Sunday 1 February 2015

Saturday August 9 Canoe Trip begins in Ft Mac at the Snye



Saturday August 9     Canoe Trip begins in Ft Mac at the Snye

We start our journey on August 9th. For breakfast (and lunch for that matter) I try to choke down some surplus overcooked cous cous from last night. I had bought and packed trip food for three of us: Brittany, my nephew, Evan, and myself.  I had assumed that Evan, a husky guy who stands 6’ 3, would eat twice as much. In fact, he is eating less than me, and we have way too much food.  After a morning and early afternoon of picking up last minute supplies in Ft Mac, arranging for a place to leave vehicles (left them at McMurray Aviation and took a taxi back to the Snye where our canoes and part of our group are waiting), and a way to get the canoes and us back from Ft Chip (we will fly and Raymond Ladouceur will again barge our canoes back on a bigger barge that he is now operating but he cannot take us as well due to insurance issues), we are finally ready. I have tried without success to arrange meetings today. It is a little disappointing, and by the time we leave it is now 4 PM.

We start out and right away I end up behind because I keep stopping to film. I begin to realize that my Innova canoe is less than ideal for filming because of its rocker (curved bottom useful in rapids because it turns easily). As soon as I stop paddling to film, it begins to rotate due to its lack of directional stability, making it awkward to film from. However, I am getting some interesting footage. 


Cliffs bearing oil sands

About 1 km downstream from our starting point, I pass an attractive, well-kept farmstead and decide to go on to do a bit of filming and see if there is anyone there. The others, no doubt impatient to get somewhere, do not wait but push on.
There is a small house and a red barn and a few assorted out-buildings. There is an older couple (around 70) working in their large garden. They are Jack and Mary-Jane Peden. I talk to them for a couple of minutes and tell them what I am doing. Jack does most of the talking. They are not at all interested in being filmed or recorded, although Jack is pretty upset and has a lot to say to me. He is very distrustful of journalists as he has been interviewed many times. In spite of his cheerleading for the oil sands, coverage that comes out is inevitably negative by those he has talked to, and he does not understand it. Jack’s father, he tells me, is Claire Peden, the first mayor of Ft McMurray, when the population (62 000 in 2011, having doubled in the previous 15 years) was about 800 (it surpassed 1000 in the early 50’s). 

According to Jack, who grew up poor, who ran cattle in his younger days and has worked for Syncrude for 40 years,  the oil sands is the best thing that has happened to Ft Mac. It has the best environmental regulations in the world, and there are no environmental problems. If the oil sands shut down, the whole country would be out of work. He was responsible for the bison herd in the middle of the oil sands development that is Syncrude’s environmental show piece. He tells me that the bison are very carefully monitored and that they contain no contamination. I was intrigued, and asked in honest curiousity, how I could see the bison tissue data. At the moment, I was thinking that perhaps this data was going to contradict everything I had learned about the oil sands. However, Jack informed me with indignation that the data belonged to Syncrude and that since they had paid for it, they had no obligation to share it with anyone. He was in no mood to listen to anything, so I did not point out to him that if Syncrude had data showing that animals living in the middle of the open pit mines of the oil sands were not contaminated, Syncrude would have been sharing that data far and wide. Very far and wide. 

Clearly, Jack’s mind was made up, and like many others who are profiting from the oil sands, he did not want to be confused with the facts. He also told me that he continued to fish in the river, and that in fact the fishing was better than ever, because “the natives” were no longer fishing in the Athabasca River. It did occur to me that this stretch of river was upstream of all the oil sands tailings ponds (vast toxic man-made lakes would be more accurate) which were leaking into the river, so that this area would be likely less contaminated. It also occurred to me that the only other people I had found this summer or last who ate fish out of the Athabasca River in the vicinity of the Oil Sands, was Cathy and Larry McGinnis. They ran the outfitting business downstream at Embarras Portage until this year; Larry is dying of cancer.  I did speak to the McGinnis’ son-in-law last summer, a Victoria doctor, who was visiting with his family and was returning with his son from fishing when I spoke to him. He was emphatic that eating the fish out of the river was out of the question. 

