The Dominion - Fort McMurray

Witnessing the Tar Sands Dead Zone

dawn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:48:05 +0000

Asserting the need to heal

FORT MCMURRAY, AB—In the face of the enormous devastation that is destroying forests across northern Alberta, a peaceful group of people are steadfastly asserting the need to heal the land and waters. On June 25, 2011, the second annual Healing Walk for the Tar Sands brought together Indigenous people, Keepers of the Athabasca, elders, children and supporters, who walked 13 kilometres through the heart of where Syncrude and Suncor extract bitumen on a massive scale.

Bitumen, a tar-like substance that holds petroleum, sits below what the industry, in an Orwellian turn, calls “overburden”—not forest

The destruction we saw is so vast it goes far beyond the visible horizon. The urgent need for healing is evident to anyone who visits this barren expanse. People from many places came to support and join in—including activists who participated with Zapatista Indigenous communities and the movement in Oaxaca, Mexico. Together they chanted, “Zapata vive! La lucha sigue!”

The Healing Walk for the Tar Sands was led by elders such as Lillian, a Cree woman, and Violet, an 83-year-old elder and the oldest woman in the community of Fort McMurray First Nation. These elder women possess a wonderful sense of humor and sharp minds, and with other elders, guided the traditional prayers, smudge and ceremonies. This walk faced the enormity of the land stolen from Indigenous peoples that is now destroyed, lifeless, and empty save for ugly scarecrows called “bit-u-men” to keep out the birds from its poisoned soil. Horrid continuous booms from sound cannons scare the birds from landing in the enormous reservoirs of toxic waste. We marched beside the machinery of destruction, the surreal gigantic Tonka trucks, cranes and pipes. The air pollution, a putrid stench, gave a headache to many of the people who participated in the healing walk.

The day was rainy with occasional bursts of sun, but the walkers were not deterred by the weather. A couple walkers had brought protective dust masks, remembering how terrible they felt last year after the six-hour walk, their lungs absorbing toxic dust from the tar sands. However, it was not appealing to wear wet masks so we continued, mostly mask-less, through the rain along the shoulder of Highway 63, accompanied by a heavy police presence.

This walk was started by people heartbroken by what has happened to their traditional homelands. One of the organizers, Cleo Reece, helped to start the Memorial March for the Murdered and Missing Women when she lived in Vancouver years ago. She spoke of the murdered and missing waters in northern Alberta: an eerie, disturbing connection between the violence against Indigenous women and against Indigenous land. Colonization is not a thing of the past; it continues today in virulent, violent forms and materializes in the increased rates of cancer found in communities downstream from the tar sands.

Resistance and commitment to peace also continue, as they have for the past 500-plus years. This is a form of power that is based in love for community, a community of the living that includes not just people, but bears, eagles, rivers, wind and forests. It is a deeply humble, peaceful power that stands in ethical contrast to the forms of power that greedily exploit and forcefully violate the land and those who live on it. It is a power that cannot be bought or sold because it is freely shared, residing in a respect and a grief for the land that gives us life.

We began and ended the day at the Nistawoyou Friendship Center in Fort McMurray where a feast for the walkers had been prepared by a chef with a joyful laugh and a team of dedicated volunteers. At the closing circle, Cree Elder Lillian Shirt was presented with tobacco in gratitude for her leading the day’s ceremonies, and she shared with us stories of survival and creativity.

We learned a lot from the tar sands healing walk and from visiting the surrounding Indigenous families, some who live in crowded old trailers, accessible by unpaved, muddy roads. The living conditions on some of the reserves are not unlike those in poor communities in Latin America.

Where are the economic benefits of the tar sands to these communities? What have they gained from these industrial projects? Witnessing the poverty, health problems and environmental destruction in person helped us respond to these questions. A huge economic gap remains between the living standards of Caucasian and Indigenous communities. Indigenous communities are marginalized in Canadian politics and are fighting institutional racism as their long-term interests are undermined.

On the walk, an elder weighed the cost of lost culture, water and foods and asked what all this destruction has been for. The question points to the global interests that have developed the Alberta tar sands in order to sustain a privileged way of life for some at the expense of others. We had travelled from Vancouver, a landscape dramatically different from the tar sands wasteland but which is nonetheless endangered by the latter's economic grip on land. Our Pacific Coast is threatened by proposed pipelines, with their inevitable spills, and a rapid increase in tanker traffic. In an era of climate change, those of us who live in urban centres cannot afford the disconnect between our cities that reap the temporary benefits of this destruction and the Indigenous homelands that have been desecrated. Through global waters, winds, and ethical human relations, we are linked with the people who are witnessing the eradication of their boreal forests, traditional hunting grounds and once-pristine waters.

