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 Nova Scotia government has not notified some landowners of potential contamination on their properties from historical gold mines, despite being required to do so by provincial regulations. Gold mines that operated in Nova Scotia dating back to the 1800s left a legacy of contamination, most notably from arsenic and mercury. In many cases, the original source of the contamination is on one property, but the material flowed — often through water — to surrounding properties over time.
The IISD Experimental Lake Area has received $11.7 million, over the next five years, from the Government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) Major Science Initiatives Fund. “This funding is essential to driving forward our research on threats to Canada’s precious fresh water—from microplastics to drugs in our water and much more,” said Richard Florizone, IISD’s President and CEO in a prepared release.
A campaign that was launched in December has started to gain steam, and the aim is to make people “give a f*ck” about Indigenous communities that don’t have clean drinking water. The censored version of the campaign is called “It’s Effing Water,” and it was started by social impact agency Public. The campaign suggests that there are nearly 70 Indigenous communities that are still without clean drinking water, and a petition to try and elevate the issue at a national level has gained almost 50,000 signatures.
J. Paul Getty, the famous 20th-century American oil and gas tycoon, once noted: “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” That’s the sort of conundrum facing Albertans right now when it comes to the massive tailings ponds created by the province’s oilsands companies. Those ponds contain approximately 1.4 trillion litres of water, the equivalent of more than 560,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, and it’s about to come rushing down the Athabasca River — one way or another.
In a resolution to a years-long dispute, De Beers Canada has plead guilty to one count of failing to report annual mercury monitoring results for the G2 station at Victor mine in 2014 as required under the mine’s Certificate of Approval. De Beers was not charged with failing to take samples, monitoring or for polluting the environment. The open-pit diamond mine operated by De Beers Canada Inc. is located upstream from the Attawapiskat First Nation. Beginning in 2008, the project pumped water from the open pit into the Granny Creek water system which flows into the Attawapiskat River, triggering a rise in the mercury level in the water and the fish populations.
Researchers from three Maritime universities are hoping microbes collected from the bottom of a lake near an abandoned gold mine in Dartmouth, N.S., will provide a model for how to clean up contaminated sites across the province in a quicker and less-intrusive way. Last May, a research team took a boat to the middle of Lake Charles, not far from the former Montague gold mine, where extensive mining took place from 1860 to about 1940.
For decades, Pictou Landing First Nation has lived uneasily near an industrial plant emitting brown, foul-smelling waste and the effluent treatment facility they say causes respiratory and skin illnesses. Now, the mill is being mothballed. Ms. Francis, a member of Pictou Landing First Nation, fought for years to stop toxic wastewater from the Northern Pulp plant from being pumped into a tidal estuary next to her community. After decades of court battles, environmental studies and protests, people on the Nova Scotia reserve are hopeful they may one day be able trust their water and land again.
Grassy Narrows First Nation has been beset with indifference for their lives and their rights by the Canadian government for five decades. From 1962 to 1970, the Dryden paper mill dumped 10 tonnes of mercury into the Wabigoon River upstream from Grassy Narrows. This polluted fish and drinking wells. The federal and provincial governments claimed as late as 2016 that the river would clean out the mercury naturally. Despite reports as early as 1984 stating government action was needed. Still nothing has been done. The Canadian government’s utter disregard for Indigenous lives is so perverse that until recently it has not allotted resources for researchers to intensively study the health impact of the mercury. Rather, the bulk of research done has been by a Japanese research team that in 2012 found at least one resident who was born with mercury poisoning and, in 2007, two children born with brain cancer and who experienced seizures.
