Monitoring program to study oilsand sustainability

OTTAWA – An Environment Canada scientist, who discovered elevated levels of mercury in bird eggs near Alberta’s natural bitumen deposits, says that a new federal and provincial monitoring program is the first of its kind to track trends that would indicate whether the oilsands industry is “sustainable.”

In an interview with Postmedia News, Craig Hebert, who works at the National Wildlife Research Centre, said the program is designed to “get a better idea of environmental impacts of oilsands” through monitoring of air, water, and wildlife. He suggested that these were “necessary additions to develop the oilsands in a sustainable way.”

“The issue with some of these other (previous) monitoring programs is that they were never designed to look at temporal trends, really,” Hebert said. “They were designed to look at (indicators needed to produce) fish consumption advisories, perhaps (as an example), for human consumption of fish.”

The program, expected to cost about $50 million a year, has increased the number of monitoring sites and is expected to publish data on its observations.

Secret government documents prepared within Environment Canada and the Privy Council Office have warned that contamination of the Athabasca River is a “high profile concern” and that oilsands development could cause irreversible damage to Alberta’s ecosystems, creating a “financial risk” for the province.

“So really, the point that needs to be emphasized here is the need for a standardized approach to being able to evaluate temporal trends through time,” Hebert said.

“To do that properly, you have to be sampling same species in the same location (and) you have to take into consideration other factors that can affect mercury levels such as changes in diet or changes in growth rate for fish, for example.”