The Dominion - 48

The Tar Sands Issue (#48)

dru — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 04:57:12 +0000

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Download Issue #48: The Tar Sands Special Issue (2007) [8.6 MB, pdf]

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Hard Times Sold in Vending Machines

dru — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:48:30 +0000

Worker migration from Atlantic Canada to the tar sands

For Atlantic Canadians, the story of worker migration couldn't be more familiar. Leaving the region for the "boom town" of the day has practically been a rite of passage since the 1970s. The successive waves of worker migration from east to west have been many--the last Alberta energy boom in the seventies, the construction boom in Toronto in the '70s and '80s, the collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland, followed by the collapse of coal mining in Cape Breton--and have always resulted in a particular pull for young workers away from the region. This regional story was immortalized by Donald Shebib's classic 1970 film "Goin' Down the Road," which follows two men who leave Cape Breton in search of a better life in Toronto, only to end up bouncing from one poorly paid job to another. The shock of rural life colliding with urban poverty was aptly captured in Bruce Cockburn's song of the same name, which he wrote for the film: "I came to the city with the sun in my eyes/ My mouth full of laughter and dreams/ But all that I found was concrete and dust/ And hard times sold in vending machines."

Today, it is difficult to exaggerate the impact that worker migration to the Alberta Tar Sands has had for Atlantic Canada. Although credible estimates for numbers of workers who have been moving west are difficult to gauge, few doubt that they are in the tens of thousands. One would be hard pressed to find anyone in the region who does not know someone working out west.

But the move by thousands of Atlantic Canadians to Fort McMurray in recent years differs from past worker migrations.

"The key difference," says Reg Anstey, president of the Newfoundland Federation of Labour, "is that in the other outmigrations of significance, like when the fisheries shut down, a lot of people took pretty lousy jobs."

According to Anstey, unlike during other times of economic collapse in Newfoundland, when workers took jobs in fish or meat-packing plants in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, Newfoundland labour is now a much sought-after commodity.

"This is the first time where almost everyone who's working out there, their way up is paid and their way back is paid by the company," says Anstey.

As of 2006, the shortage of workers across the province was estimated by the Alberta government to be around 100,000 workers. Canadian National Resources Limited has begun offering three flights a week from Alberta to Newfoundland, while Air Canada has added a 'Fort McMurray Express.' The National Post reported in May that almost a third of the residents of Fort McMurray were believed to be from Newfoundland alone.

Anstey sees many advantages for Newfoundland from the oil boom. The province, like other regions of Atlantic Canada, is in the relatively early stages of developing its own oil and gas sector. Until the Lower Churchill Valley hydroelectric project and the Hebron offshore oil project are able to deliver high-paying jobs for Newfoundland's workforce, Anstey sees the migration of workers, whose return flights are likely booked in advance by their employers, as a method of training a generation of workers for these projects.

However, the pull of workers from the region is still somewhat alarming. The populations of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia are shrinking, according to Statistics Canada, while New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island registered the lowest population growth rate of all provinces in Canada between 2006 and 2007. Newfoundland in particular, with an economy that has not yet recovered from the collapse of the commercial fishery in the early 1990s, is now in a state of population decline, with more people dying than are being born. Regional papers frequently carry stories about labour shortages for local trucking companies and fish plants. This shortage, in a startling parallel to Alberta's own industry "solution" to its own tar sands-fueled labour shortage, is prompting increasing calls from east coast business leaders to fill these positions by importing Temporary Foreign Workers.

However, for Atlantic Canadian workers travelling to Fort McMurray, the effects of this migration may not be fully known for years to come.

Steve Gaul, a resident of Halifax, worked various stints in the oil fields for a total of three years, most recently as a roughneck on a rigging crew. When asked about conditions on the job, Gaul says he discovered that exposure to harmful chemical agents was frequent.

"There's lots of Benzene and substances that you're gonna come in contact with fairly frequently. These kinds of things are very unhealthy, they even [result in] birth defects," said Gaul.

Material Safety Data Sheets detailing information about the various chemicals with which workers might come in contact were "diligently provided" to workers, but Gaul says that workers are not given time to read them.

Despite this, Gaul is quick to point out that his contractor instituted a "safety bonus" each hour for crews who maintained the safety of all members. Overall, however, he notes that rigging work is "a dangerous job by nature."

The effects of such chemicals may appear long after a worker has left a job site. As pointed out in an April 2006 column by Alberta Federation of Labour researcher Jason Foster, cancer caused by workplace exposure to chemicals like benzene are not recognized, nor even recorded by the Alberta Workers' Compensation Board (WCB)or the Alberta government.

According to WCB statistics, the WCB accepted 29 new claims for work-related cancer and recognized 38 fatalities due to occupational cancer in 2005. However, the Alberta Cancer Board estimates that eight per cent of all cancers in Alberta are work-related. This means over 1,000 new cases of work-related cancer are diagnosed and more than 400 workers die of occupational cancer each year.

Fewer than one in 10 occupational cancer fatalities are recognized by the WCB.

In addition, Alberta currently has one of the highest rates of workplace deaths in the country, and the number of workplace accidents reported in the province in 2006 was 181,159--an increase of 7.4 per cent from the previous year.

Stories of injuries and close-calls are not hard to come by. George Marshall, a 26-year-old PEI resident worked only a few days in 2006 as a labourer but "almost died twice" on the job. The first close call, according to Marshall, was on account of a fall, while the second was due to "a piece of the rig [that] disconnected and came hurtling toward me."

Jason Fraser, a 24-year-old iron worker from Chester, Nova Scotia, recently spent six weeks working in Fort Mackay. During his last week on the job, there were two serious injuries at his worksite: a structural steel worker injured both heels after a fall and a platefitter sustained facial cuts from a piece of steel. He believes that some contractors deliberately undercount the number of workplace injuries.

Fraser had difficulty adjusting to life within the work camps, which he says resembled university dorms, aside from the fact that they "basically look like a bomb dropped [on them]." After work, there was little to do within the camps.

"I've had problems with alcoholism and I just drank every night for five weeks."

Fraser also had a number of moral qualms with his work, which he believes may have contributed to his drinking.

"Nobody ever thought about the environmental impact," he says. "I had a lot of moral repression. I felt really bad for what I was taking part in."

Gaul also points out that few workers showed regard to the ethics and sustainability of the oil projects, and recalls that the subject of climate change was laughed at by instructors and workers alike during one of his training courses. He also believes that the long hours of work, coupled with the boredom of camp life, often leads to a general feeling of isolation.

"As far as the social atmosphere in the camps, it's not really the most healthy environment. There's a lot of negativity and built-up misery being shared and communicated. There are a lot of people that are in the situation where they're spending way too much time away from their family to have any kind of semblance of regular family life."

It is likely due to these "quality of life" issues that many workers from Atlantic Canada view their positions in Alberta as being largely temporary. Fort McMurray, with its overwhelming growth rate and its infrastructural inability to cope with this growth, is an unlikely candidate for long-term settlement for Atlantic Canadian workers. East Coast workers, though perhaps as naive to the hazards of the oil industry as their predecessors were to the reality of life in Toronto in the 1970s, are by now no strangers to moving to where the work is. Many recognize the higher cost of living in the West, as well as the sky-high rate of inflation in Alberta and realize that their money will stretch further on the East Coast than it will in Alberta. Some, like Anstey, see the abundance of Atlantic Canadians in the Alberta oil patch as an interim gig, as workers tide themselves over in advance of the opening of the Hibernia and Lower Churchill Valley projects. These mega-projects are likely to yield their own environmental and social impacts as well in the years to come, as the East Coast as a whole shifts its economy towards the production of oil and gas resources for export.

Still, many expect to one day see a similar job boom in the east, one that they believe might break their diet of "hard times sold in vending machines."

Acadie en Alberta

Impacting Unimpaired

dru — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:36:25 +0000

New agreements like the SPP and TILMA are aimed directly at unimpeded extraction in the tar sands

Demonstrations against the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) began in the Summer of 2007, but several of the issues raised by anti-SPP organizers invoked déjà vu for many observers: informal agreements, secret talks, plans to do away with layers of national sovereignty in favour of corporate rules of engagement set to supersede labour organizing, environmental regulations or human rights. The laundry list of rule changes sounded a lot like debates of years past--the FTA, MAI, APEC, FTAA and NAFTA.

However, a deeper look at the driving force behind the new acronyms tells a different story, one of a world with new dynamics like peak oil, tar sands and the extreme measures that North American governments are attempting to use in the tar sands to keep an oil-dependent economy going.

Before the SPP became a larger issue nationally and continentally, the Trade, Investment & Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) had already been passed in British Columbia and Alberta. The agreement, having passed as legislation and set to be "phased in" by April 2009, plays a role complementary to the SPP and continues to be similarly criticized by many organizers for the anti-democratic way it has been implemented.

According to an analysis published by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, TILMA "encompasses provincial and local governments, regional districts, school boards, health and social services.

"Nearly every action by a government, now and in the future, is potentially constrained unless expressly excluded in the agreement. Measures are defined broadly and include any legislation, regulation, standard, directive, requirement, guideline, program, policy, administrative practice, or other procedure."

CUPE also describes the SPP as "another attempt of corporate America, in partnership with their political and corporate allies in Canada and Mexico, to reduce the power of government to protect citizens from profit-hungry business.

"Their intention is to scale down government regulations and controls that try to protect our society, culture and environment. Specifically, the SPP will minimize controls in areas like immigration, food and agriculture, natural resource exploitation, public services and entertainment."

TILMA is a new set of limitations on government's ability to regulate and the SPP is the removal of a pre-existing set of regulations. Both TILMA and the SPP have specific aims that go beyond the usual attempt to enshrine investors' rights and protect corporations from government regulations.

Both agreements pave the way--in many cases literally--for the largest industrial project in history to move forward: a project that calls for the extraction of over 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the tar sands of Alberta's Athabasca, Peace and Cold Lake regions.

The SPP and TILMA have anticipated popular resistance and preemptively removed the ability of governments to control the massive supply of energy, land, water and labour needed in the tar sands. They similarly preempt governments' ability to regulate the destruction and pollution that the "gigaproject" will create.

The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union (CEP) is concerned.

"As energy workers, we are compelled first of all to respond to the SPP energy agenda," the CEP said in a statement. "Through the SPP and the North American Energy Working Group, the governments of Mexico, United States and Canada have formed an unprecedented collaboration with energy corporations to promote the continental integration of our energy industries and infrastructures."

The result has surprisingly few benefits for Alberta or Canada. A massive, ecologically rich region will be reduced to an industrial sacrifice area. The synthetic crude that it renders will go south to the US. Royalties for Albertans and Canadians are minimal, and communities living in the vast area that will be strip-mined--Indigenous and settler alike--will be dismantled.

The "Oil Sands Experts Working Group," a part of the 2006 SPP meetings in Houston, calls the tar sands "a significant contributor to energy supply and security for the continent." According to the group, it was founded "when the three countries agreed to collaborate through the SPP on the sustainable development of the oil sands resources." The working group includes the US, Canadian and Alberta government representatives.

What does "sustainable development of the oil sands resources" consist of? The same SPP report says that it requires expanded "integrated long distance pipelines," plans for which are "already in place" to accommodate "the certain doubling of oil sands production to two million barrels per day by 2010.

"The five-fold expansion anticipated for oil sands products in a relatively short time span," the report says, "will represent many challenges for the pipeline industry."

To accomplish this, the report concludes, "Governments are encouraged to streamline the regulatory approval process and better manage the risk to both pipeline and energy projects.

"Canadian governments have already gone a long way to co-ordinating and streamlining the environmental and regulatory approvals, but more needs to be done."

TILMA sets up a free trade zone between Alberta and B.C. that "breaks down barriers" for all industries. April 2007 saw the official beginning of the TILMA agreement, sold as giving Alberta and B.C. a "competitive" way to deal with Ontario's vast size advantage. In reality, TILMA turns the provinces into locations where corporations can sue any person or entity that tries to legislate or otherwise invoke regulations that would make investment more "troublesome." The agreement bans measures which "impact or impair" investment and allows even an individual investor the right to sue governments to knock down such "impediments" and receive compensation for loss of revenue.

What can be seen as an impediment under TILMA is extensive. Under NAFTA, corporations can "challenge" legislation that affects their profits. A third party then rules on the "dispute" at hand. This has seen Canada paying to maintain some of its legislation around tobacco and environmental regulations, for example.

