Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
The boss of a water company with one of the worst pollution records in England has been handed more than £1m in pay and bonuses. Anglian Water chief executive Peter Simpson faces criticism after he landed a “substantial” £337,651 bonus as part of a £1.3m pay package. The reward comes despite English water firms overseeing such shocking levels of pollution that the Environment Agency has said water company bosses should be jailed for serious offences.
The federal government’s plan to plant up to 320 million trees a year to meet the prime minister’s target to put an extra two billion trees in the ground by 2030 has been met with sharp criticism from opposition members including the New Democrat’s natural resources critic, Charlie Angus (NDP — Timmins-James Bay). Marie-Claude Bibeau, minister of agriculture and agri-food, said the national tree planting program “will engage farms groups across the country and help farmers manage soil erosion, improve water management, provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, and shelter for livestock.”
Of the 117 comments submitted to the government recently about a proposed gold mine on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore, just one was unequivocally in favour of the project. Almost all of the other commenters were squarely opposed to Atlantic Gold's Fifteen Mile Stream proposal, which would see a 400-hectare open-pit mine developed in the Liscomb Game Sanctuary, about 30 kilometres north of Sheet Harbour, N.S.
Wastewater from oilsands mining operations have long been a challenge for Canada's energy industry, much of it ending up in industrial tailings ponds. But scientists and engineers at the University of Calgary are taking aim at eliminating watery tailings from the oilsands production process with the help of specialized liquid salt. Hot water is used in oilsands mining operations to extract the oily bitumen from the sand, with the resulting wastewater ending up in tailings ponds to settle and later be reused. Alberta has an estimated 1.3 trillion litres of fluid tailings sitting in tailings ponds.
