Did Alberta give the tar sand oil fields away to global demands? Andrew Nikiforuk’s 2008 book ” TAR SANDS Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent” is worth reading from a historical and practical perspective. The book was written at a time when multinational companies invested heavily in the tar sands and made huge profits while Alberta citizen were left with polluted air, water and land and very little royalty income. What were the issues then and has anything changed?
Does Canada now have a national water policy?
Do foreign companies or nations make decisions about what will affect the Canadian environment?
Nikiforuk argues in this book that Alberta governments and agencies entrusted with environmental safety deliberately failed citizen. They chose jobs and profit from companies over health and safety. They deliberately said increased development had no measurable effect on the wildlife, water, air and human population. An Environmental Assessment declared that the dangers to the public were outweighed by the benefits. They were able to argue this because they only had two air monitors to investigate all their gas plants and pipelines and their studies were designed to deliberately not measure anything relevant.
Nikiforuk explains that the Alberta tar sands have run out of cheap oil and are now extracting the dirty stuff : bitumen. This extraction from the tar sands requires extra force; excessive amounts of water and depending on the method used, excessive amounts of natural gas. Left behind are toxic waste pools that poison the water.
How could residents who lived downstream from the tar sands in Fort Chipeweyan have gotten so many rare cancers? Why did the doctors sounding the alarm get so little response?
Companies received breaks by not having to pay until their set up costs plus some investment returns materialized. There was thus an incentive to continue to expand and dig more wells to avoid paying more to the government. The government kept approving projects rather than requiring companies to clean up as they went along.
The security deposit companies had to pay to the Alberta government was inadequate. The cost of clean up is now having to be born by taxpayers after the companies left with huge profits.
The royalties Albertans received from their resource extraction during the Klein government were among the lowest in the world. The government chose to listen to industry who threatened to pull out of the tar sands if royalties were increased. The fund that Premier Lougheed set up to enable Albertans to weather a downturn was poorly funded after his tenure. Norway copied his fund idea and protected the fund and their citizen benefitted from a healthy royalty increase.
Have companies paid appropriate fines for pollution and for not cleaning up? Is there a mechanism to prevent owners from selling sections of the company to a third party which then declares bankruptcy? Are governments monitoring this and imposing penalties and censure when companies fail to do so? Who is holding industry and government accountable?
Some recommend nuclear energy to speed up bitumen extraction. Is radiation emission free? There are no safe ways to store nuclear waste and it lasts a long time. If water polluted with chemical toxins from the tar sands tailing ponds isn’t cleaned up safely then it is hard to trust a government or industry with nuclear safety.
Governments and political parties may champion urgency for companies to adhere to environmental safeguards during and after their resource extraction especially during media hype. Before an election officials might emphasize everyone’s responsibility to lessen the effects of global warming. What is needed, however, is an honest assessment by political parties of the issues and failures, a willingness to implement accountability mechanisms and a sampling of solutions needed to deal with the demand for oil. A concrete vision would give citizens insight, choice when they vote and hope that their health is also valued.
Nikiforuk intersperses facts with humour and brings readers a Canadian story with international relevance. He reveals the human cost of unregulated development and the continued willingness to deny the truth of the harm caused by dangerous practices. This non-fiction book inspires reflection and a plea for action by concerned citizens to hold their elected officials accountable for the well being of their people amidst the desire for jobs and profit.
I love fiction but reality in politics and life is so important.
Truth is worth guarding.