Environment committee  I'll be brief on PFAS. I'll make sure my colleagues who are following the file more closely follow up with you. We are very supportive of the government appealing the decision on plastics. It's very important for us that plastics are no longer in our waterways or bodies, especially when it comes to children, who are extremely exposed.

Environment committee  Sure. It was just a short thought. You were asking me about the health impacts or the impacts in general on communities of the contamination that I was describing. I wanted to point out that we've observed really a limited effort by both industry and government, all levels of government, to actually seriously quantify and characterize that impact.

Environment committee  I think that, on the part of the Alberta Energy Regulator, we didn't see a body that seemed to take seriously its duty with regard to people. It seems like they prioritized ensuring that the industry's interests were protected. It ended up conducting a review of its own behaviour during that study and concluded that it actually did nothing wrong.

Environment committee  Absolutely. Of course, this committee has heard from them, and I'll invite you to continue talking to them directly, because they can speak best to it. I think in terms of the impacts, and again, thinking back about federal jurisdiction here, one of the key impacts is actually on their rights, their treaty rights, their constitutional rights, their right, for example, to use the land for traditional practices.

Environment committee  What we've observed over decades—the environmental movement, impacted indigenous communities and experts—is that, across governments, whether federal or provincial, we see this lack of desire to get deep into using their tools. I think there is a tendency to look away because these are powerful companies that we know lobby hard in order to not be regulated.

Environment committee  That's right. The study you're referring to, I think, is the one that came out two weeks ago from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada. It pointed out that there had been monitoring only on a section of potential air pollutants and we had not been looking for many other air pollutants that are less present in conventional oil but are very present in unconventional oil, so the oil sands.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, committee members. Thank you for inviting me. I'm Aliénor Rougeot and I'm with Environmental Defence Canada. I'll be discussing how oil sands mining contributes to groundwater contamination and how this relates to broader concerns about toxic tailings ponds in the oil sands.