"A New Kind of Gutter Politics"

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The Power of Misinformation and Paranoia

If you haven't already, read the National Post's editorial on this story.

My view:

The National Post editorial board is correct in stating that Dr. John O’Connor was wrong in the number of cholangiocarcinoma cases he reported occurring in Fort Chipewyan. Yet, NP’s failure to grasp key elements in the ongoing saga regarding Fort Chipewyan and its abnormally high rates of cancer spreads the same type of ‘misinformation and paranoia’ that it accuses Dr. O’Connor of engaging in.

Fort Chipewyan residents first raised concerns when they noticed the increased number of cancers and cancer related deaths occurring within their community. However, it was only when Dr. O’Connor joined community members in vocalizing his concerns did Alberta Health Services consider it necessary to initiate a study to examine cancer incidence in the community. The study confirmed the concerns of Dr. O’Connor and the community, as the number of cancer cases were higher than expected in Fort Chipewyan.

However, the NP editorial downplays the community’s elevated cancer rate and the role environmental factors may have behind it. According to the NP, the concerns of community residents and health officials are unfounded, as Fort Chipewyan’s elevated cancer rate is natural and the community’s close proximity to the oil sands creates this false impression that the latter has an influence on the former. Further, the NP expresses certainty when it claims that the community’s high cancer rate is due to either chance or lifestyle choices.

This is a misrepresentation of the AHS study, as it concluded that increased cancer rates could be the result of a multitude of factors, such as chance, lifestyle, but also environmental factors, such as oil sands development activity. Moreover, the study is explicit in its recommendation that increased monitoring and further studies are required to establish the community’s elevated cancer rate trend and its causes. Yet, for some reason the NP rejects environmental factors as potentially contributing to the community’s elevated rate of cancer and that the concerns of residents are baseless.

Rather than vilifying Dr. O’Connor and misleading readers, the NP should focus its attention on the real questions surrounding this story. Why does the provincial government fail to heed its own study’s findings and acknowledge that environmental factors may be responsible for Fort Chipewyan’s elevated rates of cancer? Further, why does the government refuse to engage in an independent, peer reviewed, comprehensive study of the potential impact of environmental factors on community’s health, as the AHS study recommends?

The real issue is the provincial government’s unwillingness to respond adequately to the concerns of community residents and the recommendations of its own studies. There may be a link between oil sands development and the deteriorating health of Fort Chipewyan residents. As a result, the Alberta government has a moral responsibility to determine what is behind the community’s elevated risk of cancer. However, it has currently failed to do so, and this is the real issue that the NP should devote its energies in exploring.

An Afternoon With Andrew Nikiforuk

Video from Andrew Nikiforuk's talk on Fort Chipewyan, held last Wednesday at the University of Alberta. The event was hosted by Stand with Fort Chipewyan. Kudos to Paula E. Kirman for videotaping the talk.

"Downstream" Showing and Stand with Fort Chipewyan

Stand with Fort Chipewyan and the U of A's Aboriginal Students' Council will be presenting "Downstream" this Friday, October 9. The acclaimed documentary film (33 minutes in length), followed by a free potluck, will be shown in Business Building 4-13 at 2:15 p.m. Invite friends, family and others to the showing, which will kickoff a series of events that Stand with Fort Chipewyan will be hosting this year.

Stand with Fort Chipewyan is a non-partisan, campus advocacy organization located at the University of Alberta. The organization is dedicated to raising awareness to the concerns expressed by the people of Fort Chipewyan, as well as lobbying the government to engage in actions to firmly establish the effect of oil sands development on the health of residents.

Over the course of the year, the organization will be hosting documentaries, speakers and other presentations in order to highlight the concerns of Fort Chipewyan residents, as well as the impact of nearby oil sands developments. Further, they will be providing an opportunity for students on campus to directly engage their elected provincial representatives, in order to express their concerns regarding the situation.

Follow Stand with Fort Chipewyan on facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, or check out their website.

Stay tuned for further information and events.

Canada:

"Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do your damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog."

- Tim Callaghan, Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Towards the Dignity of Difference

This weekend, the University of Alberta will be hosting "Towards the Dignity of Difference," an international conference which "examines the impacts and implications of the most recent iteration of the Western-centric discourse represented in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History theses." In addition to this, the conference aims to advocate a third approach in tackling radical extremism, one that acknowledges “the dignity of difference” and promotes “dialogue among civilizations."

What's worth noticing, and definite reasons for attending, is the conference's all star academic line up, which includes the likes of Benjamin Barber (Jihad vs McWorld), Canadian Robert Cox (considered to be the father of the British School of International Political Economy Studies, as well as for first applying Gramsci to International Relations Theory), Hassan Hanafi (one of the world's leading experts on 'modern' Islam), and Akbar Ganji (the leading Iranian dissident and award winning journalist). In addition to this, the conference includes some very interesting panel discussions and topics, including the current situation in Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Considering the cheap entrance fee, especially for UofA students, the conference is worth attending. Props to Dr. Mojtaba Mahdavi and Siavash Saffari, as well as others, for setting it up.

