Friday August 8 Arrival in Gregoire Lake, near Ft Mac

Friday August 8     Arrival in Gregoire Lake, near Ft Mac

This year there were five of us to start: Rua Mercier, a retired emergency room physician and now writer from Vancouver (originally from New Zealand); Judy MacFarlane, a former lawyer, now a writer also from Vancouver. (I had met both of them at the Sage Hill Writers Workshop in Lumsden, SK, the previous summer). There was Brittany Carmichael, the daughter of a good friend, who is a photographer who also came on the same trip the previous summer. As well, there was my nephew, Evan Pivnick, a political science graduate, who works for Andrew Weaver, the first Green Party MLA in BC.  We were to meet up with another of 7-10 people in Ft McKay.

Last night, we picked up two rental canoes (Evergreen Pals) at MEC in Edmonton. The fifth person, me, will use my inflatable Innova canoe: easy to transport and great in whitewater but does not hold a lot of gear and is slow on flat water.

We started off from Edmonton with a meeting (and a taped interview) with John O’Connor at a small cafe in Edmonton (where he lives). He tells us more of the story of what is going on in Ft McKay (where he still works as the community doctor) and in Ft Chipewyan (where he is no longer the doctor, but still has a lot of close ties).  He gives us more anecdotes of collusion between the oil industry and the provincial and federal governments to downplay any possible health effects of the oil sands industry. He was caught in the middle of the tension between reality and the rose-tinted version offered by industry and government because he did his job conscientiously. This whole thing has been a major disruption to his and his family’s life (for a while they moved back to Nova Scotia to get away from the attacks on his competence by Health Canada and Alberta Health. The attacks eventually stopped, and the complaints lodged against him with the Alberta College of Physicians were dropped although the government bodies never explained why they dropped the charges, meaning that he is still in limbo in terms of his reputation. This makes it relatively easy for oil industry supporters to say (and I have heard this) that he has been discredited even though this is not true. John gave me a number of contacts that I should talk to in Ft McKay and Ft Chip. As it turned out, I was not able to get together with any of them, but I will try again next summer.  

After the interview, we drove onward to Ft McMurray.  Like last year, we camped just short  of Ft Mac at the Gregoire Lake campground. After setting up camp, it began to rain, and then poured. We cancelled our aerial tour of the oilsands development with Ft Mac Aviation scheduled for that evening  due to the weather. We set up a number of tarps at the campsite and were able to cook and eat a supper in relative harmony. It was a very wet evening, but everyone’s spirits were high.