Canadian Icons

Dominion Stores, with their self-proclaimed excellence in butchery ("It's mainly because of the meat!") and distinctive signs, are a Canadian icon. But now, alas, they are gone. They remain throughout the Atlantic provinces, but are "Dominion" in name only, having been bought out by Loblaw, and so sport the Loblaw colours and design.

At least Dominion held on in Ontario. Until a few weeks ago, when Dominion was taken over by the Metro chain from Quebec. All the red and green signs with the old-fashioned scripted D and maple leaf were pulled down and temporarily replaced with banners until the new Metro signs were installed. Here's our Dominion. Pardon me, Metro.


I remember, as a child, thinking that my parents, aunts, and uncles were crazy when they reminisced about things from their childhoods that no longer existed. You know, a particular brand of biscuits, tea, or cod liver oil ... but now I think I understand.

This month also marked the passing of my beloved Tilley Hat. I've worn it every summer for seven years. It was inaugurated on part of a cross-Canada demonstration for Aboriginal Rights, criss-crossed the midwest, shielded me from the sun in Israel and the West Bank, saw a lot of birds in BC, stayed on my head in Newfoundland despite the wind, held off the rain in the UK, and brought a sartorial je ne sais quoi to Geneva. When I put it on while travelling with an Ecuadoran partner recently, she smiled and said, "Ahhh ... Canada!"

After all this time it was so frayed on the brim that whenever I touched it, it would shred.


Only one thing to do -- take it back to Tilley and get a replacement. For free. I kid you not. I handed it over; they handed back a fresh one. They even offered to let me keep the old one, I looked so stricken at giving it up.

Kelly says she thinks Tilley is a cult. She might have a point.

Better Luck This Time

Things didn't work out quite as our household would have hoped in the Canadian federal election. Luckily, one of us has a chance to make a difference south of the border as well. In a key state, no less:



I wonder who she'll choose?





It takes a lot of thought.


She's got a glass of a very nice Marsanne here, but I swear to God, she was not voting under the influence.


But we sure hope that her vote will have an influence.


Vote early. Vote well.

Dig, Baby, Dig.

On our second day in Fort McMurray, Ed and I got on the smallest plane I have ever been on. It was also smaller than most cars I have driven in. So small in fact, that the pilot moved it in and out of its hangar by tucking the tail under his arm and pulling.


It's a very good thing I got over my fear of flying a few years ago.


We took two flights that day, one over the tar sands projects 40 km north of Fort McMurray and another to the remote northern fly-in community of Fort Chipewyan, 300 km north. I'll start in Fort Chip, home to 1200 people from three first nations: Metis, Mikisew Cree, and Athabasca Cree.


We stayed at the Lodge, the brown building on the rocky point in the photo above. We woke up to a spectacular view of the sun rising over Lake Athabasca.


Walking through town, we passed the old Hudson Bay trading post just below a small hill, where a flock of crows rode the thermals and generally goofed around.


The people of Fort Chipewyan made their living and fed their families by hunting and trapping on the tundra and fishing the lake. That livelihood was first threatened in the 1960s by BC Hydro's construction of the W.A.C. Bennett dam on the Peace River, which lowered the water levels in Lake Athabasca -- and ruined the habitat for fur bearing animals.

Now, the concern is for the health of the water that remains in Lake Athabasca, the Athabasca River, and the vast delta on which Fort Chip is built ... all of it downriver from the tar sands projects.




Though shallow, the lakes up here are enormous by area. And the land is like a giant sponge. So when a family doctor in Fort Chip saw what he thought were odd clusters of rare cancers and a higher than average rate of death by disease, he asked for an investigation to see if there was any link to the rapid industrial development to the south. Accused of creating "undue concern," the doctor was threatened with suspension and eventually left the province to practice elsewhere.


Meanwhile, fishermen are pulling deformed fish from their nets, and hunters and trappers say the moosemeat neither looks nor tastes as it should. But the town has a brand new school, and some people have jobs, thanks to the tar sands.

This project has a pile of waste and a tailings pond running right along the banks of the Athabasca -- this particular pond is known to leak into the river.