TILMA, however, starts on the assumption that the investor is correct. Unlike the resolution process seen in Chapter 11 of NAFTA, the current agreement includes an automatic up-to-$5 million penalty for a government body (at any level other than federal) that violates the rules of "free access" for capital. For example, if a city blocks the construction of a building for reasons of heritage, costing a corporation a projected $4 million, then the governing body that invokes the regulations "impacting or impairing" owes that corporation $4 million.

Article 3 of TILMA reads, in part: "Each Party shall ensure that its measures do not operate to restrict or impair trade between or through the territory of the Parties, or investment or labour mobility between the Parties." The agreement has specifically designed protocols for hearings to be held if one or more of the signatories are in breach of the agreement.

These secretive deals and agreements are taking place during the single largest energy policy shift in North America since the peaking of US domestic oil production in the seventies.

Internationally, the US is in a scramble for remaining oil reserves. Chinese demand for oil continues to grow. Disasters such as hurricanes and war--and the fact that only one barrel of oil is discovered for every nine that are used--have brought oil prices to record highs since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. With an economic and military structure that needs vast supplies of hydrocarbons everyday, North American energy concerns have found the oil "boom" in Northern Alberta that was expected in the aftermath of a regime change in Iraq.

In response to Chinese interest in the tar sands, US energy expert Irving Mintzer blurted out, "The problem with the Chinese is that they don't know that the Canadian oil is ours. And neither do the Canadians." In the same breath Mintzer noted, "One provocation for rethinking US energy policy will be when Chinese investment in Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan oil development make it increasingly difficult for us to get access to the resources."

That hypothetical situation has come about more quickly, since the Iraqi resistance has cut off access to "stable" flows of petroleum and Venezuela has reduced its contribution to US energy markets by one third. The US has shifted their boom from Baghdad and Kirkuk to Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie. Many Venezuelans who oppose their country's socialist government have re-settled in Alberta.

Whether led by Liberals or Conservatives, Canada has been more than willing to help this shift. Approvals for tar sands operations and newly designed agreements help to take Tar Sands development to unfathomable levels of expansion.

The industry that extracts bitumen and then crude oil from tar sands was once aiming to get to production levels of one million barrels per day (bpd) by 2012. Last year, the average already surpassed 1.3 million. The swiftly rising price of oil and the near-impossibility of a long term drop in price has suddenly allowed a major shift towards producing this oil, which is only profitable at a barrel price of at least $30.

The production process of the synthetic oil is unlike anything else: there are huge labour and energy needs currently unavailable to the producers, needs that are being drawn up and planned through TILMA and the SPP.

The US Department of Energy and Natural Resources Canada had another secret meeting, along with US energy corporations, in February 2006. Some details of the meeting were leaked earlier this year to the CBC. The agenda: to reduce labour and environmental rights in order to ramp up production from the Athabasca, Peace and Cold Lake tar sands to five million barrels per day.

The United States has reorganized their long-term plans for petroleum energy by setting a goal to get up to 25 per cent of their daily oil from tar sands based operations (in addition to Canada's conventional oil). In 2003, the US Department of Energy began declaring tar sands reserves part of their calculation of oil imported from Canada. This will include massive pipeline construction across territories within British Columbia, made nearly impossible to block by TILMA.

The SPP is setting the stage for the creation of a series of "super highways" that may extend from as far as Panama City north to Edmonton and branching off to the three "hot spots" of the Albertan Peace and Athabasca Regions and northeast British Columbia.

Along with the reduction in labour rights across both provinces through TILMA, the SPP will provide much-needed labour through the expansion of the "temporary foreign workers" program. The growth of Alberta's economy has already exceeded the available population of workers. Workers from the Maritimes are paid to fly to Fort McMurray from Moncton, Halifax or St. John's and work in camps in the tar sands.

The energy needs of production in the tar sands process--whether the strip-mining operations or the "in-situ" underground "Steam-assisted gravity Drainage" (Sag-D) procedure--are equal to almost a third of what is produced. (For comparison purposes, the crude in Iraqi reserves produces about 100 times the energy that is needed to pump it out.) Sag-D consumes more energy and water than strip-mining operations, setting the stage for the requisite equivalent of four to five billion cubic feet of natural gas per day required in tar sands operations if they become fully operational.

This reality is what is leading Energy Alberta to promote nuclear power for the Peace Region, where Sag-D has barely even begun to operate.

The two maps included show the plans for this vast expansion, both in terms of the importation of labour by highway and the construction of needed energy supplies by pipeline to get to the planned five million bpd.

The first one shows the flow of goods and labour. The aim of TILMA and the SPP is the immediate creation of far more labour inflow from places such as Mexico and China, most of it ultimately destined to work in the tar sands. Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) began using 500 Chinese labourers on a "guest worker" program at their Horizons Oilsands Project last year. The SPP is a cost-effective means of importing needed labour and keeping costs down at the same time, through enacting 'labour mobility' and allowing non-citizen workers to be exploited at rates currently unreported.

The Alberta Federation of Labour points out that 2006 was the first year that the number of people admitted into Alberta who were not even allowed to apply to become landed immigrants (let alone citizens) exceeded the number of new immigrants. With agreements like the SPP in place, this will increase sharply. With TILMA, every time a labour right is undermined, it becomes the new bottom line.

According to Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour, "Employers are using temporary foreign workers as a way to suppress wages and working conditions and to avoid legitimate unions...we oppose the importation of hundreds of workers just to complete a job and then sending them back home. That is exploitation."

The truly daunting reality is that the production level being proposed will have no other option: the only way to keep up with projected production rates is to bring in people from outside.

The guest worker programs keep non-status workers in camps where they are not allowed visitations by any union. The only means by which such a "guest" will be allowed to stay beyond the term of their contract (up to 24 months) is if the employer applies, not the individual. Figures on pay and to whom it is delivered are not available and have not yet been obtained by organized labour in Alberta--we simply do not know how much migrant workers in the tar sands are being paid.

The "guest workers" may not end up only in the camps. The proposed size of tar sands expansion is such that constructing infrastructure for vast new energy "inputs" will take thousands of workers as well. Two pipelines of various gas are needed "in" to the tar sands for every pipeline going "out."

The energy needed to go into the tar sands are slated to come from the natural gas in such places as Alaska's north slope, coal-fired mega plants in Alberta, proposed nuclear reactors in the Peace Region and near Whitecourt, along with the industrialization of the Mackenzie Valley (and much more). The outward shipping of bitumen-sludge (later converted to mock oil) entails corridors across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and more, all the way to Texas and Louisiana. These schemes, in particular the one known as the Keystone Pipeline headed by TransCanada, is already causing the AFL to warn of dire consequences for job loss and deregulation of currently union-run operations.

The other corridor for sending sludge to refineries is slated to be across British Columbia, over the lands of the Carrier, Gixtsan, Haisla, Tsimshian and other unceded nations to a yet-to-be-constructed port to operate out of Kitimat, where oil could theoretically be shipped to California, Japan and China. The same port would serve to import "diluent" from Russia, a kerosene-like substance used to make the thick mud of bitumen flow like oil in a pipe.

"Pipeline ruptures happen, they're inevitable," says Gerald Amos of the Haisla Nation from Gitamaat Village on the Coast of B.C., where the construction of a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) port is being planned.

"We just don't know the location yet...All of the proponents of the Gateway project and all the other pipelines which would mean more tanker traffic here point out that we've had tanker traffic here, big ships coming in for about 40 to 50 years now. I think you are talking about a substantially different ball game when you talk about supertankers."

This project, the "Enbridge Gateway," is currently delayed due to lawsuits launched by seven First Nations, Indian Act-mandated governments and the China National Petroleum Company's withdrawal from the project.

Other pipelines heading southward are the Alberta Clipper Project and the Spearhead Expansion Project, also led by Enbridge, a self-described "leader in energy transportation." In June of this year, the first new refinery in the United States in decades was announced. The map shows only some of the refineries planning to receive tar sands bitumen.

Under the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, every single project in the Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River tar sands region has been approved. TILMA will streamline the regulations in line with these projects across all of B.C. and Alberta. It will also mean the elimination of a long-time moratorium on oil and gas offshore tankers on the central coast of B.C.

Kitimat and Gitamaat Village, currently host to major Gray and Humpback whale migration, would see 330 super tankers of oil and gas a year migrating offshore, according to the Dogwood Initiative. Nations up and down the proposed corridor would see a loss of forest cover in areas where giant grizzlies still roam near ranchlands.

The oil and gas going to and from the tar sands would cross rivers and streams and the tankers will come near 1,000 salmon spawning areas. Upon completion, the entire 1,200-plus kilometre pipeline systems would provide 75 full-time jobs. Enbridge has quietly shifted gears towards building the infrastructure to send the current bump in oil production to Texas, promising to complete this project at a later date.

That later date may well coincide with the B.C. government's other "Pacific Gateway Strategy," designed to use TILMA, the SPP, the 2010 Olympics and vast tar sands export growth to make the West Coast of Canada a major hub of de-regulated trade with Asia.

It could soon be illegal and not 'merely' politically difficult to regulate how these constructions go ahead. Environmental regulation, revenue for nations who approve the use of their lands, taxation for reclamation purposes, requirements on unionization for the construction--all of these things are being legislated and signed away.

With TILMA, Alberta and B.C. have united to ensure that the oil dug out of the earth is sent south, at an incomprehensible rate. The primary legacy of the project will be run-away climate emissions, the second fastest rate of deforestation on earth, the dismantling of previously won workers' rights, a sacrifice area in Alberta the size of Florida and the removal of meaningful democratic oversight at the community level.

The usual critiques of the SPP and TILMA are not inaccurate. Placing new developments in a global context, however, changes our understanding of what is driving this latest set of deals. Instability around the planet, dwindling reserves of oil, a collapsing American dollar and more are exposing imperial economic structures to a level of insecurity unknown in a generation. By lurching headlong in 2003 towards the Albertan tar sands, the US has made the rising price of oil work to their advantage, rather than its opposite; when the price of oil goes up, those who invest heavily in expensive, unconventional oil gain a larger foothold in market share.

The SPP and TILMA have been drawn up to increase and integrate this into a decades-long strategy for North American economic stability, a strategy that does not address our dependence on oil. Understanding the true nature of these plans allows people to make informed decisions about what to do during the rapid changes in energy politics--changes that will affect the entire population of North America (and the planet) for decades to come.

SPP Tar Sands

NAFTA Trade Corridors

Government Responsible for Sustainable Tar Sands Development

dru — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:12:17 +0000

Alberta's current royalty regime has likely cost the province more in lost revenue than Trudeau's National Energy Program did, according to a senior policy analyst at the Pembina Institute.

Dan Woynillowicz, who works with the environmental think tank, says the September 18 provincial review of the royalty system proves that Albertans aren't getting their fair share from tar sands development. The review advises increasing the royalty rate from 25 per cent to 33 per cent.

Alberta Energy spokesperson Tim Markle says the province will respond to the review's recommendations toward the middle or end of October.

"[The royalty system] was developed a long time ago as an incentive to produce our oil up north," Markle explains. "While oil sands are certainly the future, the majority of what we receive now is the result of natural gas."

The oil industry has said an increase in royalties will scare off investors and ruin the economy. Woynillowicz says the industry's reaction, while expected, is disturbing.

"It is overstated, full of rhetoric and not grounded in reality. Producers are looking to their own interests and doing so in a way that is deceiving Albertans."

Woynillowicz points out that while producers claim the review panel didn't use the right data, they were using a 10-year-old report to substantiate their claims. He also notes that over the past 50 years, "an incredible amount of money" from the federal and provincial governments facilitated technological innovations that private corporations needed to develop the tar sands.

Woynillowicz says the oil industry has been able to create fear over the review because the sector plays such a significant role in job creation and government revenues. If the province's economy were more diverse, one industry wouldn't have so much leverage over the government.

"The government is responsible to protect Alberta from boom and bust," says Woynillowicz. "It needs to diversify the economy so we are not so dependent on energy resource development and a global supply and demand market."

Woynillowicz says the Pembina Institute doesn't advocate government intervention in oil sales or foreign investment in the tar sands, but says the province needs to manage the rate of development.

As for the royalties the province does collect, Woynillowicz says they need to be better managed. Considering that petroleum is a non-renewable resource, the province should be saving a portion of revenues to ensure future Albertans can continue to have a high quality of life, he says.

The Alberta Liberals advocate taking almost one third of annual non-renewable resource revenues and dividing it among four areas, including the Heritage Fund, the province's savings fund. Kevin Taft, leader of the provincial Liberal party, also believes the province needs to create a long-term strategy for tar sands development. His approach would include partnering with other western provinces.