On the edge of the dead land and toxic reservoirs, wild flowers, forests and Indigenous families live in trailer homes. Life here is simple, humble and warm, filled with good humour and jokes. Inside, Indigenous artwork on the walls portrays wolves, traditional carvings and pictures of ancestors and grandchildren.

In this community, women, men, children, young people and elders resist their displacement and speak up about the destruction of their land, water and wildlife.

“Giving up is not an option,” said Dene Suline Elder Warrior Brian Grandbois from Cold Lake, Alberta. Brian’s community is struggling to protect Berry Point at English Bay in Cold Lake, the land where they hold ceremonies and sacred burials, smoke fish and gather medicinal plants. This sacred land is threatened to become an RV park by ministerial order. Indigenous peoples of the area have set up their peace protection camp with tipis, tents and campfires, even though police are pressuring them to leave. Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and capitalism are killing Indigenous peoples, destroying our planet, La Pachamama—our Mother Earth.

That the pollution from tar sands extraction projects has spread to affect the waters of the Athabasca River and Fort Chipewyan is no secret. Beginning in the 1990s, these waters became unsafe to drink, and people are sick as a result of their toxicity. These polluted waters empty into the Arctic. This is a fact of hydrology. Tar sands pollution as a source of acid rain in Saskatchewan is a meteorological certainty. Airborne pollutants are also reported to be concentrating in lake water in neighboring Saskatchewan, reducing the availability of certain fish species.

While the ailing of these once-healthy waters is cause for alarm, corporate negligence has been responsible for at least three recent pipeline spills in Canada and the US. In July 2010, Enbridge spilled 3.1 million litres of oil into Tallmudge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, Michigan. In May 2011 in the Plains Midwest, 4.5 million liters of oil were spilled in Lubicon Lake Cree territory, the homeland of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a young woman from the Lubicon Cree Nation who spoke eloquently at the Friendship Center. She described the horror of experiencing 28,000 barrels of oil spilling right beside her family’s homes, in the largest oil disaster in Alberta since 1975. In June 2011, Enbridge was also responsible for about 1,500 barrels spilled near Wrigley in the Northwest Territories. This last spill is said to have been kept out of waterways, but still seeped into the soil.

Horrific spills are not the only danger posed by industrial activity in Northern Alberta. In December 2010, a gushing saltwater aquifer at Shell’s Muskeg River operation raised questions about ground water contamination. This incident was preceded by another round of duck deaths in October 2010 in a Syncrude tailings reservoir. It’s a tragic irony when cultures that see water as something that comes from a tap have to learn about the interconnectedness of the earth’s waters through violent corporate operations that destroy Indigenous people’s homelands and cultures.

The Second Annual Healing Walk in Alberta’s Tar Sands was deeply inspiring. In the midst of massive greed and destruction, a community gathered to transform ground zero into a place of solidarity and social change. The call for healing is compelling, as simple and as necessary as breathing clean air and drinking clean water. The walkers shared an understanding—respect for ecological integrity must come first.

Aidee Arenas subscribed to the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, Christine Leclerc organizes enpipeline.org, Choo-kien Kua is an artist and Rita Wong is a poet. They are all based in Vancouver. This article was originally posted on the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Tar Sands Healing Walk

Tar Sands Healing Walk II

Toxic Alberta

Van Ferrier — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:20:17 +0000

Last winter we decided VBS had to do a story on the Oil Sands of Alberta. So far no American media outlet had comprehensively covered it and even the local press's approach has left a lot to be desired.

On the map with Avi Lewis

Van Ferrier — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:18:37 +0000

Oil. Canada has it and the US craves it. But what are the implications of treating Alberta's tar sands as America's security blanket?

Tar Sands and Tankers

Van Ferrier — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:16:03 +0000

Enbridge Inc., a Calgary-based pipeline company, wants to bring tar sands tankers to British Columbia's coast. This opening segment will introduce you to the abundance of British Columbia's north coast, which includes the coastal waters of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Emissions Thicken the Air in Alberta

dawn — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:38:39 +0000

The tar sands' biggest customer has second thoughts

FT. MCMURRAY -- As Canada's tar sands extraction expands full steam ahead, a perfect storm of internal and external opposition could derail some of the voracious growth at the world's largest energy project.

Together, skyrocketing construction costs, falling crude prices, increasingly vocal opposition from some native groups, and a little known section of the 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act all threaten growth projections in northern Alberta.