Jack also informed me that there are more bears than ever in the area. (This may be more appearance than reality, as all of the industrial activity in the area is pushing the bears, changing their routines, and possibly putting them into more contact with people, of which there are a lot more than ever before in wilderness areas.) He also mentions that there are very few songbirds anymore but is quick to add that this has nothing to do with the oil sands and is probably due to an increase in magpie numbers. 

Finally, Jack makes a quick dig at Dr John O’Connor, saying that the doctor is stirring up false rumours of cancers in the area, and proof that it is all false is that the doctor has been charged. This is the good PR work of Alberta Health , since although the investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta  has been dropped, O’Connor has never actually been cleared, and his reputation is in a kind of limbo: useful if you want to imply that he is untrustworthy without any evidence.

I paddle on, but the others are out of sight, having continued without me. I do not blame them as it is getting late. I find out later that they have left a message on my cell phone but it is turned off and packed away. I continue to film the high banks, up to 50 meters high, in which you can clearly see the layers of oil sands. Chunks of the tarry stuff are to be found along the shore. I continue to stop and film from my inflatable white water canoe. Bringing the inflatable was a way to get another canoe here without a third vehicle, but it has its shortcomings. It is slow especially solo. More irritating is the fact that, because it turns on a dime, it has no directional stability. As soon as I stop paddling to film, the boat starts rotating. 


First campsite on the river

An hour or two later, I catch up to the group who has already stopped to set up camp on an island. Camped on a 100 meter long sand bar island with a dense willow thicket in the middle, this trip takes on the character of any northern boreal forest canoe trip. I relax a little and we make supper. The water flows fast in the channel between sand bars and it is soothing to watch and listen to, and I sleep well.

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.

Reflections on the Past Year (between the Oil Sands trips of 2013 and 2014, and beyond)



Reflections on the Past Year (between the Oil Sands trips of 2013 and 2014, and beyond)

We start our journey on August 9th, moving into the vicinity of the world’s largest tailings ponds, just 5 days after (August 4th) the bursting of the tailings pond dam at the Imperial Metals Mt Polley Open Pit Copper and Gold mine near Likely, BC. It has been called the biggest environmental disaster in Canadian history.

On August 6th, two and a half days after the breach, the BC government ordered mine owner Imperial Metals Corp. to immediately stop the release of toxic material into surrounding waterways. Unfortunately, by this time, the tailings pond was empty of its 24 million cubic meters of water and tailings. The president of the company apologized to Likely residents but could not refrain from telling them that the water that had destroyed Hazeltine Creek and contaminated Quesnel Lake was of drinkable quality; he did not mention whether the accompanying tailings, containing an estimated 326 tonnes of nickel, over 400 tonnes of arsenic, and 177 tonnes of lead, were also of drinkable quality. 

The BC government initially claimed that it was not an environmental disaster. This was not surprising as the largest shareholder of the mine, Alberta billionaire Murray Edwards, has raised over a million dollars for the BC Liberals, and donated another half million over the last 10 years. Also, developing 8 new mines in BC by 2015 was an important part of the BC Liberals’ 2013 campaign platform. 

It is worthy of note that the BC Liberal government had cut back their environmental monitoring of mines.  The average number of inspections conducted each year is now less than half of what it was in the 1990s when the NDP was in power. From 1993 to 2000, an average of 48 inspections were conducted each year. Between 2001-2013 that number dropped to 21.
...

In July 2013, I went up to the Oil Sands area for the first time.  I was there for the 5th annual Healing Walk. A month earlier there was a substantial pipeline spill south of Ft Mac. While we were there, three hundred people, mostly from the Fort McMurray FN, were involved in the on-going clean-up efforts, we were told by a FMFN band member. 

Views from the walk 2013



The Walk 2013

Traffic on Hwy 63 during the Walk

The day of that Healing Walk (with 500 participants), we received news of the explosion at Lac Mégantic overnight, another sign of the dangers of oil and reckless corporate-government collusion. I say that because all kinds of evidence have since come to light. Transport Canada gave MMA (Montreal, Maine and Atlantic, the rail company  that owned the train that exploded) permission to reduce their train crew to ONE person over the strenuous objections of the Montreal office, the union, and a variety of transportation experts. MMA has a long history of safety violations. The MMA tracks were in extremely poor condition and yet were not designated as an ‘excepted track’, which would have prohibited the transport of dangerous goods. MMA`s safety management system, which all railways are required to have in place was not approved until 2010, 7 years after its submission to Transport Canada. MMA was supposed to provide a risk assessment after the major increase in crude oil transport. It appears that it never did. And so on: there is a lot more.