"If I were the premier, I would be calling a meeting of the other provinces to sit down and look at ways we can work together to determine our own destinies. Right now, the Alberta government is just shrugging its shoulders," says Taft. "One million barrels of unprocessed bitumen are leaving the country every day. We can't handle it all in Alberta. Think of what we can do together as a team."

According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, production from the tar sands is expected to reach four million barrels a day by 2020.

However, Markle says the province doesn't have a strategy for developing the tar sands. That is left up to producers.

"Industry is the driver of it," says Markle. "The government is basically here to ensure the resource is mined in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. We are stewards of the resource on behalf of Albertans."

Woynillowicz says the tar sands are being "mismanaged" and the province has been unwilling to address the rate of development. The Pembina Institute advocates a moratorium on new tar sands projects, something the majority of Albertans support, says Woynillowicz.

The rapid development of the tar sands is the root cause of economic inflation, neglected infrastructure and environmental damage, he says. But oil producers are responsible to their shareholders and won't voluntarily decide to slow down development.

"This is a matter of public land. The government has the responsibility for creating the playing field," says Woynillowicz.

He points out that the federal government also has clear areas of jurisdiction, such as in the area of greenhouse gases and global warming. However, Ottawa is not living up to its job of representing all Canadians due to many reasons, including the support the Conservative minority government has from Alberta.

"When they do introduce new regulations that would impact the oil sands, they are creating large loopholes (for the industry)," says Woynillowicz. "To date, the federal government has been dodging their responsibility."

He says if Canadians want the federal government to play a role in tar sands development, they can communicate their wishes through a variety of ways, including a federal election.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers did not return calls.

Boreal River

What the Tar Sands Need

dru — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:39:45 +0000

Processing requires massive inputs of water, energy, land, labour

Water

For each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands, between two and 4.5 barrels of water is needed. The water is used in the process of extracting bitumen from the naturally occurring the tar sand. The bitumen is later "upgraded" into synthetic crude oil.

In 2007, the government of Alberta approved the withdrawal of 119.5 billion gallons of water for tar sands extraction, of which an estimated 82 per cent came from the Athabasca River. Of that, extraction companies were only required to return 10 billion gallons to the river.

Most of the water used ends up in giant, toxic tailing ponds. As of 2006, tailing ponds covered 50-square kilometers of former boreal forest. By 2010, according to the Oil Sands Tailings Research Facility, the industry will have generated 8 billion tons of waste sand and 1 billion cubic metres of waste water--enough to fill 400,000 olympic-sized swimming pools. Today, the largest human-made dam by volume of materials is the Syncrude tailing pond, a few kilometres from the Athabasca river.

The waste sand and water contain naphtha and paraffin, which are used in the extraction process, and oil leftovers like benzene, naphthenic acid and polyaromatic hydrocarbon, among others. Chemicals found in the tailing ponds are known to cause liver problems and brain hemorrhaging in mammals, and deformities and death in birds.

It is difficult to estimate the volume of toxins that make their way into the Athabsca, but downstream communities like Fort Chipewyan have reported high occurrences of rare cancers, lupus, multiple sclerosis and other diseases in recent years. Local fishermen have reported boils and deformities in fish. One winter, an oil slick was discovered under the ice. Syncrude later admitted that there had been a spill about 200 kilometres upstream.

The Athabasca also feeds Great Slave Lake, Deh Cho (the Mackenzie River) and vast northern watersheds. Water from the Athabasca flows all the way to the Arctic Ocean, and plays an essential role in the lives of indigenous communities and vast areas of Boreal forest.

Energy

Between digging up the tar sand, separating out the bitumen, and subsequently upgrading it to synthetic heavy crude, the extraction process requires vast amounts of energy. Because the tar sand and bitumen must be heated, about 1/6 of the energy provided by a barrel of oil is expended to extract one barrel of oil from tar sand.

Opponents of the tar sands say that burning a relatively clean fuel like natural gas to produce oil undermines any efforts to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and transition to sustainable fuel sources. According to estimates from the Pembina Institute, the tar sands will account for 25 per cent of Canada's emissions by 2020, if Kyoto targets are reached.

The vast amounts of natural gas needed to extract millions of barrels of oil per day are leading to an anticipated shortage of supply. As a result, several energy megaprojects have been proposed.

Perhaps the most contentious of the proposals is the $7 billion Mackenzie Gas Project, a 1220 kilometre pipeline that runs along the Mackenzie River Valley, from the Arctic Ocean to Alberta's northern border. The project would connect the estimated 82 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Mackenzie River delta with the tar sands extraction plants to the south.

A second project, the Alaska Gas Pipeline would connect Alaska's north slope, home to an estimated 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with the Mackenzie valley route.

In part to make up for the natural gas supply taken up by the tar sands, Liquid Natural Gas terminals have been proposed in multiple locations on the west coast, east coast and along the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The terminals would receive natural gas from tankers incoming from the Middle East, Russia and other overseas sources.

Natural gas supply is still not enough to keep up with anticipated growth, leading industry to explore options such as nuclear power. Alberta's first nuclear power plant has been proposed in the town of Peace River, though it has faced some local opposition.

Much to the dismay of environmentalists, there is also discussion of building new coal-burning power plants into future tar sands upgrading facilities.

Labour

The Conference Board of Canada predicted in 2006 that Alberta would face a shortage of 332,000 workers by 2025. The figure has been dismissed as exaggerated (it is based on the current rate of growth continuing unimpeded), but it seems to be an accurate reflection of the concern Alberta's industrial sector has shown recently.

That tar sands require a massive influx of labour is not disputed. Another estimate says that 20,000 new positions will be created in the tar sands over the next three years.

The signs of a labour shortage are already apparent in Alberta. Workers from Newfoundland and the Maritimes are offered flights to and from Fort McMurray for the duration of their work term. Grocery stores and fast food joints offer hourly wages in the double digits, and sometimes offer signing bonuses.

Increasingly, workers are brought in from countries like China and the Philippines. In 2006, Immigration Canada issued 15,172 new "temporary work permits" in Alberta, bringing the number of temporary workers to 22,392.

Temporary workers differ from immigrants in that they have no access to immigration services, and can effectively be sent home. According to some reports, the workers' temporary status leaves the door open to abuse. In one case, 12 men brought in by a trucking company were charged $500 per month to live in a three-bedroom bungalow.

The temporary foreign workers program has sparked a debate over the development of the tar sands.

"Most skilled workers would prefer to have 20 years of stable employment rather than seven or eight years of frantic development," writes Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour. If the pace of development was slowed, he writes, the need for temporary foreign workers would diminish.

Currently, development is heading in the opposite direction, with plans to increase production fivefold in the next twenty years. Regulations are being "streamlined," and plans are in place to further increase the number of foreign workers.

Land

Open pit mining of tar sands, according to the Government of Alberta, involves "clearing trees and brush from a site and removing the overburden - the topsoil, muskeg, sand, clay and gravel - that sits atop the oil sands deposit." The "overburden" that is removed is up to 75 metres (about 25 stories) deep, and the underlying tar sands are typically between 40 and 60 metres deep.

After trees and brush are clearcut and either burned or sent to sawmills, the area is drained, and any local rivers are rerouted. Giant trucks then remove soil, clay and sand to uncover the prized tar sands. The sands are then removed and taken to plants to be processed. In the end, an average of four tonnes of earth must be removed to render one barrel of oil.

In addition to tailing ponds (see "Water"), vast amounts of waste sand are generated. These sands, still containing traces of bitumen and other chemicals, are inhospitable to life. Near Syncrude's extraction plant, for example, a vast desert stretches over the horizon. The expanse shows no signs of life, and carries the overpowering smell of asphalt.

The tar sands cover an estimated 141,000-square kilometres, of which approximately 3,400-square kilometres will be strip mined if currently-approved projects go forward.

Government regulations require the strip-mined land to be "reclaimed," and returned to a "stable, biologically self-sustaining state." According to Syncrude's web site, this means "productive capability at least equal to its condition before operations began." Syncrude envisions "a mosaic landscape dominated by productive forests, wetland areas alive with waterfowl and grasslands supporting grazing animals."

So far, Suncor says it has reclaimed 858 hectares, accounting for less than 9 per cent of the land it has mined since 1967. Syncrude has mined 18,653 hectares, a little under a fifth of which it says it has reclaimed.

None of the land, however, has been officially certified as reclaimed by the government. Both corporations have billboard advertisements in Fort McMurray proclaiming the success of their reclamation programs. In the end, it is not clear that land will be fully reclaimed, and government agencies have been criticized as lax in enforcing regulations.

Water

The Christian Labour Association of Canada

dru — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:58:39 +0000

Few subjects inspire more ire within the Canadian labour movement than the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC).

CLAC's website presents the organization as an alternative to the “adversarial” relationship of other unions with employers favouring a more “co-operative approach to labour-management relations.” Although apparently not a Christian organization, CLAC's approach to workplace organization is based upon the “Christian social principles of dignity and respect for all people.” This “non-confrontational” approach is evident in CLAC's background; over the past 30 years, CLAC members have been engaged in only four strikes, the most recent of which (in 2002)lasted two hours.

CLAC was established in 1952 by Dutch immigrants, largely members of the Christian Reformed Church who were disgruntled with the Canadian Labour Congress and its member unions. Most of its locals remained in Ontario until CLAC won a breakthrough campaign to represent 2,500 workers at the Save-On Foods grocery chain throughout Alberta, through voluntary recognition by the employer. By the mid-1980s, CLAC had begun moving into the construction sector. They currently have 11 regional offices, 150 full-time staff members and a membership of 43,000.

CLAC has been roundly criticized as being a “company union.” The Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) website criticizes CLAC's close relationship with management and questions the high rate of 'voluntary recognition' of CLAC locals by employers. Under voluntary recognition, according to AFL President Gil McGowan, CLAC locals often organize within workplaces “with the full co-operation of the boss.” The AFL believes that CLAC has been used by employers to depress wages and discourage workplace disruption. About one in five of CLAC's locals have been certified under voluntary recognition. In addition, CLAC has been criticized for its unwillingness to support employment and pay equity legislation, which they claim “undermine the foundations of such institutions as marriage and the family."

Most recently, CLAC played a key role during negotiations for the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd's (CNRL) Horizon Project, one of the biggest projects of the Athabasca tar sands. The Klein government granted this project 'special status,' which exempted most labour relations rules in construction and allowed the CNRL to negotiate almost exclusively with CLAC. CLAC, in turn, has supported the rapid expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker program on this site, which has resulted in a rapid influx of thousands of migrant workers. The AFL and the Alberta Building Trades Council claim that the 'special status' of the project is an open attack upon organized Labour in the province and is a direct attempt to depress wages and working conditions on-site, through the exploitation of temporary foreign workers.

Can Pew's Charity be Trusted?

dru — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:36:30 +0000

US foundations give millions to Canadian environmental groups

Since major foundations in the US began funding environmental groups in the late 1980s, many grassroots environmental activists have sounded the alarm about the rise of the "Big Greens." Featuring six-figure salaries and foundation funding, critics say the large environmental NGOs coopt grassroots movements and excercise control over what issues are brought up.

Recently, some activists are warning of a similar shift in Canada. In 2006, land-use planner Petr Cizek wrote an article for Canadian Dimension, calling attention to millions of dollars from US foundations being given to Canadian environmental groups.

The money comes from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is endowed by the fortune of Joseph Pew and his heirs, as well as more recent donors. Joseph Pew founded Sun Oil, now Sunoco, a US oil company with revenues of $36 billion in 2006. Under Pew, Sun Oil also founded Suncor, a Canadian counterpart to Sun Oil and currently one of the two largest operations in Alberta's tar sands. Suncor has been independent since 1995.

Sunoco's US refineries process synthetic crude oil from the tar sands. According to a 2004 Philadelphia Inquirer report, a Sunoco-run Ohio refinery processes 100,000 barrels of synthetic crude per day.

The Pew foundation's original mission reflects on "the evils of bureaucracy, the paralyzing effects of government controls on the lives and activities of people, and the values of the free market." Pew money has funded many right-wing Christian groups and conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the John Birch Society, and the American Enterprise Institute.

In the early 1990s, the Pew Trusts began funding environmental groups.

