November 10, 2009 Fringe Arts

Burnt out

Documentary gets the dirt on tar sands, premieres at Concordia this week

by Christopher Olson

The government of Alberta has denied any correlation between proximity to refineries and the high rate of cancer in local populations.

It’s like a scene from a Roland Emmerich disaster movie set in slow motion: entire mountains pulverized into dust, vast acres of forest flattened in a wave of unidentified destruction.
The culprits aren’t alien spacecraft or seismic earthquakes; this time the Canadian government is to blame. Their MO? Pillage oil from Alberta’s tar sands to satiate America’s energy demands, without accounting for Canada’s own needs.

“Canada [has become] a resource colony of the United States,” said Shannon Walsh, whose documentary, H2Oil, exposes the economic and ecological impact of Alberta’s tar sands operations and premieres at Cinema Politica later this week. “I think a lot of Canadians need to wake up to the fact that we’ve been signing away our natural resources through trade agreements for decades now.”

According to Walsh, we’re also destroying one of the largest fresh water resources on the planet in the name of short term profit.

“What kind of economy are we going to have if we don’t have an environment with which to sustain it?” asked the director. “The economic question is more than just what you get out of that barrel [of oil], it’s what will it cost to clean it up?”

For every barrel of oil extracted from the Alberta tar sands, four barrels of clean drinking water must be used to filter out impurities. Those impurities often get dumped right back into the fresh water supply through overspilling from large tailing ponds—cesspools of factory runoff that, if breached, could equal the equivalent of 300 Exxon Valdez spills.

One of the ingredients in these tailing ponds are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which, when combined with arsenic, increase their cancer-causing side effects more than tenfold. The government of Alberta has denied any correlation between proximity to refineries and the high rate of cancer in local populations.

“Just as we saw the cigarette industry duck and dive for so long about the causal link between smoking and cancer, we’re seeing the [oil] industry duck and dive as well,” said Walsh.

H2Oil takes us to Fort Chipewyan, a First Nations community nestled on the Athabasca River. The community has a population of 1,200, but has lost over 100 to cancer in the past decade. Many residents of Fort Chipewyan continue to observe tradition and hunt for game despite unhealthy arsenic levels detected in local fish and wildlife.

“There’s a cultural genocide happening [in addition to] the direct results of the cancer rates,” said Walsh, pointing out that Natives are forced to abandon their customs and rituals or risk exposing themselves to cancer-causing poisons.

“It’s a time for people to get actively involved and know what’s going on right in our backyard.”

The Montreal premiere of H2Oil will be held in room H-110 in Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.) on Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. Director Shannon Walsh will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A. For a full listing of Cinema Politica’s screenings, see cinemapolitica.org/concordia.