"If I was an investor, I wouldn't want to take the risk of putting money into the tar sands right now," said Liz Barratt-Brown, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council, an NGO leading U.S. lobbying efforts against Canada's heavy oil industry.

Canada is the largest foreign exporter of oil to the United States, with Alberta's tar sands sending roughly 500,000 barrels to the U.S. every day. Losing access to the U.S. market would significantly affect expansion plans.

And Canadian oil industry lobbyists are concerned about section 526 of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which bars U.S. federal agencies such as the military and the postal service from buying synthetic or unconventional fuels if they create more greenhouse gases emissions than conventional fuels.

"It was just one of those funny stories in Washington where this section [526] was overlooked," said Greg Stringham from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. "I don't think Canadians or oil companies knew about this section."

Between January and September of this year, Canadian oil lobbyists pushed hard to have section 526 amended or repealed, said Barratt-Brown. Unlike other provinces, Alberta maintains its own special interests office in Canada's embassy in Washington.

In February 2008, Canada's ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, wrote to the U.S. defence secretary arguing that Canadian tar sands oil should not be included in the interpretation of this section.

Then on Mar. 17, Democratic Senator Henry Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and author of the legislation, wrote a letter to Chairman Jeff Bingaman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee clarifying the legal meaning of section 526.

Waxman said section 526 of the Act prohibits U.S. government agencies, including the military, from purchasing "fuels derived from tar sands".

Lobbying continued throughout the spring. Two Republicans from Texas, Reps. Jeb Hensarling and Mike Conaway, sent a letter in late March to other members of the House of Representatives stating: "Section 526 would be problematic enough if it were clear and straightforward, however, the language contains several ambiguities, causing a flurry of attempts at legislative interpretation by the Air Force, the Canadian government, [and] the Centre for Unconventional Fuels [an industry lobby group]."

To counter anti-tar sands campaigners, the Alberta government launched a 21-million-dollar advertising campaign in April aimed at improving the province's brand.

Environmentalists claimed victory in late September, when the Defence Authorisation Bill passed without weakening or amending section 526. Oil industry lobbyists say environmentalists haven't won any victory and U.S. institutions will continue purchasing tar sands oil.

"This will be the first time government agencies have to look at greenhouse gas emissions for purchasing policies and that's positive," said Barratt-Brown.

Oil from Canada's tar sands creates roughly three times the GHG emissions as conventional crude, according to environmentalists.

While environmentalists are claiming victory, plans in the U.S. are going ahead to retrofit old refineries to process tar sands synthetic crude, a sign that some industry players are not concerned about new legislation. U.S. drivers in Colorado, Ohio, and Indiana are already burning gasoline derived from tar sands oil.

"I was in Whiting, Indiana recently, where they are retrofitting one of the oldest refineries in the U.S. to process tar sands crude," said Thomas Clayton-Muller, with the Indigenous Environmental Network.

In January 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California would require a 10-percent reduction in carbon content from all fuels sold in the state by 2020, which would effectively ban imports from the tar sands.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution in June calling for an end to unconventional oil imports. "Our cities are asking for environmentally sustainable energy and not fuels from dirty sources such as tar sands," said Eugene, Oregon Mayor Kitty Piercy, who submitted the resolution.

Despite the actions of individual cities and the California's state government, the military is the largest consumer of transportation fuel in the U.S., so its interpretation of Section 526 and future purchasing habits are crucial.

From the office tower of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers in downtown Calgary, Greg Stringham is within a 15-minute walk from 150 oil companies and "rumours spread fast."

Stringham doesn't seem overly concerned about anti-tar sands legislation in Washington. He wouldn't comment directly on what a Barack Obama-Joe Biden Democratic administration and increased concerns about global warming could mean for the industry except to say: "I'm not confident of anything."

*A version of this story previously appeared on IPS. A portion of Chris Arsenault's visit to Alberta was minded and financed by Shell Canada. This article is the third in a three part series on the tar sands.

A truck at the tar sands

The Globe and Mail does Tar Sands for a week

dru — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:45:46 +0000

oilsands_a1.jpg

Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The first of the Globe and Mail's week-long series on the tar, I mean, oil sands has at least one interesting insight, though it'll be interesting to keep track of all the things that they don't mention.

And money is getting tight in Thunder Bay. Anyone who looks closely may see some irony in the fact that the closing of local paper mills is at least partly because the loonie has been driven to record heights thanks to Alberta's staggering wealth.