Since 2003, Pew has spent about $41 million on programs on the Canadian boreal forest. Much of this money went environmental and aboriginal groups, and came into Canada via through the Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI). CBI is technically a project of Ducks Unlimited, a conservation group operating in the US and Canada, though this relationship is not stated in materials on CBI's web site. CBI has no board of directors, and no official status as an organization other than its affiliation with Ducks Unlimited. Critics point out that there that this leaves no mechanism for holding CBI accountable for how it uses its money.

According to Executive Director Larry Innes, CBI gives out approximately $2 million per year, though the figure varies. The money is disbursed in roughly equal measure to conservation NGOs and aboriginal groups. Suncor, among others, is listed as one of CBI's "industry partners."

Does the money have an effect on the groups' agenda? "Our role is convener and talent scout," says Innes. CBI's aim is to be "in a position to advance conservation objectives." In many cases, CBI sets up meetings between industry, aboriginal groups and conservationists in order to establish common priorities.

Lindsay Telfer, director of the Sierra Club's Prairie Region, which has received CBI funding in the past, says that groups need to be careful with funding sources.

"Is there a risk that some environmental groups are going to go down a more conservative path because they get funding? I don't doubt that," Telfer told the Dominion. "We have to keep our eyes on our mandates and our goals."

"I believe I've lost funding because of our positions on the tar sands, but where I've lost it, I've picked it up in other places," says Telfer. "It's a difficult debate, because in some ways all money is dirty money."

"The question to ask is, 'Are there ties to how that money is being spent?'"

Cizek says his critique of Pew funding "doesn't have to do with whether money is tainted, but whether a funder directly interferes with the agenda of an environmental organization."

"The Pew Charitable Trusts have consistently set up front groups" that act as a drag on the overall demands of environmental groups, Cizek says.

He sees a "pattern of funding from CBI" corresponding to "a pattern of incredible timidity among the mainstream environmental organizations, who don't seem to be able to take a principled stand on anything." Cizek notes that Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) and the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), two major recipients of CBI funding listed as "partners" in CBI's TV ads, have taken a "low-hanging fruit" strategy of lobbying for protection of areas that are of little interest to industry.

Innes says CBI was founded to address a "tremendous opportunity to do development differently in Canada." The opportunity, Innes say, is the culmination of a series of trends in conservation work: the recognition of treaty rights, the willingness of some corporations to embrace "sustainable practices," and the trend among conservationists to protect entire areas instead of chasing biodiversity "hotspots".

"It's one thing to walk in as an environmental group" and speak to policymakers, says Innes, "and another thing to walk in as an environmental group, shoulder to shoulder with First Nations and industry representatives and saying, 'we've got a solution.'"

The CBI is "pretty up-front about wanting to protect at least half of Canada's boreal, and do responsible management where development is going to occur," says Innes.

It's this industry-friendly approach to conservation that many activists object to. The problem with the consensus-building approach, critics say, is that avoiding conflict with corporations means that the fundamental problems with mining or logging that provoked popular resistance in the first place are not addressed.

"In the 1970s and 1980s a vibrant, truly grassroots public land protection movement emerged--first in the West and then nation-wide," writes Felice Pace of Oregon's Ancient Forest Campaign in a 2004 article. "During the 1990s Pew, with support from other foundations, moved decisively to control this movement."

"Pew favors concentrating on 'low hanging fruit,'" writes Pace. "That is, wilderness areas which local congressmen and senators are eager to support because they are not controversial."

In his 1996 book Washington Babylon, US-based author Alex Cockburn noted that "the Pew Trusts' endowment is wisely invested in the very corporations that a vigorous environmental movement would adamantly be opposing."

"In its initial National Forest Campaign, Pew demanded that recipients of grant money agree to focus their attention on government actions; corporate wrongdoers were not to be named. This extreme plan was modified after some recipients balked."

Cockburn writes that just one of the Pew Trusts made $205 million in "investment income" in 1993 from investments in companies like Weyerhaeuser, International Paper, and Atlantic Richfield. Cockburn notes that at the time this was "six times as large as all of Pew's environmental dispensations." Today, however, Pew is reportedly not as heavily invested in resources extraction.

A more recent attempt at cooperation between industry, First Nations and environmentalists in British Columbia has recently drawn the ire of grassroots activists. In 2006, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and ForestEthics celebrated a major agreement for the preservation of the Great Bear Rainforest. A year later, however, logging companies have ramped up clearcut logging to levels that are "unprecedented in 15 years," in order to gather as much timber as possible before the agreement takes effect in 2009. To make matters worse, "ecosystem-based management" techniques named in the agreement have yet to be defined. Meanwhile, environmental groups agreed to stop the direct action campaign that had previously halted logging, enabling the sped-up clearcutting to continue unimpeded.

“They made the Central Coast an environmental-protest-free zone,” Nuxalk hereditary chief Qwatsinas told the Dominion earlier this year. (See A Clearcut Answer?) “They’ve given away too much. It takes time to get the market campaign, the boycott campaign going again. Think about those strengths that were given up -- the power that they had in making demands, but it’s gone now. What else can they use?”

"We've found organized, institutional environmentalism has failed over the last four years to accomplish anything," forest campaigner Ingmar Lee told the Dominion. "The successes have come from individual grassroots efforts that have basically bypassed the entrenched, bureaucratic, environmental institutions that have been sucking up the enviro-buck and just not getting the kind of accomplishments we need."

Cizek agrees. "In the US," he says, "it has been pointed out that the organizations that are taking a principled stand are the community organizations, the ones whose neighbourhoods are being destroyed." The "Big Greens," says Cizek, often serve to tell local groups that they're asking the impossible, but when proven wrong, take credit for their achievements.

"And they often win the biggest victories."

"Victories," says Cizek, "will not be achieved in Washington, DC, or in Ottawa. They will be achieved on the front lines. The people on the front lines are the ones who are under attack directly. They're not policy wonks trying to figure out what public opinion will tolerate. For them, it's a matter of survival, in many cases it's a matter of life or death."

When discussing the tar sands, Cizek says that the groups receiving CBI funding have been extremely timid. CPAWS, WWF, Pembina, the Sierra Club and others signed a statement calling for a "carbon neutral" tar sands by 2020 through the purchase of "carbon offsets," but said nothing about slowing down or stopping tar sands development itself. A short time later, the Sierra Club called for a moratorium on tar sands development. But it was only after arch-conservative former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed called for a moratorium that CPAWS and Pembina followed suit. WWF Canada has remained silent, though its UK counterpart has recently called for a moratorium.

"To their utter embarassment, the big greens found themselves trailing far behind the curve of public opinion," says Cizek, "and had to scramble to catch up." But the moratorium on new developments, according to Cizek, still does not address the damage that will be done to the water and land by operations that have already been approved.

Groups in Canada that have received money from the Pew Charitable Trusts via the Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI), according to CBI director Larry Innes:

Boreal Forest Network
Center for Science in Public Participation
CPAWS
Ducks Unlimited
David Suzuki Foundation
Ecotrust Canada
Fondation de la faune
Forest Ethics
Forest Stewardship Council of Canada
Global Forest Watch
Manitoba Wildlands
Miningwatch
Nature Canada
Nature Conservancy of Canada
Nature Quebec
Northwatch
Ontario Nature
Pembina Institute
Protected Areas Association of Newfoundland & Labrador
Reseau Quebecois Groups des Ecologistes
Saskatchewan Environmental Society
Sierra Legal Defense Fund
Silva Forest Foundation
SNAP
The Sustainability Network
The Wild Foundation
Western Canada Wilderness Committee
Western Newfoundland Model Forest
Wildlands League
Wildlife Conservation Society
World Wildlife Fund
Yukon Conservation Society

Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation
Bloodvein First Nation
Carrier Sekani Tribal Council
Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources
Dehcho First Nations
Grassy Narrows First Nation
Innu Nation
Kaska Dena Council
Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation
Little Grand Rapids First Nation
Little Red River Cree First Nation
Lutsel’ke Dene First Nation
Moose Cree First Nation
Mistissini Cree First Nation
National Aboriginal Forestry Association
Nishnawbe Aski Nation
Pauingassi First Nation
Poplar River First Nation
Prince Albert Grand Council
Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta
Treaty 8 Tribal Association (BC)
West Moberly First Nation

CPAWS did not respond to an interview request, and a WWF representative declined to be interviewed.

"This is a very high-level political process that's going on," he adds. "This is about cutting closed back-room deals at the very political top, and allowing the environmentalists to achieve some concessions through dealings at the political top to manage their dissent into appropriate channels, so that the industries maintain their right to operate."

Sierra Club's Lindsay Telfer says that too much time is spent denouncing others within environmental and social justice circles. "That's something I've always found frustrating--divisiveness," says Telfer. "I'm more than supportive of other groups that call for more than what the Sierra Club calls for."

Telfer also comes to the defense of those who call for less. "I don't buy into the arguments that CBI is all bad, that Pew is all bad," says Telfer. "I try not to get involved in the infighting." She says she would take money from the CBI in the future if it fits the needs of a particular campaign. "If we're fundraising for a project that has specific goals, I'll take money from people who support those goals," though she adds that the Sierra Club has strict standards concerning who it accepts money from.

Cizek sees a need for a "profound dialogue about the democratic and non-democratic aspects of environmental organizations." Many environmental organizations are private non-profits with few accountability mechanisms. The WWF, for example, has only subscribers, no members. The Pembina Institute, he says, takes money directly from oil companies, to which it sells carbon credits. The Sierra Club is "one of the more democratic of these environmental organizations," he says, and that is "perhaps why they were able to initially take a more principled stand" on projects like the tar sands and the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline.

But he emphasizes that "it's not about quibbling about calling for a moratorium or a shut down," but "what were the processes by which you came to this point, and how might your funders have influenced this decision? What do they actually expect to settle for?"

"Do they actually believe in this insane program of the tar sands becoming carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets?," he asks, referring to a statement signed by several groups before Lougheed called for a moratorium.

The CBI's Larry Innes says that the issue of accountability is "an interesting question." His response to it is candid.

"We're accountable to those people who write us a cheque every year," says Innes. "If we don't achieve the kind of goals that they're interested in spending their money on, the funding stops."

For Innes, "a more interesting question is why we need US funding at all. Why is the environmental movement in Canada so small and poorly funded? Where is all the Canadian money? Why aren't Canadian philanthropists (with a few notable exceptions) investing in Canada's environmental and social justice movements?"

Depending on which explanation of foundation funding one finds more convincing, what CBI is accountable for accomplishing and why Canadians aren't providing the same levels of funding to conservationists will have very different answers.

Open Pits

Scars

Roughneck, Bruised Head

dru — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:15:55 +0000

A tale of women, toughness and safety in Alberta's gas fields

Chantal Desharnais is no stranger to the outdoors or manual labour. Still, the 24-year-old Quebecker, who had previously worked in construction and spent a summer living on the banks of a B.C. river picking fruit for income had reservations about going to Calgary to work in the natural gas industry for the summer. But it was the moral dilemma of working in an industry she has ethical disagreements with, not the physical labour, she was concerned with, says the student in international relations at the Université du Québec à Montréal. As many before her, though, the lucrative work provided an opportunity to make enough money over the summer to cover her tuition fees and help with student loan debts.

But while she says she was prepared for the physical rigour of the work, she never expected the sexism she would face–or the serious injuries she would sustain. After one month on the job, Desharnais would need to be transferred to an office job in Calgary after suffering a concussion, receiving five stitches to the back of her head, and a severely spraining her shoulder.

Despite what seems to be an ample need for workers in the Alberta oil and natural gas fields (the natural gas industry in Canada alone employed 151,327 people in 2006 and is growing), Desharnais found it difficult to get hired once she hitchhiked her way out to Calgary. Company after company refused to grant her an interview. While most companies were coy about the reasons why, she says it was clear that they weren’t interested in hiring women. Eventually, however, she started asking companies outright if they had a policy of not hiring women. While she says she sensed hesitation when she first contacted Geokinetics, her eventual employer, their human resources and personnel manager claims the company never refuses to hire women.

“We never refuse to hire someone if they are a woman–we’re an equal opportunity employer,” says Stephen Menchuk, who hired Desharnais and is familiar with her case. “We have so many positions to fill, sometimes we even hire 50, 60-year-old men. They don’t necessarily work out in the field, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done at the base-camp that isn’t as physically demanding.”

Interviewed at the end of June, Desharnais was at work by the beginning of July, flown out to the base-camp in Grand Cache, Alberta, where the company, which specialises in geological exploration, was checking the area for natural gas deposits. She was one of only two women on the crew, and says she felt it right away. Beyond what she saw as a culture of “only the tough survive,” the fact she is a woman seemed to make it all that more thrilling for others to see her fail.

