when your heart is broken a thousand times with every moment...
The province of Alberta is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Sure, we're a winter country -- 8 months of it, sometimes -- but the summers are exhilarating. In the space of two weeks we can go from a white world to a green one, complete with evening thunderstorms and light that, nearing the longest day of the year, never actually leaves the sky. You can watch the glow of it travelling around the northern horizon. The way the snow smells when it's melting, or the way the black poplars do when the leaves are dying... What it feels like to wake up to the crisp air of the Rocky mountains, or be a kid digging for dinosaur bones in the Badlands... There are places, up in the mountains, where you can actually drink the water melting from the glaciers.
I love my homeland. I rejoice in it. Regionalized as Canada is, I -- like many other people -- have always identified myself as an Albertan first, and a Canadian second.
Things that make me understand why a man like Wiebo Ludwig got desperate enough to start bombing oil company equipment.
It's been in the news lately, how Alberta is the next Big Thing when it comes to oil. They've been seriously drilling here since 1949, when Leduc #1 was established to deliver black gold. But with all of the turmoil going on in the Middle East, the U.S. is starting to pay more serious attention. It's not that we have great reserves of drillable oil -- we don't. What we do have are the Tar Sands. Naturally occurring bitumen covering an area the size of Florida along the flow of the Athabasca River. Until very recently, it was too costly and involved a process to extract the oil from the sand. Technology and desperation have changed that, though.
That? That's what most of northern Alberta is going to look like in a decade or so. It's kind of my idea of what Hell might look like.
Syncrude, Suncor, BP Energy, Nexen, Canadian Natural Resources, Baker Hughes... I know the names. I work for a trucking company that ships up north -- and most of what we ship goes to the Tar Sands. Mining equipment, replacement parts, food for the camps... I was curious, so I started looking into what's happening up there, thinking it couldn't possibly be as bad as I was imagining it to be. I wanted something we could be proud of, a contribution Alberta was making to the world economy, something like that. But what's really going on makes me nauseous even to think about.
The oil companies have a deal with the government wherein they're supposed to reclaim the land they use. Unfortunately reclamation isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, what they're tearing up to get to the sand can't be replaced. They can slap farmland over top of it, or grazing pasture for the herds of tame bison of which Syncrude is so proud, but they can never replace the fens and forest being destroyed -- all those unique ecosystems gone forever. And I can't say I'd want to eat anything grown or grazed above the toxic mess left behind after open-pit mining. Not to mention that all of Syncrude's pretty pictures of reclaimed land and professions of environmental concern are given the lie by the 500 ducks that died horribly in one of their tailings ponds (which are massive lakes of poisonous sludge left behind by the extraction process).
It's not just aesthetics and extinction. The Athabasca River is part of a huge network of rivers which eventually empty into the Arctic Ocean through the Mackenzie River Basin. Canada was built on its rivers, back before the railways, when they were the only way to access the interior of the country. Alberta's oldest settlements are all along rivers. As it turns out, we're not a very grateful people.
Alberta now boasts the second largest dam system in the world, beaten out only by China's Three Gorges. Want to know what we're damming back? Tailings ponds. That's right. Canada's largest dam system is holding back unusable, unrecoverable, toxic sludge. Hell, the tailings ponds are now the largest bodies of water in the region. Doesn't that sound delicious? And all it'll take is a breach in a dam or a flood year for all of that poison to go pouring into the Athabasca and make its merry way out into the ocean. I don't consider myself an environmental extremist, not in any way -- I drive a non-hybrid car, I don't recycle as much as I could, etc, etc -- but we're going to ruin an entire ocean here. And it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.
Even without that, it's already bad. Suncor alone has admitted that 1600 cubic meters of ruined sludge is leaking out into the Athabasca River per day. Animals living in the region are turning up deformed, with leaking tumours. Native communities are catching fish that smell like burning rubber when they're cooked, and coming down with rare types of cancer.
And this isn't even taking into consideration the other parts of the province in which environmental damage is being done. Like down south, where fracing (fracturing coal seams to extract natural gas) is ruining groundwater to the point where people's wells are putting out drinking water so tainted with methane that you can set it on fire.
Why don't Albertans know these things?
