

Chinchaga as Recurring Nightmare

No one knows what such a fire would look like, but the Chinchaga Firestorm of 1950 gives us an idea. It burned for 222 days and torched a stretch of forest that was 280 kilometres long.

It had been an exceptionally hot spring, just as it has been in western Canada this year, when a small wildfire ignited in northern British Columbia. Firefighters were too busy battling other fires to do anything about a little fire like this, which was remote and relatively far from human settlement.

Within a few days though, it crossed into the wildlands of Alberta where the tinder dry forest went on forever. A giant pall of smoke from the blaze led some people in the south to believe that an atomic bomb had exploded.

It was not an alien invasion, a volcanic eruption or an eclipse of the sun as others suspected. At one point though, flights in Canada and the U.S. had to be cancelled. In Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Fort Erie and many towns in New York, it was so dark at mid-day that lights in baseball fields, including those at Yankee Stadium, had to be turned on. Smoke from the fire travelled all the way to Europe. Some Danish people were so jittery when they woke up to see a blue sun rising over the horizon that they went to the bank to withdraw their life savings.

It wasn't just people who were affected. One farmer in Jamestown, New York, described how his chickens, which had fanned out for their midday foraging, suddenly realized they were being caught by darkness, so they scurried back across the cow yard in more than usual earnest, their heads moving in delayed jerks.''

Astronomer Carl Sagan was so intrigued by the Chinchaga fire that he looked into the event to see how it might fit into his concept of a ''nuclear winter.''

According to Flannigan and fire expert Cordy Tymstra, who recently wrote a book on the fire, Chinchaga changed the way we fight fires. But they also say that the time has come to rethink much of what we have learned since then because there will be many more fires, and more assets — small towns, oil fields, pipelines, mines, lodges, and endangered species — that will be in the line of fire.

"I liken Slave Lake and Fort McMurray to a bloody nose," says Flannigan. "Sometimes we need to suffer several bloody noses before we change our behaviour." 

Images: Alberta RCMP

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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.

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.

A health study released today by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Manitoba, is the first of its kind to draw associations between environmental contaminants produced in the oilsands and declines in health in Fort Chipewyan, a native community about 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, Alberta.

The report, Environmental and Human Health Implications of Athabasca Oil Sands, finds health impacts for communities downstream of the Alberta oilsands are “positively associated” with industrial development and the consumption of traditional foods, including locally caught fish.

Dr. Stéphane McLachlan, lead environmental health researcher for the report, said the study’s results “as they relate to human health, are alarming and should function as a wakeup call to industry, government and communities alike.”

Findings include generally high concentrations of carcinogenic PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and heavy metals arsenic, mercury, cadmium and selenium in kidney and liver samples from moose, ducks, muskrats and beavers harvested by community members. A press release for the study says bitumen extraction and upgrading is a major emitter of all of these contaminants.

The Joint Oil Sands Monitoring Program has released data about the increases in these contaminants, but fails to address and monitor impacts to First Nations traditional foods,” said Mikisew Cree Chief Steve Courtoreille. “We are greatly alarmed and demand further research and studies are done to expand on the findings of this report.”

The First Nations worked in concert with University of Manitoba scientists, blending “western science and traditional ecological knowledge” to evaluate contaminant levels and potential community exposure, according to the press release.

“This is the first health study that has been conducted in close collaboration with community members of Fort Chipewyan,” McLachlan said in a recent interview.

“The results are grounded in the environment and health sciences, but also in the local traditional knowledge shared by community members. Unlike any of the other studies it has been actively shaped and controlled by both the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree First Nation from the outset.”

The report comes on the heels of the fifth annual ‘healing walk’ in the oilsands region, during which Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said the report would “blow the socks off industry and government.”

Concerns over high rates of rare forms of bile duct, cervical and lung cancers have worried residents of Fort Chipewyan, a small community 300 kilometres downstream of the oilsands, for years.

