After Imperial Oil leak, Ottawa looking at Alberta Energy Regulator agreement

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The federal Environment Minister says the information-sharing agreement between Ottawa and the Alberta Energy Regulator needs to be updated in the wake of the continuing tailings pond leak at the Kearl oil sands project.

Water tainted with dangerous levels of arsenic, dissolved metals and hydrocarbons has been seeping off the project onto Crown lands north of Fort McMurray, Alta., since May, including next to a small fish-bearing lake and tributaries to the Firebag and Muskeg rivers. The federal government, local Indigenous communities and the public at large were not informed of the leak until months afterward, when a separate incident at Kearl spilled 5.3 million litres of waste water.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Wednesday that his department is looking into its agreement with the AER, specifically around what the regulator was supposed to tell the federal government – and when – after the Alberta agency found out about the seepage in May, 2022.

“The system we have doesn’t work, so we need to come up with a new system,” he said.

Mr. Guilbeault’s office said the minister would specifically like to see better communications protocols and processes around site monitoring.

The AER has maintained that the duty to inform the public was that of Kearl’s owner and operator alone, Imperial Oil Resources Ltd. IMO-T

But this week, AER board chair David Goldie announced an impartial, third-party review into aspects of the AER’s response to the incidents at Kearl, including what the regulator told Indigenous communities and other stakeholders and when, and other potential process issues.

Mr. Guilbeault said he’s looking forward to getting more details about the parameters of the review ordered by the AER board.

The findings of that review will be made public “in the spirit of transparency and as an opportunity to demonstrate that the regulator is both credible and trustworthy,” Mr. Goldie said in a statement Tuesday.

“I have been in regular contact with AER CEO Laurie Pushor, and he assures me he welcomes this third-party review both as an opportunity for an independent recounting of the facts surrounding the AER’s response and as an opportunity for the AER to learn and grow as applicable,” he said.

The board’s decision to launch a review adds to the growing pile of probes already under way into the Kearl incidents and how they were communicated.

Last week, Alberta’s information and privacy watchdog launched an investigation into the AER about whether the regulator had a legal obligation to disclose information about the leak, and the House of Commons asked Imperial Oil and the AER to testify at an environment committee meeting over how they handled the incidents.

Imperial Oil confirmed in an e-mail Wednesday it will appear at the committee, adding it welcomed the opportunity.

“We recognize the importance for Canadians to hear directly from us. We look forward to sharing the progress of our ongoing remediation actions and engaging in a factual dialogue about the work we are doing with all levels of government and the communities involved,” it said.

Environment and Climate Change Canada is also investigating how and why the federal government was not told about the leak, which was first detected in May, nor about the February waste water spill until after the AER slapped Imperial with an environmental protection order.

The AER, meanwhile, continues its own investigation into the incident. So too does Imperial Oil, which said it still has no information about the volume of water that has leaked into the environment from its tailings pond since May.

The federal and Alberta governments have agreed to sit down with Indigenous and industry partners to deal with the continuing leak and develop better systems of communication.

Alberta also wants the group to deal with the broader issue of how to dispose of the 1.34 trillion litres of tailings water tainted with toxic materials that are spread across the Athabasca oil sands region.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said recently that both levels of government have to work together “to ultimately eliminate these tailing ponds altogether.”

“We have a treat and release policy, but the federal government does not think that that’s an appropriate way of doing this,” she told media earlier this month.

“We can’t just keep building tailings ponds out, and we can’t just keep them managing and monitoring. We have to find a way to eliminate the water after it has been cleaned and make sure that we’re reducing the further liability.”

Mr. Guilbeault said he is, in fact, open to the idea of releasing treated waste water. But he added he doesn’t want to preclude the findings of a Crown-Indigenous-Alberta government group “that has been working on this for many months now.”

“We need to find a long-term solution to this problem. We can’t just keep pumping toxic water,” he said.