Sep. 29, 2010 - Issue #780 : Dave Stone
Vuepoint
A question of action
Did you hear James Cameron is in town? Did you hear they made him sign in to the legislature? Do you think he regrets becoming involved in this whole issue in the first place? With all of the excitment a couple of tar sands stories may have gone unnoticed in the last week. Last Friday NDP MP Linda Duncan released her minority report on the health and environmental impacts of the tar sands. The report was originally meant to be an all-party report from the parliamentary committee on the environment. After a year of meeting with aboriginal and environmental groups, touring tar sands projects in Alberta and hearing from numerous stakeholders, the committee decided, behind closed doors, to abandon the report to Parliament. Committee members decided to release individual reports. While it's an admirable effort, it won't have the same impact on Parliament, and without consensus it makes pushing the issues in Parliament a more partisan issue and easy to dimiss.
That same day the Alberta government announced it would be starting an independent review to explore why David Schindler's report on the water quality of the Athabasca River is significantly different from the reports of RAMP, a committee set up by government and industry to monitor water quality.
Proper data should be used by the provincial government, and it's an admireable effort on its part to ensure it's acting with all information. If anything, it is an important effort if only to find out why the two water quality results were so different. But reports are often a way to stave off taking real action and if the result of the parliamentary committee is any indication, there will be more interest in further dissecting the resulting information. With reports from Alberta Health Services on high cancer rates, Dr John O'Connor, Kevin Timoney, David Schindler and much of the investigations by the parliamentary committee on the environment, there is enough evidence to support the idea that there are health and environmental problems in the surrounding environment of the tar sands. The only investigation that should be happening now is, how do we stop it. V
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