“As people get off the bus, you can tell they’re judging how long they’ll last. Once you’re there for a while, you start to hear the comments too. It’s especially hard for women.”

The challenges started almost immediately, she says. For the first two days she worked with all the new employees on the line crew–the regular work for rookies in the field, following the machines clearing brush to lay the explosive line behind it. But on the third day she was sent out as a trouble-shooter alongside a 15-year company veteran known for taking few breaks and working long hours. While line crew follow tracks already cleared by machine, trouble-shooters clear their own path, going from one trouble spot in a detonation line to another. By the end of the day she was exhausted and demoralised. Upon returning to the camp, two of the older colleagues asked how her day was.

“When I told them I was out with Paddy, they burst out laughing, like it was some inside joke,” she says. None of the other new employees were sent out as trouble-shooters.

Despite the tough day, Desharnais stuck with it and was eventually transferred to work with someone a little more easy-going. Then, towards the end of the month, she was transferred back to line crew. While the work atmosphere was still far from comfortable, she felt the worst had passed. But after only three more days on line crew, she was once again unexpectedly reassigned, this time as a shooter’s helper.

But according to Menchuk, there was another reason for her constant reassignment. “I didn’t want to tell Chantal this to her face, but I’ve been told that she just couldn’t handle the work out in the field. She isn’t very big and it’s tough work carrying 30 pounds of equipment through the field and up mountains. I was told she just couldn’t keep up. Transferring her to shooter’s helper was to give her a chance; she would just need to follow behind and clean up after him.”

According to Desharnais, however, she was constantly at the head of her group and was in fact told, along with one other colleague, to slow down so the others in her group could keep pace. And while working as a troubleshooter or a shooter’s helper meant carrying less equipment, it definitely wasn’t easier when it came either to cardio or to the safety issues involved. “It was clear that they wanted to put me in a difficult position,” she said.

The job of a shooter is to detonate underground explosives sending out seismic waves to see if there are gas or oil deposits; a shooter’s helper is a kind of a sidekick, helping to set up the area, and clear away the wires after the explosion. Desharnais was assigned as a shooter’s helper in the morning, and, according to her, not given proper training except for one colleague who offered her some advice on what equipment to bring. According to Menchuk all employees receive internationally recognised training at the beginning of their employment and are updated in the field. While he wasn’t on the ground in Grand Cache, he says he couldn’t imagine someone being sent out without proper training.

“We always ensure our employees wear the proper safety equipment. Safety equipment doesn’t eliminate hazards, but it reduces them as much as possible.” Attempts were made to contact Desharnais’ on-site supervisor, but Menchuk said he is currently out of the country and not available for comment.

According to Desharnais, upon arriving on site her partner, the shooter, had no time to show her the ropes. After being dropped off by helicopter they walked half an hour into the bush to the site where they would be detonating explosives. When one of their two walkie-talkies died, the functioning one was given to her partner. She stayed back while he went to lay and detonate the explosives. All along, however, she assumed she would receive some kind of warning that the detonation was about to go.

“All of a sudden the explosion went off, with debris in the air. All I remember was being hit in the head and the shoulder,” she says. While Menchuk says he was informed she was 30 m from the explosion (the required distance) and behind a tree, Desharnais says she can’t really be sure how far she was because she was never signaled where the explosion was coming from. Upon returning to find her, her colleague radioed in that she had been injured. “But he would only say I had hurt my shoulder, and not that I thought I was hit in the head. He told me the blood on my neck was just from scratching it on branches when I fell,” she says.

“Even I didn’t really know the extent of my injuries until I got into the helicopter, but I knew I had hurt my head,” she continues. “It was only once I saw the look of the pilot when I took off my helmet in the helicopter and the blood started going everywhere.” The impact of the collision with the rock had cracked part of her helmet and cut her head badly enough that she would need five stitches once back at the base-camp, and would eventually be diagnosed with a severe concussion. “When we got back to base-camp, the medic even said that if he knew I had injured my head he would have flown out to get me instead of waiting back at the camp.”

According to Menchuk, the type of injury sustained by Desharnais is rare in general, and a first for a shooter’s helper (Desharnais disputes this, saying she was told on several occasions of shooters and shooter’s helpers being seriously injured on the job). “We do everything we can to ensure our employees’ safety,” he explained over the phone from Calgary. “But as I tell everyone, in the end you need to be aware of your surroundings. No one wanted Chantal to get hurt, and we’re sorry that she did.”

Desharnais sees something more troubling. “There was a constant diminishing of my concerns,” she says. Desharnais feels that if she was a man perhaps her co-worker would have paid more attention when she said she had injured her head and not just her shoulder. “They just seem to think you complain for nothing.”

Menchuk agrees that it is not always easy for women in the oil industry. “It’s both the work and the atmosphere,” he says. “You’re sending out a woman with a crew of 50 other guys. Issues come up, things like separate bathrooms and you need to share with the cooking crew because there are only three toilets on site.”

Diagnosed with a sprained shoulder and receiving five stiches to the back of her head, it was unclear for three days, before she was able to return to Calgary, whether she had a concussion. While she was X-rayed in Grand Cache, there wasn’t a head trauma expert at the hospital who could tell her the extent of her injuries.

Desharnais’ troubles didn’t end with the injuries. According to Menchuk, Desharnais “declined” to go back out to the site when safety personnel went with her partner to examine the area in order to file an incident report. Desharnais remembers it differently. “They asked if I wanted to go with them, and I said yes. I wasn’t feeling well [from her injuries] and went to lie down. I found out later that they had gone without me.” The ensuing reports, except for the one she wrote herself, were based mostly on the shooter’s account of the incident and downplayed the lack of training she received and the lack of communication on site. She still has copies of the reports she refused to sign because of her disagreement on the facts.

It is clear that many may think that Desharnais’s complaints are simply sour grapes because she was hurt on the job. Menchuk claims he isn’t sure why Desharnais is still pursuing the matter. “We treated her the way we would treat any employee. She decided to quit her modified work load [an office job in Calgary given to her at full pay after her injury] and go back to Grand Cache to try and convince her supervisors to change their reports. We’re sorry for what happened, but there isn’t much we can do now.”

But in an industry that is continuing to grow in Canada, Desharnais feels stories like hers need to get out. It isn’t about the fact that the work is hard, she says, or even so much that she got hurt–even though she still suffers from headaches and concentration problems from her concussion and has mobility problems with her right shoulder. It’s about the fact she wasn’t properly trained and her safety wasn’t ensured in the field, and that in large part she believes this was because she is a woman. “I may keep looking into this and talk to lawyers. But really I just don’t want to see this happening to anyone else,” she says.

Roughneck

Temporary Labour or Disposable Workers?

dru — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:26:59 +0000

Foreign labourers are brought to the tar sands, but are easily sent home

"So you believe in the free market?"

"Well, it's not so much that I believe in the free market, it's that I demand logical consistency out of those who demand the free market," answers Jason Foster, director of Policy Analysis for the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL).

According to Foster, wages in the Albertan oil industry have not been allowed to follow the basic laws of supply and demand. Companies have used various tactics to prevent the rise of wages. One such tactic, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, is of special concern to the AFL.

Although he acknowledges the existence of a labour crunch in places like Calgary and Fort McMurray, Foster remains critical both of the Alberta Government and of the oil companies, citing their inconsistencies in dealing with the problem. The AFL has gone as far as to accuse the government of causing the current shortages by its refusal to pace development in the tar sands. The glut of new construction, they claim, has led to the current scarcity of skilled tradespeople and the subsequent push to hire foreign workers.

"There are presently more TFWs [Temporary Foreign Workers] entering the province each year than there are permanent immigrants," says Foster. "The entire strategy of the government has shifted away from bringing people to Alberta to allow them to have the full rights of citizenship and become members of our communities.

"They've now shifted it to say we want a revolving door of cattle to do a bunch of work and ship them back home again. They [the oil companies] have found that if you increase supply by bringing in a pool of workers from outside the country who are prepared to work for less and without benefits--you artificially suppress wages."

The numbers seem to support Foster's claims of an influx of foreign workers in Alberta's oil patch. According to Murray Gross, a spokesperson for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), in 2006, Citizenship and Immigration Canada issued a total of 15,172 new temporary work permits for Alberta, bringing the total number of temporary foreign workers in the province to 22,392. By comparison, in 2005, 15,815 were working in Alberta.

Don MacNeil from the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union is equally critical of the government-run program.

"It's a litany of horror stories that almost smack of servitude. They [the workers] are artificially subdued because the threat of being sent back is always hanging over their heads and so the complaints part of the process is largely silent."

The permit that allows foreigners to work in Canada has their employer's name on it. Although they are theoretically entitled to the same employment and labour rights as Canadian workers, they don't have the same freedom to act on those rights, since they can be sent home at any time, without question and at the discretion of the employer.

In response, the AFL has hired a lawyer to act as TFW advocate, taking on cases for the workers to help them get their rights.

"It's a totally horrendous situation. We need them desperately, but once they come here, they have no rights," says Yessy Byl, TFW Advocate.

"I've been pretty busy, it's hard to pinpoint numbers, but I've got over 100 case files. I talk to even more people to give advice. I work with all foreign workers in Alberta, from fast food to the trades. Maybe a third of these are in the oil patch," says Byl.

Yessi mentions two identifiable themes to the types of cases she deals with. The first is that of labour brokers. The second is that of inadequate unemployment provisions.

TFWs usually get here by dealing with a broker in their home country. The broker offers promises of a job or even immigration status in exchange for a brokerage fee (reportedly between $500 and $5000). This practice is illegal in Alberta, but it is difficult to stop, since most of it is done from elsewhere, in places like California, or in the worker's country of origin.

"The brokers charge outrageous fees, contrary to Alberta law. They mislead people as to what's covered and what isn't. They understate the cost of living. They bring them to Canada and dump them. Often, the job doesn't even exist anymore," adds Byl.

Employers interested in hiring TFWs must first apply for a Labour Market Opinion, which is basically a survey of the Canadian workforce designed to determine whether or not the job requirements can be filled locally and whether or not there is a real need to hire outside of Canada. In 2004, the governments of Canada and Alberta signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to help employers who need to hire temporary foreign workers to fill labour shortages on large construction projects including in the tar sands. The MOU also allows employers to enter into an agreement-in-principle with HRSDC that will facilitate and speed up the processing of Labour Market Opinion applications.

A "Regional Occupations under Pressures List" was established for Alberta, which speeds up the application process for hiring temporary foreign workers in certain occupations. The lengthy list includes many occupations that would be required for tar sands projects, such as construction managers, electricians and heavy-duty equipment mechanics, but also food and beverage servers, cashiers and even funeral directors and embalmers.

"They [the companies] came up with a pretty interesting method of justifying the access to the program. They would have job fairs, in my view very poorly advertised, in weird timing and weird locations and nobody would come. That's one of the major hoops that they would dance through," says MacNeil.

Temporary Foreign Workers are guaranteed a set number of work days as stipulated under the terms of their work permits. If a worker loses his job, or leaves it voluntarily, he may choose to seek employment elsewhere. According to Byl, this is not always as straightforward as it may seem.

"If you're not working, it's a minimum of four to five months wait, up to a maximum of eight months, to go through the process of obtaining new paperwork, including a new Labour Market Opinion. The lack of unemployment provisions drives people underground.

"Without a job and without employment insurance, workers can't very well just sit around until they are able to legally work again. Instead, they work underground for less pay, or they go home."

When an employer brings in a worker, it's also the employer's responsibility to find the employee housing. Foster claims that this too is done with minimal concern or respect for the well-being of the workers. He cites an example of 12 Indo-Italians brought in by a trucking company who were put up in a three-bedroom bungalow and charged $500 per month in rent.

"If you are an employer and you can hire a worker where you can get half of the wages back on rent, that's a bonus...They find these ways to nickle and dime them. There are guys that come here work here for six months, then go home without having earned a penny."

I ask Foster whether the TFWs encounter racism and whether they are successful at integrating into their new communities.

"They're not and that's by the design of the employers," he answers.

Foster details how the TFW are picked up by a representative of the employer, driven to a camp exclusively for TFW and that's the last that anyone sees of them. Immigrant service agencies, he says, are forbidden under their funding arrangements with the government to serve TFWs. So if they come looking for language classes or information on how to set up a bank account, the agencies have to turn them away or risk losing their funding.

