Day 1 (Part 1) Tar Sands Canoe Trip

Tuesday August 6     “Don’t eat the fish”

            Tuesday morning at 7 AM, 7 of us drive from Edmonton to the Gregoire Lake campground just south of Ft McMurray (5 hours). Here we meet the three other canoeists who had driven from the Ministikiwan Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan. Now we are ten, all interested in finding out what is going on in the tar sands.

                                                                    Our group

              From here on, I am going to use the term “tar sands” which is much more accurate but out of favour with oil companies and the Harper and Alberta governments, who now call them "oil sands". “Tar sands” is the term used in the on-line Encyclopedia Britannica. Using the term "oil sands" is like calling a cattle ranch a "steak and leather ranch". If we are going to name things by the products we get from them, better to call it the "money and pollution sands".
 
            During our drive, we pass police cars surrounding a transport truck which is leaking yellow ooze: liquid sulfur from the tar sands. (The tar in tar sands is made of 5% Sulphur. The piles of it at the tar sands upgraders are Brobdingnagian in size.) The heavy truck traffic on Hwy 63 is more than I have ever seen. Semi-trailers can load only 8 of the tires for the tar sands trucks that carry the dug-up sands to the upgrader. They are that big.

                                                Kevin in front of a tar sands mining truck tire

            At the campground, we set up on two campsites. We have four vehicles. We are told by the private operators of the provincial campground (this is how provincial parks have been run in Alberta for a long time) that if there are more than two tents per site we will have to pay double ($64 instead of $32 per campsite). A sure sign that oil workers are often living at the campground. We take down some of our tents, double up, and Clifford and I sleep in the back of Kevin’s truck.

            Tuesday afternoon we visit the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Ft Mac (Ft McMurray), a half hour drive. Here they have a good explanation of how the tar sands operations work. But also there are some red herring exhibits about the environment: one, for instance, about the fact that beavers almost became extinct in Canada by the early 1930s. Not sure the connection but can guess why they put it in. 

            Likewise there is a short film that quotes an elder, Fred MacDonald, from Ft McKay, now deceased. In the film he is quoted as saying that “things are bad and will get worse”. However, his words "are spun" by adding that Fred knew that you can’t exploit the oil sands without consequences.

                                            The big picture: Mackenzie R watershed in green

            Everywhere you go here and everyone you talk to has an opinion. There is clearly a conflict between the big money to be made by companies, governments and workers, and the big 7 problems (my list): 

11.  Contribution to climate change of increasing the supply of oil, and especially with oil which requires three times as much energy input to produce as conventional oil. 

22.  Heavy metal and PAH pollution of the water and drying out of the Mackenzie Arctic watershed which drains 20% of Canada’s land mass; and resulting effect on the fish and wildlife. 

33.  Distortion of the Canadian economy and social problems caused by the extremely rapid development and enormous influx of capital. 

44.  Lack of reasonable taxation of the oil companies in Alberta. 

55.   The lack of democracy and the deceit of  both the companies and the provincial and federal governments in overseeing (read NOT overseeing) the tar sands development.

66.  The lack of a serious reclamation effort in spite of the rhetoric.

77.  And the biggest one: the opportunity cost of NOT investing all this money in the major changes to Canadian society needed to avert catastrophic climate change and other growing environmental and societal problems.

  A map of all tar sands projects below. Note that only a small area north of Ft McMurray (bordered in pink) has deposits close enough to the surface to use open pit mining. The rest are all using SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage): an experimental technology. According to this recent map, there are 128 active projects, 27 approved or under construction, and another 39 that have been announced and in the application process. This map comes from Alberta Energy, government of Alberta, updated July 2013.

               Four of us visit “the Snye”, the site where we will launch the canoes the next day. It is on the Clearwater River, a few hundred meters before its confluence with the Athabasca River within the Ft McMurray city limits. At the Snye (a word which means a side channel of a river), there are several people fishing. Asked if they eat the fish, they all answer no. I throw sticks for my dog, Willow, in the Clearwater. The current is strong and she is getting old. On the second throw, she gets pinned by the current against logs piled up from spring flooding. She keeps swimming but getting nowhere, and getting weaker by the minute. Finally, I empty my pockets, wade out and climb over the big pile of logs to haul her up onto the logs. True to form, she growls at me when I pull her out. She would have drowned but is still indignant about the whole thing. The four of us snack on peanuts and dried fruit. The others have gone to a restaurant to eat. We will meet up at the Ft Mac airport.