Environment committee  Good morning. Bonjour. I grew up in Montreal. I now live in Alberta. I'm very sorry, but I have forgotten all my French. I live near Rosebud, Alberta. It's a small, little-theatre cultural town with a lot of beautiful historic resource. I have worked in the oil patch for 25 y

Environment committee  Most of the work I do in the oil patch is on cumulative effects, and alarmingly, as our developments are dramatically increasing in Alberta, the mitigation of and assessment of cumulative effects seem to be going down. We seem to be deregulating in Alberta instead of increasing o

Environment committee  Do I have a translation?

Environment committee  I do not understand.

Environment committee  I wish I could speak in French. My cost so far has been almost $10,000. I had such a good well that I did not have a holding tank. They had to clean out part of my basement and put in these big tanks. That cost $5,000. The government promised in writing to pay me back, but it's

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Mr. Lussier, that's a brilliant question. This is one of the cumulative effects that is becoming so serious in Alberta because it seems that humanity is not being considered. One of my neighbours runs a cattle ranch. A well was first put right beside the house--a few hundred met

Environment committee  I will clarify, Monsieur Lussier. This is one of the problems where the MAC has failed the people of Alberta. The testing was only begun in 2006. These experiments took place in our drinking water in 2004 and earlier. I do not know what was in my water. EnCana actually came to i

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Cullen. I'll try to be very quick, Mr. Mills. There are a few things. In the States, one of the contamination cases that EnCana suffered with their CBM was where the methane came up through a creek. I don't know if we've done studies on what...but I imagine it

Environment committee  I don't think so. The regulations say that cumulative effects are supposed to be assessed—should be, but they're not. The best practices say “should be”; we need “must”. I think we need to join together, federally and provincially, for B.C., Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and New B

Environment committee  I think we have risk with the old wells, but we also have risk with the new wells. From the studies I have been looking at, even with the good cements, it's quite difficult to get a perfect seal from the well casing to the formation. The more you're going to go in and perf and

Environment committee  That's a good point. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify. What I meant by wanting the water back is having it the way it was before the CBM came, when my taps weren't whistling—my taps felt like a gas well, and I had so much gas blowing out, you could feel the gas

Environment committee  Yes. I would like to be able to rely independently on my well and be able to bathe and not have my skin burn.

Environment committee  I don't think I mentioned music, or at least I don't remember that; I think I was mentioning cattle. On that, I was talking about a neighbour's farm. I'm not exactly sure of the distance; I think it was about 300 metres from their house. Some compressors are much closer. In m

Environment committee  Did I make that here today?