Seeing the tailings ponds from the road was one thing, but seeing them from the air quite another. These ponds are bigger than most of the natural lakes in the region, and they've existed since the 1930s, though the ponds and the extraction process were on much a smaller scale then:


This pond is "dirty." The water in these ponds has been used at high temperature to separate the tar from the sand. We were given a simple demonstration where water from a kettle was poured into a beaker over some tar sand. It was quickly stirred, the sand settled out from the water, and the tar (or bitumen) floated on top.


This pond is "cleaner." The water is used many times in the process of separating the bitumen, getting dirtier and dirtier. This water is "cleaner" because the toxic waste has filtered through and settled into the sand.

This pond is on its way to becoming "dry" through seepage and evaporation. It will eventually be covered over with stockpiled topsoil and planted with barley as a means of reclamation.

Perhaps, like me, you were not aware that barley is a key component of boreal ecosystems. Ahem.

Some things cannot be reclaimed or re-used, like these enormous piles (or pyramids) of sulphur that are a by-product of the process.


And while I'm no biologist or ecologist, I don't think it's likely that this land will be reclaimed either. This land has been cleared of what the mining industry refers to as "overburden."


Birds would call it trees; plants and insects would call it topsoil; indigenous peoples would call it muskeg, dig a hole and drink clear water from it.


And then the machines will start scraping away in search of the thick tarry bitumen, which at 11 degrees celsius (its normal temperature) has the consistency of a hockey puck.



It will get trucked into a plant like this, where for every barrel of bitumen produced the industry uses 3 barrels of water and enough natural gas to heat the average Canadian home for a month and creates 78 barrels of toxic waste. After the tar is separated from the sand, it is fractionated and then recombined into "synthetic crude" which is sent further south for refining.


And the projects move further North, heading towards the delta.


Hidden from the road --but not the air-- by stands of trees.


And not hidden from the land and the animals, or the water and the fish. Or the people who are in their way.

And No Birds Sang

Two weeks ago, my colleague Ed and I boarded a plane for Fort McMurray, epicenter of Alberta's massive tar (or as the industry prefers to call it, oil) sands projects. We joined the flight in Toronto, which was its halfway point from St. John's, and it was packed with Newfoundlanders on their way to another 4 or 6 week shift. I was one of just five women on the plane, including one of the flight attendants.

Ed and I were on a reconnaissance mission, scouting out the area and seeing what people think in advance of a delegation of church leaders we will be taking to Alberta in May. Their task? To try and understand and formulate a faith-based response to the social, economic, and ecological impacts of the largest industrial expansion in the world.

Relatively speaking, we had a bit of a soft start, meeting with representatives of two of the local First Nations and then some industry types who also happen to go to the United Church. Then we took a little drive to see a couple of the biggest and oldest projects: Suncor and Syncrude.

On the way, we saw a land reclamation project at Crane Lake, courtesy of Suncor.


Beautiful, no?


Well, when you look beyond the barley plantings and the young larch and poplar trees, no. That's Syncrude in the background.


And this is a cannon at nearby Mildred Lake, one of Syncrude's tailings ponds. It fires a round every 15 seconds or so, to prevent ducks from landing on the huge reservoirs of toxic waste that remain after bitumen is removed from the tar sand to make synthetic crude.

It has the unfortunate impact of preventing ducks from landing at nearby Crane Lake, too. We saw five ducks. I heard a couple of songbirds, and we saw a few dragonflies. A pretty sparse boreal experience. Still, I suppose that the cannon method is an improvement over the old practice of letting the ducks land in the tailings and then shooting them.

Tailings ponds eventually dry up, and leave behind piles of fine white sand. These form the post-industrial landscape of Mildred Lake, and driving through, we felt as if we were on the moon.



Violet Clarke, a Treaty 8 Elder, said that she didn't know why they persisted in still calling it a lake.


And this was just the beginning.

And Now For Something Completely Different

We are back home. But about a week after we got back, I went out to Alberta for work.


It was an interesting trip. More later, when my brain is back in the Eastern time zone.