Environment committee  Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Albert Mercredi. I'm a chief at the Fond du Lac First Nation. I'm one of the community members downstream from the tar sands development. To make references in my presentation, I have had the organizers put up the mapping system of whe

Environment committee  To the left, you see the Athabasca land use vision planning process area; on the southwest corner, in the Axe Lake area, we're pretty well adjacent to the Athabasca Sand Dunes, which are one of the seven magnificent sights in the world to see. There is oil in that area. On the

Environment committee  It has been submitted to the Province of Saskatchewan. The Province of Saskatchewan was involved at stage one level. I have my coordinator here with me, who could answer a lot of these technical terms. Yes, it has been submitted, but to this day, there has been nothing from the p

Environment committee  Fond du Lac has no uranium mines on the reserve, but we do have exploration activity with a partnership we had joined to do exploration activity on reserve.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. Fond du Lac has made history by being part of this hearing today on the development of the tar sands. To answer the question, no, downriver on the Athabasca side, we have never been consulted regarding the impacts and the devastation that comes along

Environment committee  First of all, from the perspective of the Athabasca government, we have put a system in place to define what we see as a protocol system and a duty to consult and accommodate. The Province of Saskatchewan was putting laws on the land that had never been in place before, not even

Environment committee  We are in discussions with the territorial government, and we are also involved with the Keepers of the Water to bring our issues to the attention of governments, industry, and the world.

Environment committee  In our community we get the drinking water from the groundwater system adjacent to the lake. Throughout the day I've been listening to what you've been asking on the drinking water, and with that question you've raised, I guess the other issue is that we're trying to approach t

Environment committee  It is a groundwater system using well water pumps along the shorelines of Lake Athabasca.

Environment committee  The deepest one, I believe, is equivalent to the water level on Lake Athabasca, but because of the fluctuation of the water levels in the past year we have run into some difficulties. I am surprised about the question that was asked here about the water system. We have experien

Environment committee  No, it's a federal requirement, federal standards.

Environment committee  We have technical people who do it. If we are outside of the limits, we would be told, but we only check it for specific things. To answer your technical question, I do not have the documents with me, so it would be hard to answer.

Environment committee  The water right now is to a standard where it's drinkable through the taps.

Environment committee  I looked at the maps of the river system and the Athabasca. If there is further development, we'd like to be contacted and be part of the process. We would even like to visit the community.