How bad was the Federal report on the Oil Sands? ….
It was so bad that the Federal MPs decided to cancel their investigation and destroy the draft copies of the report.
How important did the Ottawa Citizen think it was? …. They buried it on the lower left hand corner of page A4 in the July 7, 2010 edition.
An excerpt:
MPs won’t discuss mysterious decision to tear up draft report
Federal politicians from the government and opposition benches have mysteriously cancelled an 18-month investigation into oilsands pollution in water and opted to destroy draft copies of their final report.
The aborted investigation comes as questions are being raised about the Harper government’s decision to exempt a primary pollutant found in oilsands tailing ponds from a regulatory agenda.
The government is in the process of categorizing industry-produced substances that could either be toxic or harmful, but has excluded naphthenic acid — a toxin from oilsands operations — from the list, and left it off another list of substances that companies are required to track and report.
The exclusion is “alarming” according to a letter sent Tuesday to Environment Minister Jim Prentice and Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, since the federal and Alberta governments have already identified it as a primary source of pollution in liquid waste dumped into ponds after companies extract oil from the region.
“Naphthenic acids are one of the main pollutants responsible for the toxicity of tarsands tailings to aquatic organisms, and have been shown to harm liver, heart and brain function in mammals,” wrote Matt Price, policy director at Environmental Defence, an independent research organization based in Toronto. “Naphthenic acids are also very long-lived, taking decades to break down.”