The day before we left on the canoe trip last year (2013), the Alberta Energy Regulator approved a lease for a new SAGD (Steam assisted gravity drainage) tar sands project (the Dover Commercial Project).  It is adjacent to Ft McKay FN lands referred to as the Moose Lake Reserve, 50 km northwest of Ft McKay. The reserve contains Moose Lake where many FMFN members have built cabins and there are also band-owned cabins. According to the Ft McKay FN website:
“This particular area in our traditional territory is sacred to the community of Fort McKay and is the resting place of many of our ancestors.”
“Moose Lake is one of the only areas far enough away from oil sands development where the people of Fort McKay can hunt, trap, fish, and pick berries safely and in peace. Fort McKay First Nation is committed to the protection and preservation of Moose Lake in order to ensure our children and grandchildren have a clean, peaceful place to keep our traditions and culture alive.”
The Ft McKay Band had asked for a 20 km buffer zone around the lake for the above reasons. They were granted 1.2 km. The lease holder is Brion Energy Corporation, a joint venture between Athabasca Oil Corp. and PetroChina Co. (now Phoenix Energy Holdings),  promises to exploit the resource “in an environmentally acceptable manner” according to the Brion website. The Dover project is expected to produce approximately 4.1 billion barrels of bitumen. At $50 per barrel of bitumen, that amounts to $200 billion. One quarter of that amount would have been lost if the Alberta Energy Regulator or Brion Energy could have dialed back their greed and given in to Ft McKay’s request. Ft McKay FN appealed but has since settled out of court.
...
As if to highlight the risks involved in SAGD projects, we also learned last summer (2013) that there was  a major underground and surface spill of bitumen from a SAGD operation in the Cold Lake area to the south. It started 2 weeks before our arrival, and approximately 1 million liters of bitumen had already leaked out. There is no known method to stop the flow. In a SAGD operation, tar sands deep underground are heated with hot water pipes and another series of deeper pipes, in theory, collects the melted tar. This spill continued for almost a year, until the spring of 2014, and it highlights the fact that SAGD operations are an unproven and unsafe technology. That and one other method of ‘in situ’ oil sands extraction are to be the main methods of getting most of the oil (tar) out of the oil sands.
...
Will the companies responsible pay for a spill cleanup (to the limited extent even possible) when there is one? Let’s look back 25 years. When the Exxon-Valdez spilled a portion of its cargo into Prince William Sound in 1989, Exxon  was fined by a US court $5.3 billion. But did they pay? For fourteen years, Exxon’s lawyers appealed the decision no less than 4 times and were able to reduce the judgement on three of the decisions. Final result? Exxon paid less than 10% of the original judgement: $0.5 billion. And this was a company with annual revenues of $420 billion, based in the US, and the judgements were in a US court. What do you think would happen if the Canadian  government  takes a Chinese company to court? 
...
Alberta has a carbon tax of $15/tonne, half of BC`s. However, it is only for industry and Alberta exempts 96% of its industrial climate pollution from paying the carbon tax. Some tax.
...


The 2014 Report of the Canadian Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development  (Julie Gelfand) was tabled in January 2015. Among other things, she noted that after 6 years of “planning”, the Harper government still has no plan for reducing GHGs in the Oil and Gas industry. Canada is not on track to meet even the watered-down (from Kyoto) targets agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009. In December 2014, Harper declared that it would now be ‘crazy’ to start putting GHG regulations in place when oil prices are low.

Gelfland  also noted that the Joint Oil Sands Monitoring program (JOSM) began two years ago, is still not doing a good job of monitoring and the federal contribution is neither transparent nor is its future assured. JOSM was announced by the Federal and Alberta governments as a “World Class” oil sands environmental monitoring program in 2012 after the Royal Society of Canada report that year determined that the previous monitoring program (also trumpeted as being “world class”) was  inadequate, unscientific, and uncoordinated.
...