Well, for a start, our provincial government is so hopelessly corrupt that they've been releasing "environmental reports" for which no research has been done, refusing to monitor environmental damage to air, water and land alike, and attempting to silence independent researchers and critics by slapping them with lawsuits. Months ago, back when the provincial elections were just finished and a Conservative majority was once again ruling the Legislature, I lamented that a vote for the Conservative Party of Alberta was a vote for Big Oil. I had no idea, no idea how bad it really is. How bad it's been for years. Hell, even the first Conservative premier, Peter Lougheed -- the man who got the ball rolling on the Tar Sands in the first place, back in the seventies -- is alarmed at what's going on now.
Gods help you if you own land on which the oil and gas companies want to drill. As it stands right now, Alberta law favours the corporations -- American corporations, usually -- over Alberta's citizens. You can't say no. You can't say stop. Think about that, all you Albertans who may be reading this. How does that make you feel?
There is a clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (clause 605, for the curious) dealing with energy supply between Canada and the U.S. It states that even in times of shortage, Canada must continue supply to the U.S. at the same level at which it has been for the past three years. Also in that clause are the provision that Canada can never charge the U.S. more than it is charging its own citizens for its energy. Mexico didn't sign that part of the treaty. But Canada did.
But here's the thing. The provinces own their own resources. It's what distinguishes a province from a territory. All those diamond mines up in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut? Federal property. The Tar Sands? Provincial. Control of the management and sale of those lands are at the sole discretion of the Alberta government. We're a democracy. We elect the government. Therefore we control what's going on there. But when Alberta's citizens disagree with what's happening, when we try to fight it, the government is the one who shuts us down. We don't own the companies who are running rough-shod over our province. We're not seeing any benefits to the destruction -- the Heritage Fund, an idea which was built on royalties paid by the oil and gas corporations, hasn't grown since Lougheed left office. And $400 cheques which were little more than bribes handed out to Albertans to buy votes for Ralph Klein around election time don't count, not even remotely. Hell, most Albertans don't even know what's going on up around Fort McMurray, the 21st century's answer to the gold-mining boom-towns of the Wild West. There's something very very wrong with that.
I'm almost thirty years old and this government has been in power since before I was born. A regime which has proven itself all too happy to sell its people and its land to be used, abused, and left broken and soiled. Do you feel whored out yet, my fellow Albertans? Do you feel like we've elected our own pimps, over and over again?
This can be fixed -- or at least stopped. There has to be something we can do, there has to be. They say that desperate times call for desperate measures. I wonder just how bad desperation has to be before even apathetic and placid Albertans start getting a taste of what that means...
I love my homeland. I rejoice in it. Regionalized as Canada is, I -- like many other people -- have always identified myself as an Albertan first, and a Canadian second.
Things that make me understand why a man like Wiebo Ludwig got desperate enough to start bombing oil company equipment.
It's been in the news lately, how Alberta is the next Big Thing when it comes to oil. They've been seriously drilling here since 1949, when Leduc #1 was established to deliver black gold. But with all of the turmoil going on in the Middle East, the U.S. is starting to pay more serious attention. It's not that we have great reserves of drillable oil -- we don't. What we do have are the Tar Sands. Naturally occurring bitumen covering an area the size of Florida along the flow of the Athabasca River. Until very recently, it was too costly and involved a process to extract the oil from the sand. Technology and desperation have changed that, though.
That? That's what most of northern Alberta is going to look like in a decade or so. It's kind of my idea of what Hell might look like.
Syncrude, Suncor, BP Energy, Nexen, Canadian Natural Resources, Baker Hughes... I know the names. I work for a trucking company that ships up north -- and most of what we ship goes to the Tar Sands. Mining equipment, replacement parts, food for the camps... I was curious, so I started looking into what's happening up there, thinking it couldn't possibly be as bad as I was imagining it to be. I wanted something we could be proud of, a contribution Alberta was making to the world economy, something like that. But what's really going on makes me nauseous even to think about.
The oil companies have a deal with the government wherein they're supposed to reclaim the land they use. Unfortunately reclamation isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, what they're tearing up to get to the sand can't be replaced. They can slap farmland over top of it, or grazing pasture for the herds of tame bison of which Syncrude is so proud, but they can never replace the fens and forest being destroyed -- all those unique ecosystems gone forever. And I can't say I'd want to eat anything grown or grazed above the toxic mess left behind after open-pit mining. Not to mention that all of Syncrude's pretty pictures of reclaimed land and professions of environmental concern are given the lie by the 500 ducks that died horribly in one of their tailings ponds (which are massive lakes of poisonous sludge left behind by the extraction process).