A government report in March 2014 found elevated rates of the three forms of cancer in Fort Chip, but suggested overall cancer rates fall on par with cancer rates elsewhere in the province. The report’s author, Dr. James Tablot, chief medical officer for Alberta health, said there was little evidence environmental factors played a role in the elevated cancer rates.

The report was treated as largely inconclusive and confirmed the need for further, independent study.

An editorial in the Calgary Herald argued the report confirmed the need to “settle the matter once and for all” and called for an independent study.

“Only then will the nagging fear — whether founded or unfounded — that the Alberta government is too closely linked with the oilsands to provide objective data and conclusions, be put to rest.”

The community of Fort Chip has struggled for years to have a comprehensive, baseline health study conducted.

In March, Chief Adam suggested it was “time for a real study, that is peer reviewed and done in partnership with our communities.” He suggested the government report was conducted to “ease the public response to this and garner more support for approvals of more projects in the region.”

Today researchers and community leaders called for further investigation of contaminant concentrations, as well as community-based monitoring and improved risk communications from government and industry.

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.

This is a guest post by energy economist Andrew Leach.

Neil Young and the Honour the Treaties Tour is crossing the country in support of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s court challenge against Shell’s proposal to expand its mining operations north of Fort McMurray.

The biggest risk I see from this tour is not that Neil Young says things which are wrong (there have been a few), that he blames Prime Minister Harper for promoting an industry that has played an important role in the policies of pretty well every Prime Minister to precede him in the past four decades (that part was pretty clear), or, least of all, that he’s a famous musician who hasn’t spent his life working on energy policy.

The biggest risk I see is that all of the heat and light around the Neil Young tour will distract you from what you should do, which is to sit down, read the mine approval, and decide for yourself what you think.

A joint review panel approved (PDF) the Jackpine Expansion in July 2013, and in December, the project received cabinet approval. The most important issue here, so far over-shadowed during Neil Young’s tour, is summarized in one line in the decision letter: “the matter of whether the significant adverse environmental effects (of the project) are justified in the circumstances.”

This decision is likely to be as important for the future of the oil sands in Canada and its so-called social license as the pipelines, rail accidents and greenhouse gas policies which have been covered to a much larger degree in the media. This is a decision where your government had spelled out clearly before it the environmental risks and uncertainties of an oil sands project, in all its gory detail, and decided it was worth it or, “justified in the circumstances.”

We’ve come a long way from the days when then-Premier Ed Stelmach declared environmental damage from the oil sands to be a myth.  Around that time, in its approval of the Kearl oil sands mine, for which Phase I started last year, a Joint Review Panel concluded that, “the project is not likely to result in significant adverse environmental effects.” But, the panel evaluating Kearl raised a flag, saying that, “with each additional oil sands project, the growing demands and the absence of sustainable long-term solutions weigh more heavily in the determination of the public interest.”

We’ve now reached the point—the panel evaluating the Jackpine Mine left no doubt—where significant environmental consequences will occur in order to not (and, I kid you not, these are the words used) sterilize bitumen. Reading the Report of the Joint Review Panel (warning, it’s a slog) will be eye opening. Let me give you a couple of excerpts, in case you can’t spare the time:

·      The Panel has concluded that the Project would provide significant economic benefits for the region, the province, and Canada

·      The Project will provide major and long-term economic opportunities to individuals in Alberta and throughout Canada, and will generate a large number of construction and operational jobs.

·      The Panel concludes that the Project would have significant adverse environmental project effects on wetlands, traditional plant potential areas, wetland-reliant species at risk, migratory birds that are wetland-reliant or species at risk, and biodiversity

·      The Panel understands that a large loss (over 10,000 hectares) of wetland would result from the Project, noting in particular that 85 per cent of those wetlands are peatlands that cannot be reclaimed.