I ask him about credentials. He explains that workers have six months to pass an exam, part of which is practical, the other part being written. Foster says that they usually fail the written part and excel at the practical component. Since the TFWs can work during the six months leading up to their test, employers generally do not concern themselves with helping them pass the test, since they can easily replace them with a new batch of workers.

"They don't want to invest in training, they don't want to increase their wages. It really is a case of disposable workers."

All involved agree that there exists a wide range in the ways that companies treat their workers, and that not all companies resort to using TFWs. The basic existence of a labour shortage is another point of general agreement. However, the extent and the cause of the shortage remains up for debate, as does its use as a justification for the hiring of foreign workers.

"I'll give some credence to those statements [of labour shortages], but I don't think they're all-encompassing. For example, if we look at the demographics of our First Nations people in Western Canada, if we look at the non-traditional, at women, at people with disabilities, there is a huge pool of workers that we're not attempting to reach out to," says MacNeil.

"There is a shortage, we don't dispute that. It's just a matter of the degree of the shortage and the solutions of the problem. We don't think that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a real solution. We think it's short-sighted and it's ineffective. We believe there are many other ways to go and it should certainly be the last of the last choices."

with files from Stuart Neatby

Workers' Quarters

What in Tar Nation?

dru — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:12:22 +0000

Life among the tar sands

We leave Fort McMurray and hitch a ride to Fort MacKay, a Native community 40kms north, where we stay for three days.

Celina, the elder with whom we stay, speaks of the trap lines from which she and her husband Edward once gleaned a life, and of the bushes teeming with berries that tickled this land before the tar sands plants opened, and stole their land, along with the health of the fish and animals. She lists the kinds of berries: raspberries, high bush cranberries, Saskatoon berries. She lists them off in circles, repeating the names, once, twice, three times, drawing attention to the abundance that she has no pictures to prove. She pauses after each name, breaking in remembrance to taste each one.

We talk about quality of life. About how apples and tomatoes, rumour has it, aren't as robust, tasty or nutritious as they were in our parents' generation and that our parents' apples and tomatoes didn't measure up to those of previous generations either. Oranges and celery; mangoes and carrots; fish, moose; the vitamins of life. I read an article about it that recites percentages, that recaps parentages.

Since the Alberta government implemented its Mineable Oil Sands Strategy in 2005, its priorities have been easier to justify and enforce: the area has been declared a "co-ordinated zone within which mining has the highest priority; policy is in place that specifically stipulates wildlife in the tar sands zone will not be protected before or during mining, "according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Young people, old people and people in-between are dying of cancer. The air here is laced by unrelenting stacks. Oil and water meet but refuse to coalesce in harmony. Like Celina, the people of Fort MacKay who live upstream from the plants get their drinking water from a source other than the river. Celina doesn't trust the water anyway and has met with oil plant representatives and observed for herself their unwillingness to drink tap water. As a result of one such meeting, Syncrude agreed to provide and pay for all the bottled water that she and her husband can drink. She smiles when she tells us that they hate her big mouth. The people living downstream from the plants, most notably in the isolated Native community of Fort Chipewyan (farther north and only accessible by plane), draw water directly from the Athabasca and are the most affected. Five cases of a rare cancer of the bile duct, cholangiocarcinoma, have occurred in Fort Chip's population of 1,200 in the past five years. Normally, only one in 100,000 people contract it. Years ago, Celina tells us, white, non-native people in the neigbouring town of Fort McMurray complained of difficulty breathing, and of green-black, deadly smoke being emitted from a Syncrude plant. As a result, the plant was closed down.

She shows us pictures, not of high-bush cranberries, but of people she's known, and some she's loved. She tells us about her eldest son, who died six years ago. She speaks of how good-looking and kind he was. The neigbouring town of Fort McMurray, where he died, seems almost entirely populated by oil rig workers, or by those in close association. The town has seen massive growth in recent years: more people, more trucks, more drugs, violence and money. Before her son was stabbed in the heart by somebody she doesn't know, Celina knew it had happened.

Our last morning in Fort Mackay we wake up to find that Celina has not returned from Bingo the night before. Just as we're beginning to worry, she arrives. She has spent the night in the hospital with her youngest son, Murray. "I think he ate a bad hamburger," she says. "Maybe food poisoning," she seems to hope. I find myself hoping as well. How serious can food poisoning be? White people who eat in fancy restaurants get it, so it can't be fatal. "The barbecue was brand new," she says. "You can't just cook meat on a brand-new barbecue. There are toxic chemicals all over these things--you have to get the factory off of it before you use it to cook with." She shakes her head at the floor and places her hand on the kitchen table to steady herself. "I don't trust other people's cooking. I don't trust it unless I've cooked it myself. I just don't trust it at all." She continues to shake her head, sadly. "A lot of people don't have a clue. They don't know how to cook a burger right. The woman who cooked it didn't even know that you can't just buy something from the store and use it right away. She probably had no idea. Half the time people have no idea they're eating poison," she says.

We meet Billy in the only restaurant in Fort Chip. He works for Parks Canada as a firefighter, away from home. On days off, he has a few drinks. He drinks and has a lot to say. He tells us of his job at a tar sands plant, how it lasted three months. "They clear cut these huge areas," he says, "but instead of giving it to the elders for firewood or something like that, they just bury it all underground with their huge machines." He raises his voice in anger. "They've taken fish from this river with sores and puss all over them. They've even found fish with two heads," he says, eyes wide. "Indians are supposed to live to 100," he smiles, "but I know sooner or later, I'm going to catch something." He is well-built, athletic, and seems healthy to me. "These plants know exactly what they're doing," he says. "They don't care if they kill us all off. If we survive, it's a bonus, but if some of us die of cancer, oh well." I find myself wanting him to become the community activist, the one who makes the noise. He's got it; he should start something. "I buy all my food in the store. I don't touch any wild meat," he says. "Would you eat a fish with puss all over it?" When we ask if he drinks the water, he nods, solemnly. "My baby bathes in it."

The fish plant in Fort Chip, not surprisingly, has gone straight downhill in the last 10 years. But the biggest problem, according to one employee, is the lack of fishermen. Apparently the government is making it harder and harder to get a fishing license. People can't afford to fish, and so they don't. Many believe that this is a government tactic, to keep the actual number of sick fish quiet.

Billy invites us to sleep at his house and we meet his wife and three-year-old daughter. He is generous with his home and his food and insists that we help ourselves to anything, that when he visits Montreal he will expect the same.

In the morning Billy seems to have lost some steam. He seems dejected and less eager to talk about the tar sands. But when we show him a video interview with Celina he pulls his chair up close and leans in to hear. He seems to agree with his entire body. On-screen Celina says: "Once they take all the oil out of this place, what are our kids going to live on? You can't drink oil. You can't eat money."

"She knows what she's talking about," he says when it's over, shaking his head. "But what can you do?" He exhales, leans back in resignation and pats his daughter's head. I can see him thinking and I hear his outrage shifting back into motion by the sound of his breathing and the grinding of his jaw. He continues to stroke his daughter's hair. After a while, he says, "You know, maybe I will get some guys together and start something." He sits up straighter. We shake hands to say goodbye. When the door is closed I lose sight of everything but Billy and his daughter and a sad part of me wants him to leave while he can.

Mackay Sky

Letting the Wildcat Out of the Bag

dru — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:05:31 +0000

Alberta's Averted Energy Tradesworker General Strike and the Fall Wildcat Walk-Outs

There can be little doubt that this summer and fall yielded a significant page in Albertan Labour history. For the first time in 30 years, a collection of unions representing construction workers came to the brink of a general strike. No such strike vote has been carried out among Albertan tradeworker unions since the inception of Alberta's 1979 Labour Code. The Labour Code makes a strike prohibitively difficult in Alberta due to the requirement that 60 per cent of unions with unsettled contracts agree to a strike vote in order for any union to be able to stage any work action. This means that no union can legally hold a strike vote on its own. As noted by Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan last July, the vote "speaks to how strongly rank and file construction workers feel, that they haven't been treated fairly.”

Although a sector-wide construction strike did not actually happen, there are a few significant developments from the strike vote. The first is that, in an attempt to buy off union support, industry gave the concession of agreeing to recompense employees for the unpredictable impacts of inflation upon the wages of workers under contract. Inflation in Alberta is rapidly offsetting the high salaries being earned by workers in all sectors. The fact that industry would agree to offset these wildly unpredictable rates is an indication of the alarm caused by rumours of the impending work disruptions within tar sands sites.

In addition, the fall-out from the strike vote was a series of wildcat strike actions, for the most part carried out illegally by hundreds of rank-and-file carpenters in open challenge of the Alberta government's hostile labour laws. Although this wave of worker direct action lasted little more than a week, they have prompted organized labour in Alberta to mount a Supreme Court challenge of the Alberta Labour Code, a process which has the possibility of removing one of the biggest stumbling blocks for organized labour in Alberta.

In case you missed all of this over the summer, the timeline below runs through the basic points of interest of the averted “summer of strikes,” culminating in September's economic disruption of the energy sector.

July 4 – A strike vote is held by five unions representing 25,000 trade workers at energy industry worksites across Alberta. The representative unions of boilermakers, plumbers and pipefitters, electrical workers, millwrights and refrigerator mechanics hold simultaneous ballots in Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray. Points of contention are largely “quality of life issues,” including conditions at work camps and the demand that employers provide flights for workers from their homes in Calgary to Fort McMurray rather than transporting them by bus. In addition, a predominant issue is the length of the contract offered by industry to these tradesworker unions; industry has offered a contract for four years, while the traditional standard, owing to uncertainty of inflation, has been for two years. Although the contract would offer wage increases alternating between 6.5 per cent and five per cent annually over four years, the unions argue that these increases would be eroded by skyrocketting inflation--inflation has increased by five per cent over the first six months of 2007 alone.

The unions had been without a contract since the expiry of the previous agreement in May. At stake is $100 billion worth of construction projects at oil sands sites in northeastern Alberta. The ballots are sealed until after an ironworkers union can hold its vote on July 13.

July 21 – Emergency Health workers in Calgary vote by a margin of 99 per cent for a strike, citing wage rates lower than other municipal workers. This vote, coupled with the looming strike vote of tradesworkers, prompts the Globe and Mail to warn of a “summer of strikes” throughout the West after rotating wildcat strikes also begin among 6,000 civic workers in Vancouver.

July 23 – Results of the trades strike vote are presented to the Alberta Labour Relations Board. Electrical workers vote 94 per cent in favour, while the boilermakers and plumbers vote 99 per cent and 97 per cent in favour respectively. Millwrights vote 90 per cent in favour and refrigeration mechanics vote 85 per cent in favour. However, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers(IBEW) spokesman Barry Salmon downplays the idea of a general construction workers strike, suggesting that what may happen would be rotating walk-outs.

"It just shows the level of frustration among trades," says Salmon, “This is all about getting back to the table.”

August 10 – The unions representing plumbers and pipefitters, millwrights and refrigeration mechanics agree on settlement terms with the Construction Labour Relations Association, which represents construction contractors and industry. The plumbers and pipefitters, and millrights accept the four-year wage increase offer (alternating between 6.5 per cent and five per cent for the following four years), although manage to gain adjustment to inflation for these wage increases. The unions representing refrigeration mechanics enter into a memorandum of settlement.

August 14 – The unions representing electricians formalize a memorandum in respect to the settlement framework, largely accepting the same conditions as the plumbers and pipefitters, and millwrights.

August 23 – Following the settlements on August 14, and August 10, hundreds of electrical workers and pipefitters rally in Fort McMurray in protest of their union leadership's resolution with contractors. “My thoughts on a four-year contract is it’s too long,” says worker Shane Brooks, referring to the skyrocketting housing costs in Alberta, as well as the potential erosion of their wage increases due to run-away inflation. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in four years from now.”

August 30 - A settlement is reached with the Labourers' Union, based upon the plumbers and pipefitters’ settlement of August 10. This brings the number of represented tradesworker group settlements to 17 out of 25, although the carpenters and roofers have yet to vote on the offer. Under Alberta's labour laws, if 19 trades groups reach agreement, the rest are stripped of their right to strike. But union leaders who have accepted the settlement claim that the concession by contractors to guarantee indexing of wage increases to inflation is a significant victory. “There wasn't much more to get,” says IBEW local spokesman Barry Salmon.

Results of ratification votes from the electricians, plumbers and pipefitters, and labourers are expected by September 10.