It's not just aesthetics and extinction. The Athabasca River is part of a huge network of rivers which eventually empty into the Arctic Ocean through the Mackenzie River Basin. Canada was built on its rivers, back before the railways, when they were the only way to access the interior of the country. Alberta's oldest settlements are all along rivers. As it turns out, we're not a very grateful people.
Alberta now boasts the second largest dam system in the world, beaten out only by China's Three Gorges. Want to know what we're damming back? Tailings ponds. That's right. Canada's largest dam system is holding back unusable, unrecoverable, toxic sludge. Hell, the tailings ponds are now the largest bodies of water in the region. Doesn't that sound delicious? And all it'll take is a breach in a dam or a flood year for all of that poison to go pouring into the Athabasca and make its merry way out into the ocean. I don't consider myself an environmental extremist, not in any way -- I drive a non-hybrid car, I don't recycle as much as I could, etc, etc -- but we're going to ruin an entire ocean here. And it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.
Even without that, it's already bad. Suncor alone has admitted that 1600 cubic meters of ruined sludge is leaking out into the Athabasca River per day. Animals living in the region are turning up deformed, with leaking tumours. Native communities are catching fish that smell like burning rubber when they're cooked, and coming down with rare types of cancer.
And this isn't even taking into consideration the other parts of the province in which environmental damage is being done. Like down south, where fracing (fracturing coal seams to extract natural gas) is ruining groundwater to the point where people's wells are putting out drinking water so tainted with methane that you can set it on fire.
Why don't Albertans know these things?
Well, for a start, our provincial government is so hopelessly corrupt that they've been releasing "environmental reports" for which no research has been done, refusing to monitor environmental damage to air, water and land alike, and attempting to silence independent researchers and critics by slapping them with lawsuits. Months ago, back when the provincial elections were just finished and a Conservative majority was once again ruling the Legislature, I lamented that a vote for the Conservative Party of Alberta was a vote for Big Oil. I had no idea, no idea how bad it really is. How bad it's been for years. Hell, even the first Conservative premier, Peter Lougheed -- the man who got the ball rolling on the Tar Sands in the first place, back in the seventies -- is alarmed at what's going on now.
Gods help you if you own land on which the oil and gas companies want to drill. As it stands right now, Alberta law favours the corporations -- American corporations, usually -- over Alberta's citizens. You can't say no. You can't say stop. Think about that, all you Albertans who may be reading this. How does that make you feel?
There is a clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (clause 605, for the curious) dealing with energy supply between Canada and the U.S. It states that even in times of shortage, Canada must continue supply to the U.S. at the same level at which it has been for the past three years. Also in that clause are the provision that Canada can never charge the U.S. more than it is charging its own citizens for its energy. Mexico didn't sign that part of the treaty. But Canada did.
But here's the thing. The provinces own their own resources. It's what distinguishes a province from a territory. All those diamond mines up in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut? Federal property. The Tar Sands? Provincial. Control of the management and sale of those lands are at the sole discretion of the Alberta government. We're a democracy. We elect the government. Therefore we control what's going on there. But when Alberta's citizens disagree with what's happening, when we try to fight it, the government is the one who shuts us down. We don't own the companies who are running rough-shod over our province. We're not seeing any benefits to the destruction -- the Heritage Fund, an idea which was built on royalties paid by the oil and gas corporations, hasn't grown since Lougheed left office. And $400 cheques which were little more than bribes handed out to Albertans to buy votes for Ralph Klein around election time don't count, not even remotely. Hell, most Albertans don't even know what's going on up around Fort McMurray, the 21st century's answer to the gold-mining boom-towns of the Wild West. There's something very very wrong with that.
I'm almost thirty years old and this government has been in power since before I was born. A regime which has proven itself all too happy to sell its people and its land to be used, abused, and left broken and soiled. Do you feel whored out yet, my fellow Albertans? Do you feel like we've elected our own pimps, over and over again?
This can be fixed -- or at least stopped. There has to be something we can do, there has to be. They say that desperate times call for desperate measures. I wonder just how bad desperation has to be before even apathetic and placid Albertans start getting a taste of what that means...