·      The Panel finds that diversion of the Muskeg River is in the public interest, considering that approximately 23 to 65 million cubic metres of resource would be sterilized if the river is not diverted

·      The Panel recognizes that the relevant provincial agencies were not at the hearing to address questions about why the Project (which seeks to divert the Muskeg River: author’s addition) is not included in the Muskeg River Interim Management Framework for Water Quantity and Quality;

·      The Panel concludes that it could not rely on Shell’s assessment of the significance of project and cumulative effects on terrestrial resources;

·      The Panel notes that a substantial amount of habitat for migratory birds that are wetland or old-growth forest dependent will be lost entirely or lost for an extended period;

·      The Panel is concerned about the lack of mitigation measures proposed for loss of wildlife habitat…that have been shown to be effective.

Don’t stop reading before you get to the good parts:

·      Although the Panel has concluded that the Project is in the public interest, project and cumulative effects for key environmental parameters and socioeconomic impacts in the region have weighed heavily in the Panel’s assessment;

·      All of the Aboriginal groups that participated in the hearing raised concerns about the adequacy of consultation by Canada and Alberta, particularly with respect to the management of cumulative effects in the oil sands region and the impact of these effects on their Aboriginal and treaty rights.

It’s these last two that have got us to where we are today—to a First Nation challenging the government in court for a decision that it made which valued bitumen over the environment and their traditional territory and for not fulfilling its constitutional duty to consult on that decision.

The decision on this project will, in all likelihood, go all the way to the top court in the land. The decision which really matters, however, will be the one you take: is it justified, in your mind, given the circumstances?

This article originally appeared on Maclean's. Republished here with permission. Read Leach's Neil Young Fact Check, also on Maclean's, here.

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The impending closure of a key multi-stakeholder group that provides advice to Alberta and the federal government on the environmental effects of the oilsands was unexpectedly delayed by an injection of money from oil companies.

The funds come at a time when the future – and the purpose – of the organization, which involves the participation of aboriginal, industry, government and environmental groups, is increasingly uncertain. 

The Edmonton Journal reports that the 12-year-old Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA) was to be shut down on January 1, which would have resulted in layoffs, eviction from their offices, and the termination of contracts with scientists working on issues ranging from speedier land reclamation in the oilsands to the improvement of water quality.

However, oil company stakeholders provided $400,000 to keep the organization funded for a little while longer.

"It is for the first month of 2014 only," CEMA spokesman Corey Hobbs told Fort McMurray Today.

CEMA's uncertain future depends on Alberta's newly appointed Environment Minister Robin Campbell, who can resist pressure from the energy industry to have the organization shut down.

"We are optimistic that Minister Campbell will make a positive decision for the future of CEMA," said Hobbs. "There is no indication from anyone that the province does not support CEMA's research or work in the oilsands."

Managing Impacts

According to Andrew Read, Technical and Policy Analyst with the Pembina Institute, CEMA’s role is to “produce recommendations and provide management frameworks” regarding the cumulative impacts of the oilsands. The group consists of more than 50 members ranging from First Nations and Metis groups, environmental advocacy organizations and industry.

CEMA’s recommendations are based on the monitoring work of other environmental agencies.

According to Read, environmental monitoring agencies and CEMA provide complementary work: “monitoring agencies watch what’s happening in the environment and CEMA develops plans on how we can manage the resultant effects of industry to maintain environmental quality.”

The Pembina Institute withdrew from CEMA in 2008 citing numerous shortcomings with the multi-stakeholder framework, including a continued failure to adequately address environmental concerns.

CEMA has been struggling since 2012, when the Oil Sands Developers Group cut the organization's 2013 budget to $2.5 million for the first six months, down from $5 million the previous year. Then-environment minister Diana McQueen restored the group's funding and ordered a review of its future.

The province’s review, submitted in August 2013, showed industry wanted CEMA shut down. Renewed funding for the organization was refused. In September, industry members called for CEMA to be disbanded and its policy development job shifted to an industry-only group.

"We're very close to losing CEMA," said CEMA executive director Glen Semenchuck. "We've been waiting for five months for the minister to respond. Is CEMA going to survive? I don't know."

An Industry Imbalance?

Helene Walsh, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society representative to CEMA, says the cuts in industry funding are the result of an increase in non-industry stakeholder input.

