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.
Whether Calgary does or doesn’t have fluoride in its water appears to be a fluid situation. Last year, council voted in favour of adding fluoride after a plebiscite question in the municipal election. However, if you think you’ve been drinking it over the last 12 months, you’re mistaken. At the time of the vote, city officials told councillors it would take between 18 and 24 months to complete the work to add the mineral back into Calgarians water. But that timeline may now be extended.
Calgary-based electricity producer TransAlta Corp. is suing the Alberta government and the Alberta Energy Regulator to prevent oil and gas companies from fracking near its largest hydroelectric dam in the province because the technique can cause earthquakes. The court action, which was filed in September in the Court of King's Bench of Alberta, takes place as two oil and gas companies have applied to frack within five kilometres of the dam. TransAlta is concerned about possible seismic activity causing damage to the Brazeau power plant, near Drayton Valley in central Alberta, as well as the loss of wildlife, habitat and human life.
When the Mikisew Cree First Nation grew tired of warning elected officials that the Peace-Athabasca Delta in northern Alberta was slowly drying up, they went international in a bid to find help. That’s how a group of United Nations monitors came to be seated in a community hall in the remote community of Fort Chipewyan last weekend, going over the nation’s list of concerns for Wood Buffalo National Park, the site of one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world and and home to endangered whooping cranes and the continent’s largest wild bison population.
In the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, a public health debate rages. It’s not about vaccines, masks or where people can smoke, though — it’s about fluoride. It’s in our toothpaste and mouthwash, and a common word around dental offices. But in Calgary, it holds a spot in the public consciousness due to decades of advocates on both sides slogging through six plebiscites on whether the city should put fluoride — a mineral found in rocks and dirt — into the water supply to fight tooth decay.
Dentists want to keep it in, but one group wants communities across Canada to keep fluoride out of the water we drink. A new group, Fluoride Free Canada, is expected to announce a new initiative to make sure fluoride is not added to drinking water in any Canadian community. Details of the announcement have been embargoed until late Wednesday morning, but it comes as the debate continues to take place in some Windsor-Essex communities on whether the anion should be added to the water.
"It's just like the chlorine in drinking water. In the right concentration it is protective because it purifies the water, but in a certain concentration chlorine gas has been used in wars because it's deadly." A character in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove believed communists were adding fluoride to American water and called it the “the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot” they’ve ever had to face. The movie, which satirizes the Cold War, pokes fun at the thought of water fluoridation being used as a weapon of war.
Nova Scotia MP Lenore Zann wants environmental racism — when injustices related to the environment disproportionately impact people of colour and Indigenous groups — addressed in a new bill she’s put forth for debate in the House of Commons. Zann’s Bill C-320 looks to establish a strategy in Canada that would explore the correlation between race, socioeconomic status, and environmental risks, as well as the link between dangerous conditions and bad health in communities where Indigenous groups and people of colour live, CBC reported.
