Oil sands mining | Canada called to be consistent

(Montreal) Canada must avoid aggravating the heavy environmental impact of oil sands development and implement what it advocates at the 15^e United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP15), argue indigenous nations and environmental organizations.

Ottawa plans to change the Fisheries Act to allow “discharge of treated effluent” from oil sands operations into the Athabasca River and its tributaries in Alberta, which is of concern.

These are process waters used to separate sand from bitumen and produce oil, which contain various heavy metals and chemicals, and which are stored in huge tailings ponds.

“We cannot protect biodiversity while we have laws that could compromise it; we are not going to keep it on one side and ruin it on the other”, declared to The Press Aliénor Rougeot, head of the climate and energy program of the Canadian non-governmental organization Environmental Defence.

Ottawa must be consistent, she said on the sidelines of a presentation on the oil sands Thursday at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal.

The Fisheries Act prohibits the discharge of toxic substances into waters that are home to fish or into waters that could reach waters that contain them, recalls M^me Red mullet.

“The government is in the process, at the request of the industry, of developing regulations which would make an exception to [cette interdiction] for the oil sands,” she worries, lamenting the vagueness surrounding the treatment that the effluents would undergo.

“We did not have any data that shows us the treatment, the list of all the chemicals”, indicates M^me Rougeot, who claims that the evaluation of the proposed treatments be made by an independent toxicologist.

“It can’t be up to the industry to say it’s safe,” she said.

Indigenous nations living near the Athabasca are demanding more studies be done, said Mikisew Cree First Nation spokesperson Melody Lepine.

Aboriginal nations have also been calling for a plan to rehabilitate tailings ponds from oil sands mines for years, but they are wary of the project to treat the water they contain to discharge it into the Athabasca River.

“What we understand is that the industry wants to reject them not to rehabilitate, but to refill the basins by producing more, because it would be more complicated to develop new basins”, indicates Aliénor Rougeot .

However, the basins are “already leaking” and the cumulative effects of possible discharges of water into the river are unknown, she says.

“We have a river which is already so polluted that we are already in a fairly dangerous area”, estimates M^me Red mullet.

“A war” of water

From 1975 to 2020, the size of oil sands industry tailings ponds grew from 2.4 square kilometers to 307 square kilometres, observed a report released in May by Environmental Defense and the Northern Alberta Chapter of the Nature Society. and parks (SNAP).

“These tailings ‘ponds’ are located perilously close to the Athabasca River, one of Canada’s great rivers, which flows through Alberta and the Northwest Territories to join the Mackenzie River, which empties into the Arctic Ocean,” the report wrote.

“Water respects no boundaries created by humans,” said Tori Cress, communications manager for Keepers of the Water, an organization that campaigns for water protection.

Ottawa and various Aboriginal communities are working together on a Crown-Aboriginal working committee that is evaluating “alternatives to the discharge of oil sands effluent”.

The Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, is following the file “very closely”, he told The Pressaffirming its desire to do things well.

“No decision has been made yet, and will not be until the end of the committee’s work. And it will be based on science and indigenous knowledge,” he said.

This working group has developed an assessment of the solutions, which “could be entrusted to experts in water management in order to protect the environment,” indicated Mr. Guilbeault.