Thank you. I believe copies of my presentation have been provided to everyone. I just want to confirm. Thank you.
First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak as part of your review of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. My name is Melody Lepine, and I am a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation.
I will begin with slide number 2. You should see a map.
The Mikisew Cree nation is a signatory to Treaty 8 in northeastern Alberta. We are the largest first nation within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which is primarily the area called the Athabasca oil sands region of Canada. The community that I am from is just downstream. A large majority of our members occupy today a small community called Fort Chipewyan. It's actually the oldest settlement in Alberta.
There are about 800 or 900 members who reside in Fort Chipewyan. A large portion of our members still occupy their traditional territories, which today are referred to as the Wood Buffalo National Park and the Peace-Athabasca Delta, as well as along the Athabasca River, where there is extensive oil sands mining and development occurring today.
With me is Phil Thomas. Phil is one of the scientists who work for Environment and Climate Change Canada. He has done some studies that he is going to refer to at the end of the presentation, and he is going to assist me with some of the technical questions that we may have about the things I'm going to discuss here today.
Some of you may already be aware that this area, specifically within Wood Buffalo National Park, which is also a UNESCO world heritage site, has been a concern for many of the indigenous people within the region. I represent one of five first nations within the region. The Mikisew Cree, being the largest, filed a petition about two years ago with the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, asking for the site to be listed as “in danger”.
One of the reasons we filed a petition to the World Heritage Committee requesting the “in danger” listing is one of the subject matters I am discussing today, which is the increasing levels of contamination within the region.
Wood Buffalo National Park was listed as a world heritage site because of its having one of the world's largest freshwater deltas, the Peace-Athabasca Delta. The Peace River feeds the delta from B.C., where there are extensive hydroelectric projects, and the Athabasca flows from the Athabasca glaciers in the mountains within Jasper National Park.
There is extensive oil sands development along the Athabasca River, and the contaminants that Phil and I will be discussing today would be mostly PAHs and a bit of mercury.
I will turn to slide number 3.
Like many other indigenous communities throughout Canada, the Mikisew Cree occupies traditional territories. We strive to protect the area. We continue to hunt, fish, and trap, and to exercise our treaty rights within the area. The health of our environment is really critical to the health of the community—the physical health, the spiritual health, and the mental health.
One concern that has been growing within my community of Fort Chipewyan is the increasing occurrence of rare cancers. You may have heard, from the headlines in the past several years, that Dr. O'Connor, a physician within our community, was accused of raising undue alarm because of witnessing the increasing levels of cancers.
The community feels that the increase in the levels of cancers and a lot of these rare autoimmune diseases has a direct link to the oil sands development and the increasing levels of pollution flowing downstream to our community.
We have little choice but to have confidence that our traditional foods and our environment are healthy. We rely on pieces of legislation like the act that you are reviewing to protect and safeguard our environment, to allow for it to be healthy so that we can continue to sustain ourselves, eat our traditional foods, practice our treaty rights, and pass on our culture to future generations.
On slide 4, you'll see a table. There's not a lot of monitoring within the region, and there have been very few studies.
We did undertake a traditional food biomonitoring study. It was done out of the University of Manitoba with Dr. Stéphane McLachlan. One of the things we did was survey a number of community members about their perception. How did they feel about the foods they were consuming? Were they worried about the state of the environment and the health of the ecosystems and the water?
Many members do not drink water from the rivers anymore. They're witnessing a changing environment. The table really represents the fear among the community members, as well as their concern for the state of the environment, the health of their wildlife, and the foods that they're consuming, such as the berries. The table is from the study, and we can supply you with the biomonitoring study if you'd like to examine some of those results a little further. That study actually was funded in part by Health Canada through the northern contaminants program.
Slide 5 shows some examples of what some of the community members are seeing. Mikisew has also started a community-based monitoring program within its community. We started community-based monitoring within our territory in and around Fort Chipewyan, specifically within the delta, because there is no monitoring occurring there. A lot of the monitoring is done upstream; it is focused on where a lot of the development happens. However, we are seeing a changing environment downstream. Fort Chipewyan is just about 200 kilometres from Fort McMurray. We have elders and traditional land users observing, and what they see is very unusual, so we started a monitoring program, and we are now collecting data and sharing the results with both the federal and provincial governments. We are trying to understand why these changes are happening.
For example, we are seeing numerous fish kills. In the spring, the elders go out to Lake Claire in the delta, and they're seeing hundreds of fish floating around. There have also been occurrences of a lot of seagulls dying off. We're seeing things like rabbits with extra genitals. There's a photo that you'll see later on of deformed fish. We really don't understand why these things are happening; we just know that they are happening.
Some of the results that we are collecting from our monitoring indicate increasing levels of contaminants. They link people and health in terms of increasing cancers and some of these rare diseases that our communities have never experienced before. You see the changes that they're seeing in their traditional foods: fish, moose meat, rabbits, ducks, muskrat, and everything that we rely on—subsistence living. It's not just our constitutional right to exercise hunting, fishing, and trapping; it's also a part of our culture.
Things like mercury, lead, silver, cadmium, arsenic, selenium, zinc, and chromium are all very dangerous substances to be consuming. We're actually seeing their levels exceed the CCME guidelines.
Phil, maybe you can speak about the next slide.