Government must take action against sour gas polluters

Just over a year ago, a series of investigative reports examined the dangers of toxic sour gas to many Saskatchewan residents, coupled with a government and corporate culture dedicated to suppressing any public awareness of the threat.

This week, a new report from the Price of Oil collaboration confirmed that nothing has changed. And if anything, the rot in Saskatchewan’s regulatory system appears to be even worse than we knew before.

For several years, a pattern of deaths and illness linked to sour gas in southeast Saskatchewan has been a matter of public knowledge. And the provincial government made a show of arranging for more inspections to be conducted.

But there’s a crucial difference between carrying out testing, and taking action to protect the public. And the latest report reveals that even when the provincial government has had specific knowledge of public safety dangers arising out of sour gas, it has chosen not to share that information with the people affected — going so far as to reject recommendations that residents be informed of identified risks.

Instead, the Saskatchewan Party has chosen to let oil companies decide for themselves whether to bother letting residents know that their health is at risk. And needless to say, the corporations making our province sick haven’t been eager to advertise that fact.

The provincial government’s excuse for failing to act on known public health risks is the claim that residents are protected by its enforcement against operators.

But even leaving aside the folly of letting industry determine when it feels like informing the public of health issues, any claim about meaningful enforcement is impossible to square with the fact that not a single operator has been assessed a fine for a well-documented history of consistent pollution. And in fact, the Saskatchewan Party’s policy has been to ensure that no meaningful enforcement takes place — as one former employee indicated that “(i)f you’re an inspector who issues a fine, you don’t keep working there”.

In other words, inspectors are receiving the message that any continued employment depends on their protecting polluters from the public interest, rather than the other way around.

And that lack of action is particularly dangerous when residents have wrongly assumed that their provincial government actually has their best interests at heart.

Each time the sour gas threat has been investigated, the residents affected have presented a similar message: that they didn’t know anything was wrong, and that they expected the provincial government to be doing its job of protecting citizens.

The latest report includes an interview with one resident who said just last year that he was “reassured by the province’s oversight of the industry” — before he learned about a multiyear history of sour gas leaks, which had been concealed from people in the Wauchope area. And in the interim, a study found that his property was home to off-the-charts measurements of pollution and corrosion.

Unfortunately, if any attempt to rely on corporations to let us know about the risks of corporate pollution is unrealistic as a matter of incentives, the hope that investigative media can do the job falls short based on the lack of resources to identify everybody affected by an industry with thousands of wells emitting sour gas.

Only the provincial government has both the capacity and the theoretical incentive to ensure that toxic pollutants aren’t putting us at needless risk. But if we want to be able to feel safe from environmental threats, we need to ensure that our government actually has its priorities in order — rather than continuing to sacrifice people to profitability.

Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005.

The rot in (our) regulatory system appears to be even worse than we knew before.