September 2 – The Alberta Federation of Labour threatens to take the Alberta government to court over the the 1979 Labour Relations Code, the Alberta law that, according to AFL President Gil McGowan, "was designed to make it almost impossible for [construction] workers to go on strike." Under the labour law, no strikes can be allowed for tradespeople if agreements are reached with 75 per cent of the bargaining units in the construction industry. McGowan's warning comes after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favour of B.C. healthcare workers in June. The Supreme Court ruled that the right to join a union and the right to collective bargaining were protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

September 5 – Two months after the strike vote by the five tradesworker unions, 4,000 carpenters and 100 roofers who had not been among the five trade groups to make a strike vote on July 4 vote to strike by a margin of 97 per cent. A strike notice is served to the Alberta Labour Relations Board, with job actions scheduled to take place on September 8.

September 7 – The Alberta Labour Relations Board rules that the strike vote by carpenters is illegal, claiming that another union representing labourers had not served a strike notice at the same time as the carpenters. The Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers vows to carry out work stoppages in spite of the ruling.

September 10 – Wildcat strikes, focused moreso on the Labour Relations Board (LRB) than energy corporations, begin at energy industry worksites throughout Alberta. Two hundred and fifty workers walk off the job at a Petro Canada refinery project east of Edmonton and others stage a walk-out at the Long Lake project southeast of Fort McMurray. Other walk-outs occur in Calgary. The industry-backed Construction and Labour Relations Association (CLRA) responds by obtaining cease and desist orders from the LRB. Workers continue picketing outside of the LRB offices.

Electrical workers vote 50.8 per cent in favour of the CLRA settlement, although several workers claim that they never received ballots for the mail-in ballot process. Regardless, this ratification ultimately signals that, under Alberta's Labour code, no other tradesworker unions, including the carpenters who rejected the settlement, have the right to strike until the end of the contract in 2011. Meanwhile, plumbers and pipefitters vote against ratification of the CLRA settlement.

September 11 – After hundreds of tradespeople walk off job sites for the second day in a row, hundreds converge upon the Alberta legislature to demand the right to strike under Alberta Labour legislation. Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers President Martyn Piper distances himself from the wildcat strikes, claiming that he has ordered workers to return to work. Piper's back to work order comes in response to Alberta Employment Minister Iris Evans' government order prohibiting pickets “at any general construction site or maintenance site in Alberta.”

The Petro-Canada upgrader project in Edmonton remains closed after other unionized tradespeople refuse to cross the carpenters' picket-line.

September 12 and 13 – In spite of the government's 'cease and desist' order, as well as a back-to-work order from the Carpenters' Union, walk-outs and protests continue throughout the week. Outside of a Petro-Canada refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, workers stage what they call a “social gathering.” Workers wave plackards bearing the slogans “don't ever give up," “united we stand, divided we beg," and “liberate Alberta, not Afghanistan” at passing traffic. Hundreds of other union workers protest in front of Edmonton's courthouse.

Frustration with union leadership seems evident at these walk-outs. "All the workers are here by their own choice, not by the union's choice," says a scaffold worker taking part in a rally at the Edmonton courthouse. "My union told me to go back to work and let them deal with it." A speaker at the demonstration who urges workers to return to work is booed off the stage.

CBC News reports that 200 unionized employees working at a steam injection site near Long Lake have been fired after clocking off work to take a first-aid course. The workers were apparently given two hours to remove their belongings from the work camp.

September 14 – Although information pickets and protests continue in Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan and elsewhere, including a march by 300-400 workers on the Alberta legislature, the actions are much smaller than earlier in the week. Workers have begun to return to work. Union leaders and industry negotiators both welcome the end of work stoppages.

Members of the union representating Labourers (Local 92 of the Labourers International Union of North America) vote against a strike by a margin of 66 per cent, thereby ratifying the four-year contract offer by the energy industry. This brings the total number of tradeworker unions voting in favour of the contract to 20 out of 25, well over the 75 per cent required to render a strike action by any union illegal under Alberta law.

September 22 – In a weekend demonstration, hundreds of workers stage a mock funeral of the Alberta Labour Relations Code. Says Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan: “Alberta's labour laws don't facilitate collective bargaining, they discourage it...It's not only wrong; It's now illegal.”

October 1 – Four Construction unions mount a constitutional challenge to Alberta's Labour Relations laws on the basis that it violates workers' rights to freedom of assembly.

Although most tradesworker unions, including most of the unions which had initially voted for strike preparation in July, have ratified settlements with the energy industry, carpenters, roofers, and plumbers and pipefitters remain holdouts against this contract.

Strike Vote

Oil Flows South, Impacts Flow North

dru — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:27:07 +0000

regionmap.jpg

based on cartography and files by Petr Cizek, for OilSandsTruth.org

Mackenzie Valley Pipeline

Multi-billion dollar pipelines are proposed which will transport natural gas from the Arctic Ocean to Alberta.

That the gas from the pipelines is destined for the tar sands was once denied, but plans for a “North-Central Corridor” pipeline make the link clear. First proposed in the 1970s, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline has been criticized for being a giant step in the industrialization and colonization of the primarily-Indigenous north. The development needed to keep gas flowing through the pipeline would affect a massive area of pristine wilderness. Maps projecting the impact of the rapid expansion of northern natural gas exploitation show a dense web of access roads, drilling locations and pipelines covering a vast area (shown in yellow on the map) around Deh Cho, or the Mackenzie River.

Alaska Highway Pipeline

The proposed 2,700 kilometre-long Alaska Highway Pipeline would link Alaska’s North Slope natural gas deposits with the tar sands. The project, estimated to cost as much as $30 billion, would cross several protected areas and First Nations lands covered by Treaty 8.

LNG Terminals

For Many Women, Alberta's Boom a Bust

dru — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:30:15 +0000

Rising housing costs, lack of alternatives lead to precarious situations

Driven by the tar sands, Alberta's white-hot economy continues to make headlines. But the gendered repercussions of the province's boom are often neglected, understated, or altogether denied.

Alberta's tar sands operations have made the province an attractive point of relocation for many in the last couple of decades. A large number of jobs have been created, many paying six-figure salaries. Other industries, most notably the service sectors, have had to compete with these salaries in a struggle to retain workers. As wages have been pushed higher in order to lure employees, rent has increased as landlords capitalize on the increases in income. Those without the resources or skills to tap into Alberta's renowned boom and profit from it are the most likely to have to deal with its negative consequences.

In the case of the tar sands, women have often been discouraged from pursuing the very resources and skills necessary to capitalize on the booming industry.

This is due in part to many female workers' experiences with sexual harassment, gender discrimination and unequal wages. Sixteen years ago, Mobil Oil's first female landman, Delorie Walsh, submitted a claim of gender discrimination, a poisoned work environment and unequal pay. She was finally compensated in October 2007.

Those benefiting most from the oil and gas workforce are male. For example, current male/female ratios are 79 to 21 per cent for geoscientists and 96 to 4 per cent for trades.

The significant gendered imbalance of access to jobs means unequal access to housing. Observers say this has led to a steady decline in quality of life for women. "The boom is great if you're a CEO in downtown Calgary," says Edmonton NDP MLA Ray Martin. "Saskatoon is now experiencing a mini-boom too. But this means that more and more people are falling behind." The "successful" economy has created an urgent lack of affordable housing, transitional housing, and shelter spaces, particularly for women.

Women tend to be more susceptible to losing their homes due to abuse or conflict with a spouse or caretaker upon whom they are financially dependent. Because women are more likely to have children to look after, and are less likely to feel safe on the street or in shelters where men are also present, many return to abusive relationships when there is no alternative shelter available.

This is one of the reasons why men make up the more visible segment of homeless populations, says author Susan Scott. Earlier this year, Scott interviewed over 60 homeless women across Canada about their lives. She is critical of the limited definition of the term "homeless."

"If a woman is sleeping with her landlord to maintain a roof over her head, then she is homeless," says Scott. "Other women will do it for money for drugs, to medicate a trauma that they've suffered which has gone untreated--they are also homeless. Others will hang out in a bar, hoping for a bed and a safe place--they are also homeless."

The Women's Emergency Accommodation Centre (WEAC) in Edmonton is the most well known of less than a handful of women's shelters in the city. It can accommodate just 75 women per night, and there are generally 25 to 30 women staying there for a longer term, which means fewer beds available for those seeking emergency shelter.

Amy Gillis, an inner-city physician in Edmonton, says there are few other options for women seeking shelter. "There's the George Spadie Centre, but you usually have to be intoxicated to go there. There's the Hope Centre, but they have far fewer spaces available for women than men. There are not enough absolute spaces for women, and there is little stability in these places."

The shelter situation in Fort McMurray is grimmer still. Currently, none of the shelters there accept minors. A report released this month by the region's Homelessness Initiatives Steering Committee found that some teenagers are resorting to prostitution in exchange for a bed or couch for the night.

Jan Reimer, Provincial Co-ordinator of the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters and a former mayor of Edmonton, says the need for spaces far outstrips supply. "Last year, we served 13,000 women and children. On top of that, 25,000 could not be accommodated and 15,000 simply could not find a place to stay. Only four shelters in Alberta have all of their beds funded by the province. The capacity really needs to be increased."

Part of the reason there are so many more women and children in need of shelter than there is shelter space is that Alberta has no transitional housing program. As a result, there is often nowhere for them to go from the shelter, except back to the street. Establishing a good transitional housing program would help women dealing with trauma, or legal issues, but more importantly, it would buy time, which is what many need most. "A lot of women can't find a place to live, due to a lack of references, or a bad history with landlords. What they need is physical support in the community," says Gillis.

Affordable, quality child care is one indication of a community's support of women. A lack of child care can result in women's inability to access social services necessary to get out of shelters. Alberta is the only Canadian province that has not added child care spaces over the last 15 years. In fact, it is the only province that has seen a decrease; between 1992 and 2004, the number of spaces dropped by 7.2 per cent.

Despite a serious lack of child care spaces, Alberta's population is growing at five times the national rate, and faster than anywhere in the Western world. The strong economy has encouraged migration to the province, which has contributed to a 10.4 per cent increase in total population since 2001, and a rental vacancy rate of 0.9 per cent--the lowest in a generation, and a third of the national average.

If current economic growth continues apace to 2025, the province could face an estimated shortfall of 332,000 workers, many of whom are expected to come from other countries, and will also need places to live. Already, housing formerly considered affordable has been purchased for "worker housing." There now exists a new group of workers that cannot afford to pay rent. In Fort McMurray, for example, it is common to pay over $1,000 for one room.

"Not enough money is being spent on infrastructure to keep up with the speed of tar sands development," says Ray Martin. "I think that there are just too many tar sands projects going on right now. There should be fewer projects."

Federal Liberal cuts to social infrastructure in the 1990s and decades of provincial Conservative inaction on social housing have together set the stage for Alberta's current housing crisis. Alberta's Affordable Housing Task Force, which toured in the spring of this year, found that Calgary's 2006 homeless count indicated a 32 per cent increase over the past two years. Edmonton showed an increase of 19 per cent, while Fort McMurray's homeless population rose by 24 per cent. Housing prices in Calgary have soared by 50 to 60 per cent in the last year alone, and by an average of 14 per cent in all of Alberta.

Alberta has yet to adopt rent-increase guidelines similar to those employed in Ontario or BC. Of all the recommendations made by Alberta's Affordable Housing Task Force, the most controversial item by far was the proposal to introduce rent control. According to Martin, who supports the recommendations, the Task Force, for the purpose of proposing effective measures, presented a package deal which would have to have been accepted in totality or not at all.

For example, a law stipulating the amount of legal increases, and a law limiting rent increases to only once a year, are complementary, whereas picking and choosing from the recommendations creates loopholes. "There is resistance to approving the whole package," says Martin.

"One of the main arguments is that accepting rent controls would provide even less incentive for the government to create much needed affordable housing. But the fact remains that there are no limits on rent and I still haven't seen more affordable housing being created."

A tenancy law passed in May that promises tenants a full year's eviction notice (when landlords plan to convert their apartments to condos) is being avoided in practice through a number of loopholes. The full year's notice only applies to periodic tenants, whose leases are renewed without notice. For everyone else, the majority of whom are fixed-term tenants, the lease ends on the date indicated, and no notice has to be given by the landlord to end the tenancy.

Dania Kochan, an Edmonton resident whose lease had expired, had made an agreement with her landlord to rent on a month-to-month basis. In June, she was given one month's eviction notice, and told by Service Alberta, the government branch that oversees and enforces tenancy laws, to "get a lawyer" when she complained.

Jim Gurnett of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH) finds the situation tiring. "Poor tenants are not a high priority," says Gurnett.

