I'd have to say that the federal government is not enforcing any of the rules that everybody else works by in Fort McMurray. The Alberta government sets out the rules and gives the approvals. Once that happens, all the things that should be protected by the federal government go down the drain.
Everything that we live by, we live by harvesting off the lands. The lands that I'm talking about are totally devastated. I no longer eat the fish from the Athabasca River. We still use fish from the greater lake, Lake Athabasca. That advisory came down, to not eat fish more than once a month, a long time ago. That was brought down by the Alberta government.
When you look at everything else that we use for food, such as moose and ducks, everything is polluted. When you start seeing scary pictures of 1,600 ducks all covered with tar and drowned on the Syncrude site, that's only the tip of the iceberg. That 1,600 should have been something more like in the thousands, more than 1,600.
Some of our people work on those tailing ponds. When they're working there, they don't report all the animals that they've seen die there. They have a job to worry about. They have a family to feed.
When I say that, it's because I feel that we have no voice. The voice that should be dictating how the rules should be played out there is the federal government's; it has the final say. My chief and council will come to the federal government because by treaty you have to be there to protect the lands, the traditional lands of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.
Right now, everything is totally devastated. I am not kidding. There's no more fur there to be had, no more muskrat. You couldn't find ten rats on my reserve, when we used to take out something like 40,000 or 50,000 in the spring of the year.