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(ANNews) – A recently released scientific study on the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER) poor monitoring of tailings spills merely confirms what Indigenous people have long known to be true, says the executive director of Indigenous Climate Action (ICA).
Sherwood Park-based geologist Kevin Timoney’s report, published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Monitoring and Assessment journal on Jan. 3, found that the AER has significantly underreported spill volumes and their environmental footprints, and that the regulator had conducted routine inspections in just 3.2 per cent of tailings spills.
“This report is just another addition to a bunch of glaring reports that have come out, get some media attention and disappear,” Eriel Deranger, ICA’s executive director, told Alberta Native News in an interview. “Business continues as usual in the sector and industry.”
Last year, a report in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal found that the Alberta Emissions Inventory Report and Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory had underestimated air pollution from the oil sands by 6,000 per cent.
“Not only are they under-reporting their emissions,” Deranger said, “but they are over-reporting their cleanup, and the AER is failing to do their job in responding to the toxic waste spills.”
Timoney conducted his research by filing a freedom of information request for all AER documents relating to 514 tailings spills reported from January 2014 to May 2023, including photos of the spill sites, and comparing them with the figures publicly reported in the AER’s field inspection system database.
In one instance, the AER publicly reported a spill of 44,596 m3, but internal AER documents revealed that the true spill volume was 4,459,680 m3.
In another spill, the AER database reported a spill’s footprint as 100 m2. In the internal documents, that figure was 465 m2, but photographs of the site revealed the latter figure too was an underestimate.
“Images show spilled bitumen, soil contamination in a large footprint, and contact with vegetation,” Timoney wrote in the study. “Both the spill volume and spill impact were visual estimates.”
Deranger, who is from Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), noted federal and provincial authorities’ well-established track record of concealing information from downstream Indigenous communities.
In May 2022, the AER notified ACFN and Mikisew Cree Nation (MCN) that discoloured water had accumulated near Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine. The First Nations heard nothing more until February 2023, when 5.3 million litres of contaminated wastewater from a holding pond leaked into the surrounding environment.
This lack of transparency isn’t confined to the AER. Transport Canada concealed a 2017 report that found the dock in Fort Chipewyan—a key transport hub in the remote community—was surrounded by land contaminated with traces of arsenic, mercury, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and uranium.
“Over the last decade that I’ve been working directly with my community, I can’t tell you the amount of times that a community member, a land user or a hunter has reported foam, oil slicks, things on the water systems and stating, ‘something’s happened,’ and us being gaslit by the AER and industry to say that nothing has happened,” said Deranger.
She added that this has a major psychological impact on Indigenous communities, compounding the negative environmental and physical health effects of unchecked oil sands extraction.
“These are huge, huge violations of our Indigenous rights in the community and a failure of the government to uphold their fiduciary obligations to also ensure that Indigenous rights are protected in the pursuit of economic endeavours in the region,” Deranger said.
Melanie Dene, executive manager at ICA, expressed frustration that Indigenous concerns about what’s happening to their lands are only taken seriously when they’re validated by settler scientists.
“I feel that Indigenous knowledge supersedes Western science,” said Dene, who is from MCN. “It’s our science, our land users, our traditional knowledge holders,that have been saying this since the very beginning. They have been witnessing it for the last 50 years.”
An AER spokesperson said the regulator is aware of Timoney’s report and “subject matter experts will review the data for a more comprehensive response at a later time.”
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