But one person's downturn is another's upswing. While places like Thunder Bay suffer, many Canadians enjoy the proceeds of rising oil stocks. The spotlight on Alberta ended the long-lamented discount attached to Canadian oil company shares, which have outperformed their U.S. counterparts of late. (Suncor, for instance, has become the world's best performer among big oil companies that are traded publicly.)

It's something that the Globe can toss out there casually and then forget about, but it's actually a huge economic issue in Canada. The oil boom in Alberta allows investors to continue to pretend that the economy is ok, while sectors like timber and manufacturing approach a full-blown crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

Smoking in the Greenhouse

dru — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:13:10 +0000

Tar sands growth makes meeting Kyoto targets less likely

The Kyoto Protocol is a legally binding agreement to the international treaty called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its objective is “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

The Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce global emissions by five per cent by 2010. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that reductions of 50 to 85 per cent by 2050 are needed to stabilize the climate at safe levels.

Under the Kyoto agreement, Canada is committed to reducing emissions to 563 megatonnes. At current trends, Natural Resources Canada projects Canada's emissions will exceed this level by 36 per cent--or 265 megatonnes--by 2010. By international law, countries that exceed their targets are required to make up the difference, plus an additional 30 per cent, in the next commitment period.

In a detailed analysis, the Pembina Institute concluded in 2005 that oil sands are the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions growth in Canada, with a rapidly increasing share of the country's total emissions. Emissions from the oil sands are projected to increase between 450 and 560 per cent between 2003 and 2020.

Commercial development of the oil sands began in 1967. In 1995, the Alberta Chamber of Resources laid out a strategy that envisioned tar sands production doubling or tripling by 2020. This timeline was exceeded by 16 years--oil sands production more then doubled by 2004 to 1.1 million barrels per day. Current projections range from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers' estimate of 2.7 million barrels per day by 2005 to the government of Canada's estimate of 6 million barrels per day by 2030.

Greenhouse gas emissions projections for the oil sands are complex. For example, high pressure steam is used to melt the bitumen so it can be extracted from the sand--for this reason, producing oil from bitumen results in three times the greenhouse gas emissions compared with the equivalent barrel of light or medium crude. While relatively clean-burning natural gas is currently used to provide the steam, proposals for coke or bitumen could double the emissions, while nuclear power would lower greenhouse gas emissions but produce nuclear waste.

The federal government has not publicly released its projections of future GHG emissions from the oil sands since December 1999. However, the rapid growth of the oil sands corresponds with the dramatic increases in the government's estimate of how much Canada will overshoot its Kyoto target. In 1997, Canada anticipated its emissions would exceed its Kyoto target by 137 MT, whereas the most recent estimate in 2005 was 270 MT, a one hundred per cent increase.

Pembina Institute offers the only concrete numbers. In 2003, emissions from the oil sands accounted for 3.4 per cent of Canada’s total. As the oil sands continue to grow, Pembina projects that by 2010 they will account for 7.5 to 8.2 per cent of Canada's total emissions, under current trends.

Between 2000 and 2020, the Canada Research Energy Institute anticipates that development and production activities in the oil sands will lead to an increase in GDP of $885 billion, reaching three per cent of the country's total GDP by the end of 2020. As Stéphane Dion famously stated in an interview when he was environment minister: "There is no minister of the environment on Earth who can stop this [oil sands development] from going forward because there is too much money in it."

At the UN emergency meeting on climate this October, Stephen Harper stated, “The core principle of Canada’s approach to climate change is balance. We are balancing environmental protection with economic growth.”

Harper's greenhouse gas emissions strategy is based on carbon intensity. This means that instead of reducing overall GHG emissions, oil sands projects can successfully meet the Harper government targets while, reports Pembina, quadrupling output with the end result of tripling emissions. The regulations also give new oil sands projects a three-year grace period from any emissions restrictions, with an unknown impact.

The Pembina Institute is calling for the oil sands to be carbon neutral by 2020 by using a combination of offsets and carbon capture and storage. Such a strategy has its detractors; organisations such as Carbon Trade Watch argue that offsets encourage a business-as-usual approach, when in reality dramatic changes are required.

Source: The Climate Implications of Canada’s Oil Sands Development Matthew Bramley, Derek Neabel and Dan Woynillowicz. 1995- the Pembina Institute.