Questions worthy of asking.
1.  Why does Canada want to ship raw bitumen out of the country? In Norway, they insist on maximizing the jobs from oil. They have no pipelines to the coast because they do all the refining in the country. If we legislated it, the oil companies would build the refineries here.

2. Why do we have cutbacks to the CBC, Canada Post, Education, Scientific endeavours, Fisheries and Forestry officials, and Health Care? Because we keep cutting taxes to the wealthy and corporations. Norway takes in 5 times what Canada/Alberta does from each barrel of oil. 

3. Why are we trying to liquidate a non-renewable resource like oil when future generations will need it? If we developed it much more slowly, it would be possible to reclaim the land and avoid polluting and drying out the entire watershed.
...
More evidence of the Canadian government priorities. The Natural Resources Canada spending report submitted to Parliament in the fall of 2014 indicated that it  failed to spend $298.6-million on programs for "green" programs such as renewable energy development and technology innovation.

The lapses in spending on green programs or technologies that would help cut greenhouse gas emissions included a further $1 million the department left unspent from $10.9-million that had been allocated for a Climate Change Adaptation Program. It also left untouched almost the entirety of $22 million that had been dedicated to a satellite earth observation program, which was supposed to provide data on vegetation, land and water conditions in the "oil sands region" as well as other oil and gas-producing region. The observation was supposed to help with developing an ecological baseline to measure environmental damage caused by oil and gas extraction. 

Meanwhile, Natural Resources Canada spent $438.3 million on programs to support the oil and gas industry -- it spent $41.6 million more, or nearly 10 per cent extra, than the amount it was allotted for the 2013-2014 fiscal year. The federal government spent $24 million in an ad blitz promoting Canadian oil and Keystone XL in key cities like Washington in the U.S., but according to a survey, the ad campaign has had little impact across the border.
...

There is an ongoing lawsuit by Jessica Ernst, a former consultant to the oil and gas industry in Alberta, which alleges that industry activity including the hydraulic fracturing of shallow coal seams between 2001 and 2004 in central Alberta contaminated local aquifers with methane, making Ernst's water flammable. 
In particular, the lawsuit alleges that the ERCB (now called the Alberta Energy Regulator) violated Ernst's right to free expression under the Charter by banishing her from contact with the board while she was dealing with the pollution issues on her property. Last year, Chief Justice Neil Wittmann ruled that the case against Encana and Alberta Environment could proceed to trial, but he dismissed the claim against the Alberta Energy Regulator on the grounds that a statutory immunity clause excepted it from civil action and Charter claims. 



 Jessica Ernst
Ernst's lawyer Murray Klippenstein has appealed that ruling, saying that no government or province can legislate themselves out of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, on which Ernst's claim is based. The astounding thing about this is that the Alberta government is claiming that the Alberta Energy Regulator, the body that decides what Oil and Gas projects (including all of those in the Oils Sands) are approved, has NO duty to protect Alberta citizens. If not, what exactly does it have a duty to protect??

Of the fourteen defining characteristics of fascism (cited by Dr Lawrence Britt after studying regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and several Latin American countries), the Harper government along with its corporate friends,  is now clearly displaying seven of these, including Mass Media Control, Obsession with National Security, Corporate Power Protection, Suppression of Labour Rights, Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts, Obsession with Crime and Punishment, and Fraudulent Elections.
Personally, I cannot wait for an election. Not that that will solve all our problems, but it will be a good start if we can elect a government which does not have its mind made up before it has the facts.

I can`t end my reflections without some good news on energy.

1. Germany generated over HALF of its electricity demand from Solar Energy for the first time on June 9, 2014!!

2. In France, some 20 companies and institutions employing 10 000 people have signed up to pay their staff  CDN $0.36/km to bike to work in a 6-month long experiment. Other countries with bike-to-work schemes include: Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Belgium and Germany.

3. One fifth of the world’s power production now comes from renewable sources. In 2014, 95 developing countries have policies to support renewable energy (compared to only 15 countries in 2005).