Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to participate in tonight's adjournment debate, otherwise known as the late show. For the benefit of those watching at home, this is an opportunity for parliamentarians to focus briefly on what might be considered unfinished business of the House prior to adjourning for the day.
The unfinished business that I would like to talk about tonight is in reference to a question I posed to the Minister of the Environment on April 1 about the contamination of the Athabasca River being caused by oil sands industry activities. In his very short response to my question, the minister betrayed his misunderstanding of three areas in particular: first, Dr. David Schindler's findings; second, the Fisheries Act and third, the Canada-Alberta Administrative Agreement for the Control of Deposits of Deleterious Substances.
Those are the three areas I would like to focus on in this very brief debate. First of all, it bears mentioning that the minister has qualified the science that has been done on contamination of the Athabasca River by oil sands activities as garbage science. He has mentioned this in media interviews. He considers this garbage science even though there is mounting evidence by very reputable scientists that the oil sands are contaminating the Athabasca River and its tributaries; in other words, the Athabasca watershed.
A related aspect of the minister's misunderstanding of the science is found in his answer. He called Dr. Schindler's research “allegations”, which I think is a little disrespectful of one of the world's greatest water scientists. He suggested that Dr. Schindler's findings, in a report that he presented to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, are related only “to airborne emissions as opposed to Fisheries Act issues”.
It is true that Dr. Schindler's research found a link between oil sands development and the deposit of pollution in the Athabasca coming from particular matter that is settling in the Athabasca River. There is no doubt about that.
However, while Dr. Schindler's research found high contamination of polycyclic aromatics, including several known carcinogens in snow samples from the Athabasca River, near the centre of oil sands activity and at the bottom of the impacted Athabasca River tributaries, it also found high concentrations of several contaminants under the ice that are known to be high in tailings ponds. They are sites that are just downstream of tailings ponds, indicating that there is some effect of tailings pond leakage under winter's low-flow conditions.
In other words, not only is pollution being deposited on the river from the air, but contaminants are also found in the water in winter under the ice, which means that these are contaminants coming from the tailings ponds that are leaking into the Athabasca.