“CEMA was largely industry dominated until the organization was restructured a few years ago with the four different chambers [aboriginal, environmental, industry and government] given equal voting power. Soon after that industry started reducing their funding and now they want CEMA to stop its work,” she said.

With CEMA shuttered, it would be difficult to know how non-industry groups, like First Nations, could contribute to cumulative impacts management, says Read.

“Without CEMA, there is a significant vacuum of expertise in the management of cumulative effects in Alberta that balances the needs of all of the stakeholders in the oilsands region. If it were to cease to exist, there would be a significant need for increased government and industry engagement with stakeholders to identify and address the various cumulative effects resulting from oilsands development.”

CEMA was founded in 2001 by former Premier Ralph Klein with the mandate of addressing the oil industry's environmental footprint. It is the only scientific agency that does government policy work by engaging all local stakeholders for consensus decisions.

Moving Ahead, But in the Wrong Direction

Alberta recently established the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA) intended to harmonize and ensure the credibility of environmental monitoring across the province.

Read said the Pembina Institute is “watching the establishment of AEMERA carefully as it will dictate the credibility of environmental information that is reported by the agency.”

“We are concerned about the substantial powers being granted to the AEMERA board which is appointed by the government and does not require equal or fair representation of all stakeholders. Ultimately without fair and equal representation on the board, AEMERA may suffer from the same credibility issues as past agencies have,” Read said.

In the last year, CEMA released a detailed guidance document on end-pit lakes, and hopes to release a wetland reclamation policy guide and a framework to help industry and government understand Aboriginal traditional knowledge, in 2014.

With no budget for 2014, scientific projects are currently frozen.

Alberta also faces the possible closure of the Wood Buffalo Environmental Agency (WBEA), which monitors air pollution in the oilsands area and is currently running on emergency funds.

“If CEMA were strengthened and aboriginal and environmental groups were truly able to influence the development of the tar sands there would be hope for positive change and improved management that could improve the prospects for healthy water, air, land, wildlife, people and communities,” says Walsh, who also works with Keepers of the Athabasca.

“Closure of CEMA is a step in the wrong direction.”

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It’s no secret that the province of Alberta, the government Canada, and the titans of the fossil fuel industry pride themselves on robust regulatory and oversight structures when it comes to the extraction of natural resources.

"Environmental protection is a priority for our government and Canada is a global environmental leader," said Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver. "This is why Canada's oil sands are subject to some of the most stringent environmental regulations and monitoring in the world."

"The regulations that are in place are very stringent, the most stringent in North America and certainly around the world," added Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, Diana McQueen. "We have a lot of development in this province, but we also have very tough regulations with regards to any spills that happen."

"The system is working," continued Alberta Energy Regulator CEO Jim Ellis. "We have the resources we need now to properly regulate it. And that includes compliance, on the ground inspections, regulations… They are capably handling the workload right now."

"It was extremely frustrating. I just reached a point where I was so frustrated I said, 'I'm going to do whatever it takes to extract this information' because I just felt wronged by the whole process," said Timoney. "It just seems like it’s a process that’s designed not to release information but rather to appear to release information."

"When you've looked at thousands of these records, what we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg," added Timoney. "It was evident that there were thousands of incidents the public didn't know anything about."

"Not every incident is going to result in a compliance action," responded Alberta Environment spokesperson Jessica Potter when asked about such a low rate of enforcement. "The determination as to whether or not we move forward with an enforcement action entirely depends on what we find in that investigation."

In short, as both Timoney and the study are at pains to point out, the governments of Alberta and Canada are "absolutely not" doing enough to enforce regulations. "There is this disconnect between the statement from the government that we have these great regulations and we’re strictly enforcing them, and the reality, which is that there are thousands of violations about which they do nothing."

"I feel very strongly that the public has a right to know what’s happening," concluded Timoney. "In this situation, what we’re trying to do is say, 'Decide for yourself. Here’s the information that we gathered. If you wish to decide that environmental management in the bitumen sands region is good or bad, here's a set of information that you can look at to decide for yourself.'"

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