I have a slide projection I'd like to make.
I'm going to start with our study that was set up to examine the claim of industry and the Alberta government that no pollution from the oil sands industry gets into the Athabasca River. After seeing sights like the one shown here, and this one, and having studied watersheds for 40 years, my guess was that these claims were erroneous.
Also, the last time RAMP was reviewed, the program was found to be totally wanting. We thought it was worth having an independent study. So what we did in this study was to first use GIS to map the McMurray formation, which is the bitumen-laden formation shown in the lightest colour here, and we sampled at every site that you see on the map, several down the length of the Athabasca, slightly above Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan, and then on every tributary upstream.
The first thing we did was sample snow. This was the entire winter's accumulation. We sampled it at 31 sites. We did this because there has been no airborne monitoring in the Athabasca area since 1981--at least that's been reported.
So here is a profile of snow. You can see the black layers in it. We filtered the snow, and this array is from Fort McMurray on the left to Fort Chipewyan on the right. Each of the little side branches represents a tributary.
These are the particulates on the filter after filtering 900 millimetres of snow water, indicating how much particulate was in the snow.
This shows the melted snow at impacted sites. It actually had an oil layer on top of the water after it was melted. We found that airborne contaminants were detectable for a 50-kilometre radius around the two upgraders near our site AR6, as shown here.
If you look at the patterns going downstream, AR6 is again the upgrader location. You can see high contamination of polycyclic aromatics, including several known carcinogens, near that centre of activity and also at the bottom of the impacted tributaries.
We saw the same thing for every toxin we looked at: mercury, arsenic, lead, you name it. When we looked at the amount that these were elevated in the snow--both in particulates in the snow and dissolved and in tributaries and in the water of the Athabasca rivers--we found that every one of these toxins was elevated. They're elevated above background even as far down as Lake Athabasca.
Our data agreed with the Environment Canada National Pollutant Release Inventory. I'll just show you three, but probably all would be the same. Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well. All of these contaminants are being spewed into the atmosphere, which the companies are reporting to Environment Canada. This is why we are seeing these elevated concentrations in snow and in the river water.
We also found high concentrations of several contaminants--that are known to be high in the tailings ponds--under ice at sites that are just downstream of tailings ponds. This indicates that there is some effect of tailings pond leakage under winter low flow conditions.
So we conclude from our results that their industry is adding substantially to the contaminant burdens of the Athabasca River by both airborne and waterborne pathways. All thirteen elements on the U.S. EPA's priority pollutant list were higher within a 50-kilometre radius of the upgraders on the river. Environment Canada's NPRI emissions data indicate that these same elements are being spewed into the air in increasing amounts.
The oil sands industry is making these reports to Environment Canada, but it's not what they are claiming to the public. This is shown in these various myth buster full-page ads that have been running in newspapers across Canada. Their claims about contaminate release, water use, and reclamation are simply not true.
So our evidence and that from the NPRI indicates that oil sands companies should be charged under the Fisheries Act. Clearly they're discharging deleterious substances into fish-bearing waters. One wonders where the enforcement of this act is.
I think this monitoring program carried out by RAMP is totally incompetent, as the reviewers of the program in late 2004 already concluded. I think a lot of public trust has been lost.
The only agency with the expertise to carry out a decent monitoring program is Environment Canada. I think given the lack of public trust, there should be an oversight panel of scientists not connected with industry and not susceptible to muzzling by government to help regain public confidence. There should be annual public reports that are made widely available. Industry should continue to pay for the program, but it should not be run by industry.
We have restrictions on airborne and waterborne pollutants from power plants. These are comparable, and in many cases increasing to what we see from large power plants. Clearly some additional restrictions are in order. It's time we had some hard goals for reclamation of mines and tailings ponds and watershed protection.
That's all I have. Thank you.