"Just as long as the government can point to a law that's there to protect them," they feel that's enough. There were 4,100 condo conversions in Calgary between January and May of this year, and the number keeps rising.

Alberta's housing crisis is massive and affects people across demographic boundaries. "Employees at Calgary women's shelters are as in need of affordable housing as the women they serve," says Reimer. "What's worse, the salaries being paid in the oil industry are so high, they can't find people to work in donut shops, let alone shelters."

The province has resorted to hiring government employees from the service sector and has successfully recruited employees from women's shelters. Women's shelter workers see this as adding insult to injury. Reimer cites occurrences of workers from women's shelters being lured from their jobs for positions at Dunkin' Donuts, a company known to offer 'signing bonuses' of $1,500 to increase their chances of acquiring staff.

"What needs to happen immediately," says Reimer, "is a government investment that will allow the [human services] sector to provide competitive wages and benefits that will attract and retain a workforce. Frontline shelter workers need to be respected by the government."

Susan Scott says that there is no substitute for a real strategy for dealing with homelessness. The responsibility, she says, lies with the government and with the people of Alberta.

"Alberta is really good at band-aid solutions," says Scott. "People will give at Christmas, and Thanksgiving, so you can see it's really not a thorough process; we give, and we turn right around and blame the victims. No housing means that people will be homeless. Shelter is a right. Society has set it up so access is limited to those who can afford it."

The Edmonton Small Press Association contributed information and contacts to this article.

Housing Demonstration

Housing Demonstration 2

The Richest First Nation in Canada

dru — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:42:53 +0000

Ecological and political life in Fort MacKay

The primarily Indigenous, mostly Cree (also 'Chipewyan Dene') community of Fort MacKay--just north of the internationally famous tar sand "boom" city of Fort McMurray--is said to be the "richest First Nation in Canada." The alleged wealth is largely due to the fact that the community is surrounded by, and on top of, tar sand.

Home to about 500 residents, Fort Mackay is the only official community north of Fort McMurray on highway 63, and lies 40-odd kilometres down the Athabasca River. On a remote northern highway like this one, one would normally see car traffic every few minutes. On this particular road, cars go by every few seconds. When shifts at tar sands processing plants change over--the plants operate around the clock--the traffic is bumper-to-bumper and slows way beneath posted limits. Where two generations ago, there was nothing but muskeg forest, there is now sandy wasteland. Where there were rivers, there are now nine-storey-deep holes. Where there were lakes with fish, there are now "tailing ponds" filled with toxic waste left over from the extraction process--cannons are fired to prevent birds from landing in them and dying. Syncrude's largest such "pond" is surrounded by one of the largest earthen-built dams on the planet.

"Every which direction you look, they're [tar sands extraction plants] all around us, they're all around. And these two up above us here, those are the worst ones. These two are the worst polluters...that's Syncrude and Suncor, they're the worst ones because they're so close to us too, you know?" Celina Harpe told us. An elder in Fort MacKay, Harpe has lived here all her life. When the mining operations began in the 1960s, they brought many changes, including serious health problems, to the community.

"People only died of old age in our days...very seldom--maybe the odd now and then, but other than that, few deaths, very few. But now? [deaths] right and left, young people 37, 34, 43...in their forties, early fifties. People are dying here."

"It's got something to do with these plants, I'm sure of it myself because I've been here my whole life--in our day that's not the way it was."

After the plants began to operate, the water began to make people concerned for their health. Many locals who ran trap lines nearby lost their lines when the land was "scraped off," in mining terms. Those whose trap lines were not destroyed describe the disappearance of many of the animals they depended upon for their food and their livelihood.

Blueberries and Saskatoon berries were once so abundant that everyone had more than enough to flavour their favorite recipes. Now, locals report, they are not scarce--they are simply gone.

Today, there is suspicion about the collusion of the Fort MacKay administration with Syncrude, Suncor and other corporations: companies that have been the driving force of the drastic changes in living conditions that have occurred in Fort MacKay.

The facts of the drastic changes visited upon Fort MacKay by operations like Syncrude and Suncor are not disputed. Few speak out as defiantly as Harpe. Whether because of the perceived inevitability of tar sands mining or the millions of dollars in "partnerships" offered by oil companies, the local Indian Act government--the Fort Mackay First Nation--is going along with mining. (Under the Indian Act, the federal Minister of Indian Affairs has control over the funding of the Band.) While many others oppose the mining, they are less apt to go on the record in a small community like Fort MacKay.

Now, the Fort MacKay First Nation wants to begin a new joint venture with Shell in the tar sands themselves. This means that Fort MacKay will likely find itself opposed by the two First Nations of Fort Chipewyan, which is downstream from the tar sands. Fort Chipewyan has seen a drastic increase in rates of rare forms of cancer and other illnesses, but has not seen the millions in investment and "community partnerships."

Perhaps as a result, its representatives oppose the expansion of the tar sands, and may find themselves in conflict with Fort MacKay in the approval process. However, it is an "open secret" that the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board review process is not much of a process. The board has yet to refuse a single application for tar sand mining.

Today, the problems of Fort McMurray have extended to Fort MacKay. There are many victims of random violence in the small community, violence often tied to drug and alcohol abuse. Downstream of the massive plant for Suncor along the Athabasca River, there is a collective sense of defeat to these "side-effects." And when you cannot see the plumes rising out of the stacks, you can smell them in Fort MacKay's living rooms--the smell of burning tar all day, every day.

A trip out to the Suncor plant by river can give one a sense of the size of the intrusion. The plant is located approximately 12 kilometres from MacKay as the crow flies. There, huge volumes of water are sucked out of the river. Some of the worst effects are the various forms of pollution that are expelled into the air and the water in the area right at the plant. Suncor has colonized an island in the middle of the Athabasca River--turning it into a giant tailings island of waste material. The size of the dykes has been growing for 40 years. Some day, they may give way.

The speed of growth of the tar sands, the quantities of money that will be infused to develop them, and the vast influx of migrant workers from other parts of Canada and beyond trigger social breakdown in varying degrees. Alienated, unhappy work forces will abuse drugs and alcohol, leading to violence, prostitution, elder and spousal abuse and children fathered by workers who are long gone.

Perhaps nowhere are the symptoms of this breakdown more acute than in Fort MacKay, where the niece of a top band council member was hospitalized after being beaten over the head days before our visit.

Today in Fort MacKay, there is a resignation of fate for many members of the community. Syncrude and Suncor make it known that they want to be seen as the companies who "take care" of the community and work in constant co-operation with the residents. Yet there are no open forums and holding a referendum or giving any actual decision-making power to the original owners of the territory is out of the question.

"Keeping you informed" is the slogan attached to a notice posted recently in the Band Council's office building in town. The notice reads: "Suncor Energy Oil Sands would like to notify local residents that throughout June and July there is a potential for increased flaring and emissions for a scheduled tie-in event. Increased flaring may occur during the shut down and start up of Upgrader 2...If you have concerns, call Suncor's Community Consultation Office at..."

Elsewhere in Alberta, flaring is blamed for premature deaths and stillbirths in livestock and human beings.

Throughout the area, Syncrude and Suncor make their names as public as possible -- on calendars, on booths at events, at parks and cultural happenings; their names even permeate annual Treaty Day celebrations.

The Indigenous peoples of the Athabasca region, in particular the community of Fort MacKay, have watched the water turn toxic, muskeg turn into desert. Some community members will no longer eat the fish or moose and many can't trust the water flowing from their own taps. "You can't drink oil to live. You can't eat money to live," said Harpe. "If you've got no water, you've got no life."

Most residents of Fort MacKay aren't as publicly outspoken. But when they get to talking, a transition sometimes takes place. Talk of the inevitability of the projects--of the "it's bad, but what can you do?" variety--is briefly sidelined, and an anger shines through. Words like "crime against humanity" and "getting away with murder" issue from people who now make their living from the tar sands and related employment. In many cases, it surprises the person speaking as much as it surprises us. It seems that having the names "Suncor" and Syncrude" attached to radio commercials, books, events and more has an isolating effect on believing what one sees with one's own eyes.

It makes one wonder what prevailing opinion would be if it were not widely assumed that the unlimited expansion of the tar sands is inevitable and unstoppable. Perhaps that confidence will come in a small community if challenging the tar sands rights to operate starts first in larger centres.

Mackay Sky

Community Notice

Sublime Tar Sands?

dru — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:44:18 +0000

Edward Burtynsky's photography and Canada's extractive industries

For over 20 years, Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky has photographed some of the world’s largest sites of resource extraction and processing. He has documented uranium and nickel mines, stone quarries, oil fields, oil refineries, “urban mines,” including massive tire piles and compacted metal waste, giant factories, the recycling of single-hulled oil tankers and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China-—the world’s largest hydro-electric project. As part of this quest, Burtynsky has also documented the oil industry in Canada, including the Albertan tar sands. However, there is a noticeable difference between his work in Canada and his work overseas. When Burtynsky takes his camera to Bangladesh or China, he reveals human labour as the driving force behind the landscapes of these industrial mega-projects. Human beings are what define these landscapes. In his photographs of the Albertan tar sands, however, the human figure is absent. Why did Burtynsky choose to remove people from his portraits of Canadian industry?

The history of landscape painting and photography may help explain his choices. If people appeared at all in traditional landscape images, they served to show the overwhelming vastness of the subject. In Burtynsky’s pictures of mines, mine tailings, quarries and urban mines from the 1980s and 1990s, he follows this tradition. People, or their residue in the form of tire tracks, parked cars, ladders, or abandoned backhoes, are used to reveal the vast scale of these extraction sites.

Burtynsky has said that he aspires to create sublime landscapes for our time. The sublime landscape in the nineteenth century symbolized the overwhelming power of Nature over Man, represented by a vast and pristine vista of land. It reminded the viewer that Nature can be simultaneously threatening and beautiful. Burtynsky has imagined the twentieth-century version of the sublime as a landscape transformed through human power into something equally beautiful and frightening. His photographs of mines and quarries shock the viewer with their otherworldly appearance, especially once one realizes that they are portraits of a land made unrecognizable through intensive industrial activity.

By eliminating people from the Canadian landscape, Burtynsky shares something else with his nineteenth-century peers. When British painters came to Canada, literally removing Canada’s aboriginal people from the picture served the British agenda of colonization. In his photographs of other countries, Burtynsky has put people back into colonized or capitalist landscapes, but by keeping them out of images of Canada, the agenda he is serving has come into question. In his Canadian photographs, the subject of the immense reorganization of land is the landscape, not the people. The images do nothing to challenge the prevailing Canadian ignorance about the enormous environmental and social consequences that will be the legacy of the Alberta tar sands project for generations to come.

For most of his career, Burtynsky has studiously avoided politicizing his work and he has come under attack for his relentless pursuit to aestheticize his subject and render it ambiguous. However, this ambiguity is what draws viewers in again and again. It is both pleasurable and disturbing to see these transformed landscapes. But the works cannot be labelled “eco-propaganda,” nor do they clearly glorify the industrial practices they present. Sometimes it is even difficult to tell what the subject is. The hundreds of black hills of processed earth that have been photographed with the same sensitivity one would expect from a postcard of the Grand Canyon turn out to be Oil Fields No. 24, Oil Sands, Fort McMurray, Alberta (2001). What looks like a vibrant river of fire is actually the enduring liquid waste of a nickel mine. In this way, Burtynsky masterfully presents the most distasteful industrial wasteland as one of the most spectacular places on earth. This ambiguity allows a myriad of different meanings to be read into his photographs: industry CEOs choose them for their walls; activists point to them as evidence of environmental catastrophe. This is both the potential power of his pieces and the largest point of political criticism of them.

Recently, Burtynsky has started to dispel some of the uncertainty of his environmental views by speaking publicly about the industrial processes he has spent his career documenting. He has collaborated with Jennifer Baichwal on the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, a poignant portrait of what industry is doing to the people and land in China, and he recently wrote an article for The Walrus, in which he decries the resource extraction taking place in Canada. In the article, he calls for the Canadian government to mandate sustainable practices in the extraction and sale of Canada’s natural resources, including the Alberta tar sands. However, a letter to the editor sharply noted that, despite his undisputed talent as a master photographer, "Alas, as an environmental activist, he is a failure."

Indeed, while Burtynsky’s photographs of Canadian industry make for great art, they operate within the Canadian political mainstream and do little to shake up the consciousness of a public content to keep looking away from the social and environmental degradation that is taking place in its own backyard.

Edward Burtynsky’s photographic works can be viewed online at www.edwardburtynsky.com

Burtynsky