Current news for the Canadian oil sands is dominated by the leakage from a tailings pond on the Kearl mine site. Characterized by being 5.3 million litres of toxic liquid this has been dominating the news. The government of the NWT has expressed alarm that it has not been notified and the First Nation of Fort Chipewyan is angry that they have not been notified. Politician from the UCP have apologized and promised to look into it, Imperial Oil has apologized, and Alberta Environment has followed suite.
The first clue that something is amiss is the reporting of the quantity in litres. If you are in the oil industry you realize that the common measure is cubic meters (M3). The second is the distances involved between the Kearl site, Fort Chipewyan, and the NWT. The Kearl site is about 150 km away from Fort Chipewyan and about twice that from the NWT border. The Kearl site itself is 50+ km upstream on the Firebag river and is buffered by fairly large fens. If the spill were to maker it to the Athabasca river, which in turn flows by the Fort Chipewyan reserve, the flows from the Athabasca range from 150 to 2000 M3/ second and will therefore be heavily diluted if the pollutants even make it there.
Reports from Kearl monitoring by Imperial indicate however that concentrations of the pollutants highlighted by the CBC and others are within guidelines in close proximity to areas directly between the Firebag river and the lease.
Given that that all indications are that this is grossly exaggerated if not completely fabricated, why was the misinformation propagated like it was? The Fort Chipewyan band had accused heavy oil operators of causing causing cancer through releases from tailing ponds for years before this but from other operators. Some studies showed that this was not the case and others describe a correlation. The band however was predisposed to treat any news of spills with alarm. The AER posted the spill issues in February 7 and on March 2 an updated report indicated that no wildlife was affected.
The link between the First Nations, ENGOs, and the Canadian press has likely produced an alarmist and senseless piece of junk. At a minimum, the CBC and other news outlets were gullible. If one retired oil industry employee can see the holes in this story, surely editors can at least fact check and verify it. At worst, the CBC and other chunks of the Canadian press are compromised by ENGOs and First Nations. The degree to which the Canadian news feed is dominated by a handful of seemingly closely related interests however can twist our democracy in knots.
Imperial Oil has apologized for not communicating with stake holders. UCP politicians have apologized and pledged to investigate. The AER has also apologized. All these parties likely know that the issue is a gross exaggeration but prefer to let the charade play out. The Liberal government promises to investigate, Guilbeault accuses the oil industry broadly, and the DFO issues a statement. Why is there not retraction or correction though?
In politics, the rule is to apologize for nothing unless a majority of press is against you and in this case for force of the media is unassailable. The oil and gas business has a lot of experience here and the sensible approach is to duck rather than rage against the storm. Witness the internet assault against the Canadian Energy Center, which is commonly disparaged as the UCP “war room”. It became a magnet for attacks by anti oil activists around the world.
Freedom of the press has been a core value of democratic institutions in the west but the assumption has always been that the opinions of the press would be well thought out and independent of external influence. In the 21st century, it seems possible to create a fog of disinformation that becomes the norm for a lot of the press.