Safe water supply must take precedence over oil

Two months after the July 20 Husky pipeline breach that resulted in a 250,000-litre heavy bitumen spill, the three major cities whose water supplies were disrupted were finally told last week they could again draw water from the North Saskatchewan River.

Let that sink in for a moment, because we are talking about water.

Three major Saskatchewan cities — Prince Albert, North Battleford and Melfort, with some 62,000 people — were finally told by the Saskatchewan Water Security Agency they can use their drinking water source — after two months.

For two months, thousands of people were put in jeopardy by what should be seen as negligence in the monitoring and inspection process of both a government and an oil company.

For almost any other government, this would be a crisis of immense (perhaps insurmountable) proportions.

But for Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party administration, it seemed just one of a number of irritants this summer contributing to a nine-percentagepoint drop in personal and party popularity — a sizable decline, but hardly a threat to a government that had just cruised to a thirdterm, larger-than-ever majority.

Maybe this is where the problem begins.

For too long, a premier, a government — and a province as a whole — have bought the dangerous fallacy that a pipeline or the oil economy is our most precious resource. To believe so is utter nonsense. One surely doesn’t have to be a frothing-at-the-mouth-David-Suzuki environmentalist to understand this. For eons, we have recognized the preciousness of water.

Since the time of white settlement in Saskatchewan, farmers, townspeople and city dwellers alike have understood that no commerce — or anything else, for that matter — happens without a good, clean, safe, water supply.

This is nothing more than simple recognition of what’s needed to exist. First Nations people knew this for thousands of years, before their history was wrapped in the warm, fuzzy, politically correct notion of “our first environmentalists.”

Before we can even eat, we need water.

For this reason alone, we should be alarmed at the way the government has bumbled the spill ... and even more alarmed at the disturbing number of occasions this Sask. Party administration has been sending a message about oil corporate/business interests or government economic interests — versus safety concerns for our water.

Any environmental matter — land or air — in which we allowed Husky Oil to do the testing, monitoring and analysis of the spill’s cause — then be closed-mouthed about the findings — would be outrageous. That this spill involves our drinking water is beyond acceptable.

We still don’t know why it took 16 hours before the “pressure anomalies” in the flow of heavy bitumen through the pipeline were addressed by shutting down the leak into the North Saskatchewan River.

And when we try to ask, we aren’t directed to a professional in the environment ministry. We are told to speak to an executive council political appointee in the economy ministry. Now, we await a “full report on the incident” from Husky.

Yes, Husky supposedly will provide full compensation for inconvenience experienced by the cities and others.

Yes, it is unfair to simply pin the problem on Wall’s undying devotion to the oil sector and pipelines when such pipelines existed long before he became Saskatchewan’s premier. Wall didn’t put all these pipelines underground near rivers.

Let us also understand that pipelines have long coexisted with our water supply and still pose less danger than moving oil by rail.

But this in no way excuses the laissez-faire way in which the government has handled the Husky Oil pipeline spill.

“These are some of the basic questions we needed answered,” Sam Ferris of the province’s Water Security Agency said last week. “And we needed assurances to come to a decision, and support a decision, regarding the safety of the water for use for municipal water treatment systems.”

This is a massive understatement ... albeit one that badly needed to be made, considering how badly we have lost our sense of priorities.

Oil cannot take priority over water in Saskatchewan.