Canada, Land of Opportunity

Engineer

Doctor

Iggy Eye's the West

“The big issue for me is I don't want to be a party of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, which is what this party is, because you can't be a good prime minister unless you represent all Canadians.”

“I think sometimes we tried to establish our environmental bona fides by running against the oil sands, and I just think: This is a national industry. It's pumping something like $8-billion into the federal treasury. So it's slightly bad faith to beat the goose that lays the golden egg over the head with a stick. The goose is a little messy. The goose needs to be cleaned up. The goose needs to make better use of the yard, but let's make this a sustainable industry that all Canadians can be proud of.”

"Frankly, I think it's condescending to westerners that being a so-called intellectual is some big liability. People out here are as devoted to the life of the mind, and the life of culture, as anybody else in the country. ”

- Federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in today's Globe and Mail. Definitely promising, but as is always the case, let's keep an eye on the follow through.

(h/t @macleansmag)

Three Hot Meals a Day...

A very special hat tip to Tyler Butler for posting this hilarious Fry & Laurie video. Tyler asks whether the video is simply a hilarious sketch or relevant Alberta political commentary (pertaining to Bill 44).

I say both.

Check it for sure.

Fort Mac MP's Thoughts on Fort Chipewyan's Health Concerns

Brian Jean, MP for Fort McMurray-Athabasca (which includes Fort Chipewyan) shares his thoughts regarding Fort Chipewyan's health concerns in a recent issue of Slave River Journal (h/t George Poitras via facebook):

Chip Health Concerns Inconclusive: Jean
By SHAWN BELL, SRJ Reporter

The MP responsible for Fort Chipewyan says while concerns about cancer in the community are valid, information is inconclusive and further studies need to be done.Brian Jean, MP for Fort McMurray-Athabasca, says he has been keeping close watch on the health concerns in Fort Chipewyan for the past three years but hasn’t heard anything conclusive enough to warrant immediate action.

“Right now the studies have not proved anything, including health effects,” Jean said. “I’ve looked closely at the statistical data, and overall the numbers are very close to the Alberta average.”While he acknowledges the federal government’s responsibility for First Nations in Fort Chipewyan, Jean pointed out the responsibility for industry rests on the province, making it difficult to determine who is responsible overall. Besides, the MP said there needs to be further examination of the potential causes.“We don’t know what the causation is,” Jean said. “Is it Uranium City, or what has been happening across the lake, or the Bennett dam, or the oilsands that have been leaking for 10,000 years before we got here? The evidence is inconclusive.”

Jean said he was promised a new report that would conclusively describe health problems in Fort Chipewyan during his meeting with community stakeholders two weeks ago, but hasn’t received it. Yet he emphasized the federal government is taking the issues of water and air pollution very seriously. “This is of great concern to us,” he said. “We’ve acted very aggressively on water and air quality.”And he assured that no matter the discussion of government responsibility in Fort Chipewyan, if environmental issues are shown to be directly related to health, action will be taken immediately.

In the meantime Jean believes better records of health concerns must be kept.“I think good records have not been kept in Fort Chipewyan,” he said.

Jean is right in the sense that no study exists that conclusively proves causation between environmental toxicity and the community's health. Currently, a government study indicates an abnormal cancer and rare cancer rate among residents, and industry and independent assessment of toxicity levels in and around Fort Chipewyan indicate toxins far exceeding safe and acceptable levels. These studies, as Jean readily admits, validates the community's concerns, but does not compel the government towards any immediate action to address the situation.

However, the residents of Fort Chipewyan are well aware of this. That is why they have been calling for a comprehensive, independent and peer reviewed study that assesses the link between the environment and the community's health for years. But, the provincial and federal government has not yet responded to their requests.

Let's work through this again slowly.

Jean claims that immediate action is unwarranted because there is no evidence indicating causation. In order to obtain evidence of causation, a study needs to be conducted. However, both the provincial and federal government (of which Jean is a member) refuses to initiate in any such study. So, lacking the expertise and resources, the community is left to demonstrate causation itself, as both level of governments refuse to carry out this task themselves.

Humour me for a moment.

Can you imagine that if government, independent and industry studies indicated that residents of a Calgary neighborhood nearby a toxic dump, were reporting abnormal cancer and rare cancer rates, as well as toxicity levels far exceeding safe and acceptable levels, the community would have to demonstrate a causal link on its own? There would be no way. The government would step in to conduct a study and do all that it could to address the concerns of the residents. Just the way it should be. There is enough evidence, as Jean himself suggests, to warrant a a comprehensive, independent and peer reviewed study, but the government has been less than forthcoming to initiate one.

So, what makes Fort Chipewyan different? This is the most important question. How come politicians can claim that the community's concerns are valid, yet not legitimate enough to warrant a comprehensive environmental-health study, even though government reports call for one? Is it Fort Chipewyan's lack of political significance? The fear over what might be discovered? Or is it something more legitimate?

Answers that can only come from our elected officials and must be provided before they refuse to address Fort Chipewyan's concerns. Or question the community's health records.