Fort Chip rally draws attention to water quality

Organizers of an environmental rally in a remote northern Alberta community hope to draw international attention to the effects of oilsands development on drinking water.

The rally and forum, scheduled to start at 5 p.m. MT Tuesday, will bring together First Nations leaders and elders, experts on water and public health, and environmentalists from Canada and the United States.

Rally organizer George Poitras, a former Mikisew Cree chief, said he hopes theevent will persuade leaders to slow down the pace of development in the Alberta oilsands thatis polluting water with contaminants.

"Albertans and Canadians generally are recognizing that the pace of the development is such that there are too many problems associated with it. So let's put a pause to the development of the oil sands. No further approvals," Poitras said in an interview.

"The water is constantly on our minds because we live around the water. The water is who we are."

Tuesday'sevent is being organized by the First Nations in Fort Chipewyan, nearly 600 kilometres northeast of Edmonton on the western tip of Lake Athabascaand downstream from major petroleum refineries.

Speakersinclude Dr. John O'Connor, the Fort Chipewyan physician and medical examiner who was recently the subject of controversy when he alerted the media to what he believed was a disproportionately high incidence of colon, liver, blood and bile-duct cancers in patients in his community.

Earlier this year, Health Canada officials filed a complaint against O'Connor with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, accusing him of causing undue alarm.

Other rally speakers will include David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta, and members of the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Pembina Institute.

People in the community of 1,200 have long opposed upstream oilsands development. In the past year, that concern was heightened by what residents say has been an unusually high number of deaths from rare cancers. Poitras said residents who have spent a lifetime on the land are nowhesitant to eat fish.

"If man can go to the moon, surely to God they can find a way to purify that water before they discharge," Métis elder and fisherman Ray Ladaceur said. "It's going to ruin the whole North, right down to [Tuktoyaktuk]."