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.
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