After repeated requests from community members over more than two decades, a federally funded study will begin to examine the health impacts of the oil sands in Fort Chipewyan, an Indigenous community in northern Alberta.
Many residents of the community, located more than 200 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, have long believed there is a connection between the cancer at Fort Chipewyan and industrial development up the Athabasca River.
Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine, which suffered a 5.3 million liter wastewater spill in 2023, is located about 140 kilometers from Fort Chipewyan. The closest project is Suncor Energy’s Fort Hills mine, more than 90 kilometers away.
Researchers will study current and historical health data, study local disease patterns, and monitor people and the environment. They will also study how environmental changes affect the culture and daily lifestyle of a community.
“We’re not pointing fingers, we just want answers to what’s going on,” said Ruby Ladouceur, president of the Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation, in an interview with CBC News. “We can’t pinpoint and say it’s all from industry, right? We can’t do that because we don’t have the evidence to prove anything yet.”
The study will be conducted by third-party researchers under the supervision of 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 federal government announced the 10-year, $12 million study in August 2024. The first round of funding came in March for the planning and management phase of the study.
The study is called the Monument Hill Project and is named after a local lookout overlooking Fort Chipewyan and Lake Athabasca.
Ladouceur says the research methodology will combine Western science and indigenous knowledge of the land.
“Our goal is to better understand the relationship between environmental conditions, traditional land use, and the health and well-being of our people,” Ladouceur said. “It is undeniable that environmental health and human health are interconnected.”
Alberta does not currently maintain community-specific cancer statistics in rural areas of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) and other parts of northern Alberta, according to a spokesperson for Alberta Primary and Preventive Health Services. Instead, it only supports general or regional data.
“In small communities, the number of cancer cases may be very low and potentially detectable, so cancer data is typically analyzed over several years to protect privacy and ensure reliable interpretation of trends, which are then directly communicated to communities,” a ministry spokesperson said in an email.
Dr. John O’Connor, who has been raising concerns about cancer in Fort Chipewyan since 2006, told CBC News he’s glad the study is happening.
However, he wishes it had happened sooner and is concerned that the study’s 10-year timeline is too long.
“I think the urgency with which to take this on and get it done really calls for a shorter time frame,” O’Connor said. “Just the number of people I served as a physician myself was quite alarming.”
Community says past reports were untrue
Previous reports on cancer in Fort Chipewyan have focused on medical records and trends in resident health. People who left, including residents needing cancer treatment, were not counted, according to Callie Davis-Flett, special projects advisor for ACFN.
A 2009 study by the Alberta Cancer Council found that at the time, rates of some cancers in Fort Chipewyan were 30 per cent higher than the rest of Alberta.
In 2014, researchers at the University of Manitoba announced they had found evidence of heavy metals and industrial pollutants in plants and animals commonly collected by people at Fort Chipewyan. Their study suggests that some concentrations are hazardous to human health.
A report published that year by Dr. James Talbot, who was Alberta’s chief medical officer of health at the time, looked at health data from 1992 to 2011 and found higher-than-expected rates of bile duct, lung and cervical cancers.
Talbot found no evidence that cancers were linked to industrial exposure and suggested that these numbers were due to a lack of medical resources and lifestyle factors such as obesity or smoking. He concluded that the total number of cancer cases at Fort Chipewyan was “not significantly higher than expected.”
The report was met with criticism from Fort Chipewyan leaders, who said the analysis of health statistics was not the same as an in-depth, long-term study of population health.
Ladouceur said the goal of the new study is to examine how environmental changes have affected the health of Indigenous peoples and their communities, rather than variables such as lifestyle factors.
Davis-Flett said there is limited public data when it comes to the relationship between the cancer at Fort Chipewyan and how the environment has changed as a result of oil sands development.
“From word of mouth, from what the elders have said and from what members of my community have told me over the years, it is clear that this is a very serious issue and that it affects every person in the community,” she said.