Environment committee  Well, subsection 36(3) says clearly that no deleterious substances shall be discharged to fish-bearing waters, and Environment Canada is responsible for enforcing that subsection of the Fisheries Act. I don't know, given the evidence that we have and that they have in their NPRI

Environment committee  It has. The most recent airborne monitoring in the oil sands was done by AOSERP in 1978 and 1981. If we match our particulate emissions with theirs, they have roughly doubled, which means that industry has put out to the air less per barrel of oil mined, because they've increas

Environment committee  There have been no snow samples taken in recent years, certainly, except for water content. Environment Canada and Alberta Environment both have small monitoring programs. Both have been jeopardized year after year by successive budget cuts, to the point that, the last I heard, E

Environment committee  That's largely correct. Their work, of course, was criticized because it was at very few stations on the river. And it was dismissed in part because it was felt that the background for fish in mercury, for example, was always high, which is true. But there have been studies at th

Environment committee  I don't know if the federal government is consulted at all on the sign-off. I do know that what industry is saying about reclaiming to the same sort of communities that were on that land before is not going to happen. My wife, for example, is a scientist working in reclamation in

Environment committee  No, it wasn't. I knew the governments were already strapped for cash for their own work. If I'd asked the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for the money, they would have told me to go around and get letters of endorsement from all of the oil companies.

Environment committee  Yes. I don't think it's the place of university scientists to run long-term monitoring programs. They're not any more suitable for a succession of graduate students to do than a succession of consultants. You really need long-term expertise. Environment Canada is very good at doi

Environment committee  Yes, they are.

Environment committee  It would be via water.

Environment committee  I think most of it is reaching the river via the tributaries, many of which are mined right to the river banks or even destroyed. If I look at all of our evidence, it looks like the worst contamination occurs during the first few years after a watershed is exposed, and that's ver

Environment committee  I would say that at the current rates of river flow and of seepage, it's probably a very small part of the overall picture, compared to the airborne and surface runoff problems we've documented. With respect to the tailings ponds, however, the scenario I dread would be a tailings

Environment committee  I don't know for sure. I know that a few years ago that was correct. My colleagues in Environment Canada tell me that CEPA needs updating by adding many pollutants to the current list.

Environment committee  I did.

Environment committee  I think the big danger would be their leaking through the many wells that will be driven through freshwater aquifers to reach those very deep saline ones. Somebody earlier referred to a pincushion effect. My guess is that we'll have tens of thousands of wells drilled through fres

Environment committee  There were other studies in 1978 and 1981 that were published as reports under AOSERP. Other than that, no one has addressed the contaminants in snow. But they dovetail well with the “emissions to the atmosphere” reports, as I pointed out, as part of Environment Canada's NPRI stu