'It’s like nobody wants to tell us the truth,' said Allan Adam, Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, seen here in 2019. 'We’re finding out all these things because of the hard work that we put in and the pressure, but it just goes to show that we’re in a losing battle.'Jana Pruden/The Globe and Mail
Three Indigenous communities in northern Alberta say they were never told that the environment around a local Transport Canada-operated dock was contaminated, despite a 2017 report commissioned by the federal government that found elevated levels of arsenic, nickel and hydrocarbons.
The leaders of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Mikisew Cree First Nation and Fort Chipewyan Metis Nation want Ottawa to clean up the mess, and say it’s unacceptable that the government never came clean about the contamination that they worry has affected the health of community members.
They are particularly riled that the federal government for years encouraged the communities to take control of the dock under Ottawa’s Port Asset Transfer Program, but failed to include any mention of contamination over years of letters, e-mails and in-person meetings.
Allan Adam, Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, says the community only found out this summer through a third-party contractor who came across the report when they asked Transport Canada for information to potentially dredge the site for ease of access.
“It’s like nobody wants to tell us the truth,” he said in an interview. “We’re finding out all these things because of the hard work that we put in and the pressure, but it just goes to show that we’re in a losing battle.”
Fort Chipewyan is a remote community about 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray. It can only be reached by plane or boat in the summer, or an ice road in the winter.
The dock, built in 1961, juts into the Athabasca River from the middle of the community. It’s where children swim in the summer, people eat berries picked from the shore and residents fish from the wharf; there’s even a fishing derby there each year. It’s also not far from the intake pipe for Fort Chipewyan’s drinking water.
The federal government’s failure to inform Fort Chipewyan about the contamination was the subject of a blunt August letter to Canada’s then-transport minister, Pablo Rodriguez, by Mr. Adam, Fort Chipewyan Metis Nation President Kendrick Cardinal and Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro.
“This is a profoundly disturbing and a shocking failure on the part of Transport Canada. The Department has known for more than two decades that the dock and surrounding area has been used for recreational purposes including swimming and fishing,” they wrote.
Despite the findings of the 2017 study, they said, “Transport Canada officials have taken no action to warn our community of the risks to human and environmental health.”
They asked the minister to commit to the timely remediation of the environmental contamination and the repair of the Transport Canada dock by no later than this month, but that didn’t happen.
According to the federal government, this is no risk to human health based on studies done over the years, and work is continuing to figure out the best path forward to remediate the sediment at the site.
Transport Canada press secretary Laurent de Casanove did not respond as to why the community was not told about the contamination, but said in an e-mail that the government is “working with the local First Nations community to ensure that operations at the port facility are carried out safely. Remote and Indigenous communities must have access to the safe and reliable connectivity that they need.”
The study commissioned by Transport Canada concluded that arsenic and nickel concentrations in sediment samples exceeded government guidelines. It added that “adverse biological effects are possible, but not probable.”
Various hydrocarbon contaminants were also in the water and soil around the dock, according to the report, most likely owing to the historic and current use of the site to transfer fuel from barges to an adjacent property that used to contain 17 above-ground storage tanks, and an 18,000-litre diesel spill in 1986 and a second gasoline spill the following year.
All four test pits reported hydrocarbon concentrations above environmental guidelines, and one exceeded drinking water guidelines for chemicals including benzene, ethylbenzene and xylenes.
Of the 35 sediment sampling locations tested for the study, only four did not exceed government quality guidelines for hydrocarbons.
Fort Chipewyan is downstream from Imperial’s Kearl Lake oil sands, where water laced with toxins from tailings has been seeping off the site since 2022. The oil company says it has found no evidence of harm to people or fish-bearing waterbodies.
However, the impact that the oil sands industry has had on the health of people in the community will be the focus of a new 10-year study that received $12-million from the federal government in August. Fort Chipewyan leadership says that rates of rare cancers, autoimmune diseases and skin problems have skyrocketed in recent years, leading to excess deaths, and they believe nearby oil sands operations are the cause.