Church leaders wrestle with oily dilemma
OTTAWA, ON—Church leaders have returned from a visit to the tar sands in northern Alberta stricken by what they saw and determined to appeal to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for more regulation of the industry.
"They want to take it to the prime minister," says Mary Corkery, executive director of Kairos, the ecumenical justice body that organized the delegation in late May. An advocacy trip to Ottawa is being planned for the fall, she says.
Kairos led a group of 10 church leaders, a Gitxsan chief from B.C. and two indigenous leaders from Ecuador and Nigeria to visit Fort McMurray, Fort McKay and Fort Chepewyan.
Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Christian Reformed, Quaker, Anglican, United and Presbyterian leaders met with community elders, flew over open pit mines and tailings ponds and met with representatives from Nexen and Suncor, two energy companies at work in the area.
Staggering scale
Presbyterian Church moderator Cheol Soon Park was stunned by the aerial vista of stripped boreal forest. "What I saw was immense and, surprisingly, it was bad beyond my wildest imagination," he says.
Someone else in the group described the view as "a combination of terrifying and dazzling," says Donald Peters, executive director of Mennonite Central Committee Canada. "It stops the heart with a question."
The Alberta government claims the oil-soaked sand asleep under its boreal forests (estimated at 140,200 square kilometers) holds enough oil to satisfy global demand for decades to come. So far, only about two per cent of that oil has been extracted.
It's a gold mine for Canada—the U.S.'s biggest supplier of oil—and as a result, the industry is expanding with frantic speed. Existing mines are producing more than a million barrels of crude oil per day. Alberta boasts it will triple that flow in ten years time.
A barrel of Alberta crude oil may sell for around $70 these days. But each barrel of oil is extracted at a cost of two tons of soil, several barrels of water and enough natural gas (burned to heat the water) to warm a house for days
There may be other more perilous price tags attached.
Communities in peril
Downriver from the pools full of toxic tailings left over from the extraction process is the community of Fort Chipewyan.
A few years ago, John O'Connor, a family doctor who flew regularly to treat patients in the remote community, began to notice a surprising number of rare cancers in the town. When he started to publicize his suspicions that the cancers were caused by toxins leaching from the oil industry upstream, he was accused by Health Canada of raising undue alarm.
Peters recalls talking with a woman in Fort Chipewyan (he guessed her to be in her mid-40s) who said that four of her five sisters died of cancer. The graveyard is full, local elders told their visitors, and they don't know where they will be buried when their turn comes.
"Water is the big issue," says Peters. "People are concerned about the aquifer; people are concerned about effluent running into the Athabasca river. We heard at least two hunters in different places with the same story: you shoot a moose, you open it up and the organs tell you that you shouldn't eat it. Other people say, 'We can't eat the fish.'"
No conclusive studies have been done on the water quality or the source of the cancers. Nexen and Suncor both wash their hands of the matter, saying there's no documented link between the industry and illness.
No bad guys here
But that doesn't mean people want the to see the industry shut down. "There are no bad guys and no good guys," says Winnipeg archbishop James Weisgerber. "We didn't hear anybody who wants to stop this development."
Traditional livelihoods such as trapping and fishing are being threatened, but other livelihoods are emerging and many in the indigenous communities benefit hugely from jobs and other effects of the booming economy.
At a breakfast in Fort McMurray attended by some of the delegates, the Northeastern Alberta Aboriginal Business Association thanked energy company Suncor for $1 billion in service contracts.
"I didn't hear people saying, 'Shut this thing down,'" says Peters. "I heard people saying, 'Help us slow this down; help us bring some reasoned approach to the growth; help us get proper regulations in place; help us get an independent study of the health situation in Fort Chipewyan."
"I knew it was complex going in, but I came away feeling the depths and tangledness of the complexity was even more than I could have possibly imagined," says Susan Johnson, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. "But the thing I felt the most urgently is: we need to have a plan—both provincial and federally, a plan for sustainable development of resources."
Your problem is our problem
Despite the complexity, two things are clear in the minds of each delegate ChristianWeek spoke to. First, each of us helps create the demand that drives the oil producing machine.
"I think we should revisit our lifestyles," says Soon. "It's not Alberta's problem; it's our problem…. We have to look around our homes and save energy in every single aspect of our daily life. That will be the most important message for every single Canadian."
Secondly, delegates agree it is urgent that both the Alberta and federal governments step in to commission studies and regulate the industry's inexorable advance.
"The thing most glaringly absent is the role of government," says Weisgerber. "Government needs to arbitrate between these competing demands to ensure everyone's voice is heard. But one gets the impression the government is anxious to move ahead on this project as fast as it can because the only agenda item they seem to have is to make money. The [energy] companies will even tell you that."
With that in mind, church leaders are planning their next step.
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