Environment committee  I'm going to show you some photos and maps to illustrate the material that's in the briefs you have. I explain there the reason for our study. This is a natural seep of oil sands, of which there are several along the Athabasca River. Of course, industry's position has been that

Environment committee  We did take fish samples as part of the study and we're analysing them as we speak. I don't have any results back yet, except to know that some of the fish are very, very high in mercury, and we're looking to see if they've increased over previous studies. We have archived sampl

Environment committee  The monitoring of the river was actually started in a very good fashion by the federal government, but over the years they've gradually turned the monitoring over to the province of Alberta, which in turn has turned a lot of it over to industry itself. As a result, we have a data

Environment committee  No, we're not. I haven't really applied for any in industry for 20 years. They funded some of my research 30 years ago in the early days of the oil sands. It's not a place I want to go for money. I want to maintain my independence to do the research and publish the research that

Environment committee  I'm sure it has. About 50% of that area is underlain by peatlands, including the forested areas, probably at a mean depth of three or four metres. These have taken 3,000 or 4,000 years to accumulate. They act like a giant sponge, absorbing snowpack and the rainfall that falls in

Environment committee  A small part of it has come from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Most of the rest of it I've raised from foundations such as Ducks Unlimited and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.

Environment committee  It would, but there are also some aspects of the federal funding that I don't like. For example, for anything bigger than an ordinary discovery grant, they want letters of endorsement from clients such as oil sands companies to say how great your research is. Well, if four or fiv

Environment committee  I don't believe it can, and I think it's so unrealistic to expect it that it's time for some new restoration goals. We have a history in this country of never having enough money put aside to reclaim after mining. We have several cases that have been outlined in the 2002 Auditor

Environment committee  I would say that we see all of the toxins I mentioned. There's a wide suite of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, including several known carcinogens; some related compounds that have one of the carbons substituted by a sulphur, known as dibenzothiophenes; and then a suite of toxi

Environment committee  I can probably address that. I've been involved in some of that work for 20 years. There are actually several pulp and paper mills upstream on the Athabasca, but over the past 20 years they have really cleaned up their act. The one at Hinton, for example, spewed huge amounts of

Environment committee  That was looked at in some detail by the northern river basins study, which saw no evidence. The problem has been that the big development in the oil sands has occurred since the northern river basins study took place. At that time, there were only two rather sleepy little oil sa

Environment committee  I would say it has been very unsuccessful. I had a small role in a 2004 review of the program. It was largely done by three federal scientists from the fisheries and environment departments. Of a 100-page report, about 99 pages were scathing criticisms of how they changed chemi

Environment committee  I'm really not prepared at this point. We were surprised at the high indication of airborne input. It's probably not too surprising when you think of strong winds blowing across huge expanses of the sort of landscape you saw yesterday. Also, I don't know if you saw any of those m

Environment committee  So far we haven't. We started to analyze regional airborne patterns, but we've only had the results for a few weeks now and we're just beginning that work. It's clear there are a few metals that don't seem to be related to the industrial activity at all—most notably uranium and c

Environment committee  I think the reason is, as you saw, a lot of it is connected with that particulate fraction that will settle, but also, water is added by the tributaries downstream. If the downstream tributaries don't have much cadmium in them, they're going to dilute the upstream sources. I thi