After repeated pleas from community members over more than two decades, a federally funded study will begin examining the health impacts of the oilsands on residents in Fort Chipewyan, an Indigenous community in northern Alberta.
Many people in the community, located more than 200 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, have long believed there are links between cancers in Fort Chipewyan and the industrial developments upstream along the Athabasca River.
Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine, which was the site of a 5.3-million-litre wastewater spill in 2023, is located around 140 kilometres away from Fort Chipewyan. The closest project is Suncor Energy’s Fort Hills mine, which is more than 90 kilometres away.
Researchers will examine current and historical health data, study local disease patterns and monitor people and the environment. They will also examine how environmental changes impact the community’s culture and daily way of life.
“We’re not pointing fingers, we just want answers to what’s going on,” Ruby Ladouceur, president of the Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation, said in an interview with CBC News. “We cannot pinpoint and say this is all from industrial, right? We can’t do that because we don’t have the evidence to prove anything yet.”
The study will be carried out by third-party researchers and overseen by the Métis Nation, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and the Mikisew Cree First Nation (MCFN). The federal government will play an observer role.
The 10-year, $12-million study was announced by the federal government in August 2024. The first round of funding arrived in March for the study’s planning and governance phase.
The study is called Project Monument Hill, which shares the namesake of a local vantage point overlooking Fort Chipewyan and Lake Athabasca.
Ladouceur says the study’s methodology will combine western science and Indigenous knowledge of the land.
“Our goal is to better understand the relationship between the environmental conditions, traditional land use and the health and well-being of our people,” said Ladouceur. “It’s indisputable that environmental health and human health are correlated.”
Alberta doesn’t currently maintain community-specific statistics about cancer for rural areas of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) and other parts of northern Alberta, according to a spokesperson for Alberta Primary and Preventative Health Services. Instead, it only maintains general or regional data.
“In smaller communities, cancer case counts can be very low and potentially identifying, so cancer data is generally analyzed over multiple years to protect privacy and ensure reliable interpretation of trends, which are then shared with the communities directly,” a ministry spokesperson said in an email.
Dr. John O’Connor, who has been raising his concerns about cancer in Fort Chipewyan since 2006, told CBC News he is happy the study is taking place.
However, he wishes it happened sooner and is worried the study’s 10-year timeline is too long.
“The urgency with which it needs to be taken on and completed, I think, does require a shorter time frame,” said O’Connor. “Just the number of people that I managed myself as a physician was quite alarming.”
Community says past reports fell short
Previous reports looking at cancer in Fort Chipewyan have focused on medical records and health trends of residents. Individuals who left, including residents seeking cancer treatments, were not counted, according to Callie Davies-Flett, a special projects adviser with the ACFN.
A 2009 study from the Alberta Cancer Board found that, at the time, some cancers in Fort Chipewyan were 30 per cent higher than the rest of Alberta.
Researchers from the University of Manitoba announced in 2014 they had found evidence of heavy metals and industrial contaminants in plants and animals commonly harvested by people in Fort Chipewyan. Their study said some concentrations were dangerous to human health.
A report published that same year from Dr. James Talbot, who at the time was Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, reviewed health data from 1992 to 2011 and found higher-than-expected instances of bile duct, lung and cervical cancers.
Talbot found no evidence of cancers linked to industrial exposure and speculated the numbers were linked to a lack of medical resources and lifestyle factors such as obesity or smoking. He concluded the overall instances of cancers in Fort Chipewyan were “not significantly higher than expected.”
That report was met with criticism from leaders in Fort Chipewyan, who said reviewing health statistics was not the same as an in-depth, long-term community health study.
Ladouceur said the purpose of the new study is to examine how environmental changes have impacted the health of Indigenous people and their community, rather than variables like lifestyle factors.
The amount of publicly available data is limited when it comes to the relationship between cancer in Fort Chipewyan and how the environment has been changed by oilsands developments, said Davies-Flett.
“By word of mouth and by what elders have been saying and what my community members have been saying to me for years now, it’s clear that this is very much so an issue and that it affects every single person in the community,” she said.