Projected Emissions by Province

Tar sands emissions: projected

Working Full-Time

dru — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:32:58 +0000

The work camps of Fort McMurray

Two mechanics from site picked me up at the Fort McMurray Greyhound station at 2pm. I had spent the uncomfortable six-hour bus ride from Edmonton beside a large, sweating man from Bathurst, New Brunswick, who worked at the same site to which I was travelling. When this connection was discovered, he excitedly phoned his sons, also on-site, to tell them 'a girl was coming.' My introduction to the alternate society of work camps had begun.

Of Wood Buffalo Region's population of 80,000, over 10,000 live in work camps flung far and wide throughout the bush. Here, being female is akin to having a giant pair of antlers on your head and wearing neon clothing adorned with flashing, beeping lights -- all the time. In my camp, perhaps 30 or 40 of the 1400 people were women. The first time I attended meal hall, I made the mistake of wearing a mid-length skirt and, while trying to swallow incredibly inedible "food," I overheard several conversations about the possible colour of my underwear.

Generally, work camps service the construction sector, with most contractors' workforces living in trailers on or close to the worksite--anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours from Fort McMurray. The trailers each hold between 30 and 50 men, plopped onto a carved-out section of bush; these camps typically house 1,500 to 2,500 people. Like weird small towns, you see the same people over and over again, learning more about their habits than their personalities. Being a girl, this is naturally amplified. "You wore a red shirt yesterday" is both a brilliant observation and a good pickup line, in camp terms.

The camps are not trying to emulate small towns. Rather, they reinforce a sense of estrangement from the immediate surroundings; rules about what personal items are allowed are many and domestic comforts are few. Meal times are set, quiet hours are enforced and any unusual activities are investigated by the security guards. Most workers are on a rotational schedule, working six weeks at a time, before being flown--at company expense--to their home territory for two. Due to intense overcrowding, many camps have adopted what is known as "hotel-style service." Employees check into a camp room for their shift and leave with all their belongings at the end, effectively forcing them to live out of a suitcase. Company policy states that "this emphasizes that our workers are on-site to work," and not to establish any type of home within the camp.

This is exactly what makes camps successful in oil companies' eyes. Workers living in camp are far more likely to have spotless attendance records than those living in town. There is not much point in missing work when all you can do with a day off is sit in an 8-by-12-foot bunk. The productivity of camp workers is therefore worth the expense of keeping them in camps, where the bill for a single day's lodging can vary from $120 to $180 and is entirely picked up by the client or contractor. Oil company logic follows that by creating too plush an atmosphere within camps would lead to increased absenteeism and, at the very worst, a home away from home.

This institutionalized nomadicism has contributed to the careless atmosphere most camp residents have towards Fort McMurray. It is not a pretty town and its air of neglect is palpable: as the saying goes, everyone works in Fort McMurray, but nobody lives there. Many workers avoid going to town altogether, preferring to wait in line to use the long-distance pay phones. Town nightlife is fraught with bar fights--especially between non-union and union members--centred on how much money one can spend at the strip club or casino. Outsiders would be amazed to learn that it is possible to throw $300 worth of toonies at a stripper over the course of an evening. The small upside of this testosterone fest: if you're female, your drinks will always, always be bought for you.

These alive and alarmingly abundant stereotypes contributed to my thoroughly mixed reaction to camp. On the one hand, the camp functions as a refuge from these harsh elements of town life; but on the other, it subjects one to a totally unnatural way of living. Work is the focus of existence. As the "hotel-style" camps emphasize, life is something that happens when you're away from camp. What exists in camp, then, is a society defined by work and routine, out of touch with larger civilization. As one camp resident of two years says, "Camp life is hard to describe to anybody who hasn't been there. Even my family doesn't get it."

The drag of the daily routine, enforced always by rules, is indeed hard to convey to outsiders. In search of a small break in mid-December, my friend Dave bought a toboggan and brought it to go sledding on the hill behind the camp. We had talked about the possibility of sledding for weeks beforehand and the potential for an activity other than watching TV or getting drunk had us all excited. Three of us bundled up against the -30 degree weather one night and took the sled out -- only to be stopped by a security guard after our first run down. "I don't think there is a specific rule against this," he said, "but you better stop anyway." Minutes later, we were back in our rooms having a beer and the piercing disappointment we all felt could only be understood by someone else worn down by the monotony of camp.

The sense of mental isolation, compounded by geographic remoteness, means it takes a certain hardiness of personality to survive in camps. For those who can, there is the benefit of saving large amounts of money within short spans of time. The friendships formed in camps are close-knit, as people depend on their friends to stay sane in such an absurd environment. My camp life was positively shaped by the people I met there and they are the reason I look back at my time there somewhat fondly -- that is, until I remember the meal hall.

Working Man