Thread by @LaurieAdkin

This story by @EmmaLGraney exemplifies some of the problems with Cdn environmental regulation. @JonathanWNV @GreenPartyAB @ElizabethMay @ccpa

theglobeandmail.com/business/artic…

Note that there was no routine monitoring by Env Canada for oil sands tailings ponds seepage or leakage for a five-year period. We know from past experience that this job must not be left to the AB govt or industry associations.

Failing to exercise close oversight of this industry's pollution amounts to deciding that the health and lives of the Indigenous communities downstream and the ecosystems they depend on are just the price to be paid for bitumen revenue.

But even when the federal Minister of Environment acknowledges this, what is his proposed solution?
"developing regulations on safe contamination levels, similar to those that guide sewage plants and metal mines."

To start with, this is an admission that pollution of the Athabasca River, its tributaries, and surrounding lakes has been permitted go on for decades unregulated.

And that it will continue in the absence of standards for "safe contamination."

The response from the minister also tells us how the game is normally played in Canada. We don't stop the contamination, even when we have strong grounds to believe that it is poisoning life. Instead, we make a political call about how much life, and whose, is sacrificeable.

The industry should never have been permitted to create toxic tailings lakes next to the Athabasca River. It should have been required to develop safer storage methods before the mining was ever approved.

That is what would have happened if the river mattered. If the people mattered. If "development" and "economic prosperity" were consistent with ecological sustainability. That is what govts would do now; they would require that the tailings ponds be removed.

And by "removal," I do not mean dumping their contents into the Athabasca River.

The minister knows there is no "safe" level of contamination--that the poisoning of the water system is incremental and cumulative. The minister knows that he should be guided by the precautionary principle, not an L50 test for fish mortality (or some other such "standard").

The regulatory regime is based on trading ecosystem health for short-term economic and political benefits. This is not a necessary trade-off, as those aligned with corporate interests proclaim. It is a political choice.