Genevieve Simms
Clean up Alberta’s embarrassing oilsands mess
Who could have known that a flock of ducks on its way home for the summer was fated to become a powerful symbol of all that is wrong with Alberta’s most vital industrial project — the oilsands.
As much of the world knows by now about 500 ducks died when they set down on a lake of oily goo usually referred to by the petroleum industry and the government as a tailings pond; tailings pond being a much more neutral phrase than 22 square kilometres of the toxic sludge produced when oil is extracted from the sand it is embedded in.
And that’s just one tailings pond. There are almost a dozen and they cover about 55 square kilometres. Within 10 years when all the planned oilsands projects are up and running they will cover three times that area.
As fate would also have it at about the same time the ducks were dying Alberta Deputy Premier Ron Stevens was winging his way home from a trip to Washington D.C. where he went to great pains to convince U.S. lawmakers that oil extracted from the oilsands is not “dirty.”
That’s how those alarmed about the environmental impact of these massive strip-mining projects are describing it stateside. This matters a lot to the powers that be in Alberta because if enough Americans think our oil is “dirty” they may stop importing it. Thanks to the unfortunate ducks Stevens was left with a lot more than egg on his face.
It’s a storyline that could have come out of a Robert Redford movie. Eager Alberta politician goes to Washington to spin a story about his government’s strict environmental policies. As the senators and congressmen considered what he had to say photographs of ducks drowning in poisonous muck popped up on CNN and the Internet.
And wasn’t it just the week before that Greenpeace militants swooped in on Premier Ed Stelmach’s fancy fundraising dinner in Edmonton and dropped a huge sign from the ceiling that read “Stelmach: The Best Premier Oil Money Can Buy”? Timing was certainly on their side.
The tailings pond belongs to Syncrude — a joint venture of Imperial Oil ConocoPhilipps Petro-Canada EnCana and Nexen — and is the world’s largest oilsands operation. The poisonous pond was built in 1973 and according to a Syncrude spokesperson the ducks died because a system of small cannons designed to issue warning shots was not up and running due to recent snowstorms.
This sounds like a reasonable explanation until one asks why on Earth hugely profitable corporations and a wealthy provincial government couldn’t come up with something better than a contraption that is no more than a complex scarecrow. And that begets an even bigger question: Why have these toxic lakes been allowed to fester for so long?
Tailings ponds line both sides of the Athabasca River which flows into the Mackenzie River basin. Many are already leaking and creating their own tainted wetlands. Minnows dropped into the ponds die within 96 hours. Residents of Fort Chipewyan which lies downstream from the oilsands projects have long been complaining about the weird-looking fish they pull out of the water and the high incidence of certain cancers in their community.
Just last January the Pembina Institute issued its first environmental report card in which it assessed the performance of 10 major oilsands operations. Syncrude received the lowest score (18 per cent) and refused to provide information for the survey.
The report card observed that overall “Information about the actual and proposed environmental performance of individual oilsands operations is not easily accessible…. There is little comparative information about the actual and proposed environmental performance of individual oilsands operations and far too little discussion of best practices available to oilsands developers.”
Talk about canaries in a coal mine. The fate of the 500 ducks is symbolic of much deeper problems when it comes to the environmental consequences of Canada’s largest industrial project.
Unfortunately most of the CEOs and politicians including Prime Minister Stephen Harper who called the death of the ducks a “tragedy” seem more concerned about polishing up their tarnished reputations than actually doing anything to lessen or limit the environmental quagmire that caused the deaths of the hapless ducks in the first place.
Stelmach has called for an investigation. It will likely focus on why the scarecrow didn’t work rather than what lies beneath the scarecrow. That may satisfy a lot of Albertans but it’s becoming clear that we are going to face more and more embarrassing questions posed by people outside the province if we don’t clean up our act.
Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based journalist who has covered politics since the Lougheed days.
