The Closing of the Canadian Mind

By STEPHEN MARCHE  ::  THE NEW YORK TIMES  ::  AUG. 14, 2015

Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, is creating a legacy of secrecy and ignorance.   Credit  Mark Blinch/Reuters

THE prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.

He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN. His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters.

Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information.

Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.

But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility. At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

Mr. Harper’s war against science has been even more damaging to the capacity of Canadians to know what their government is doing. The prime minister’s base of support is Alberta, a western province financially dependent on the oil industry, and he has been dedicated to protecting petrochemical companies from having their feelings hurt by any inconvenient research.

In 2012, he tried to defund government research centers in the High Arctic, and placed Canadian environmental scientists under gag orders. That year, National Research Council members were barred from discussing their work on snowfall with the media. Scientists for the governmental agency Environment Canada, under threat of losing their jobs, have been banned from discussing their research without political approval. Mentions of federal climate change research in the Canadian press have dropped 80 percent. The union that represents federal scientists and other professionals has, for the first time in its history, abandoned neutrality to campaign against Mr. Harper.

His active promotion of ignorance extends into the functions of government itself. Most shockingly, he ended the mandatory long-form census, a decision protested by nearly 500 organizations in Canada, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Catholic Council of Bishops. In the age of information, he has stripped Canada of its capacity to gather information about itself. The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life.

The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history. Mr. Harper’s tenure coincided with the scandal of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack while in office and whose secret life came to light only when Gawker, an American website, broke the story. In a famous video at a Ford family barbecue, Mr. Harper praised the Fords as a “Conservative political dynasty.”

Mr. Harper’s appointments to the Senate — which in Canada is a mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs — have proved greedier than the norm. Mr. Harper’s chief of staff was forced out for paying off a senator who fudged his expenses. The Mounties have pressed criminal charges.

After the 2011 election, a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted of using robocalls to send voters to the wrong polling places in Guelph, Ontario. In the words of the judge, he was guilty of “callous and blatant disregard for the right of people to vote.” In advance of this election, instead of such petty ploys, the Canadian Conservatives have passed the Fair Elections Act, a law with a classically Orwellian title, which not only needlessly tightens the requirements for voting but also has restricted the chief executive of Elections Canada from promoting the act of voting. Mr. Harper seems to think that his job is to prevent democracy.

But the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country. The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible — more irritating distractions than substantial changes. He is “tough on crime,” and so he has built more prisons at great expense at the exact moment when even American conservatives have realized that over-incarceration causes more problems than it solves. Then there is a new law that allows the government to revoke citizenship for dual citizens convicted of terrorism or high treason — effectively creating levels of Canadianness and problems where none existed.

For a man who insists on such intense control, the prime minister has not managed to control much that matters. The argument for all this secrecy was a technocratic impulse — he imagined Canada as a kind of Singapore, only more polite and rule abiding.

The major foreign policy goal of his tenure was the Keystone Pipeline, which Mr. Harper ultimately failed to deliver. The Canadian dollar has returned to the low levels that once earned it the title of the northern peso. Despite being left in a luxurious position of strength after the global recession, he coasted on what he knew: oil. In the run-up to the election, the Bank of Canada has announced that Canada just had two straight quarters of contraction — the technical definition of a recession. He has been a poor manager by any metric.

The early polls show Mr. Harper trailing, but he’s beaten bad polls before. He has been prime minister for nearly a decade for a reason: He promised a steady and quiet life, undisturbed by painful facts. The Harper years have not been terrible; they’ve just been bland and purposeless. Mr. Harper represents the politics of willful ignorance. It has its attractions.

Whether or not he loses, he will leave Canada more ignorant than he found it. The real question for the coming election is a simple but grand one: Do Canadians like their country like that?

______________________________________

A novelist and a columnist at Esquire Magazine who lives in Toronto.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 16, 2015, on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Closing of the Canadian Mind.

A Cautionary Tale

In 2007 the Nova Scotia government leased land in the Kennetcook, Hants County area to Triangle Petroleum of Denver to drill five exploratory shale gas wells.  Of these five wells, three were eventually fracked for exploration rather than production purposes.  

Ten million liters of fracking wastewater was produced from these initial test wells and is contained in two ponds in Kennetcook, left behind by Triangle and their associates.  

Accurate figures on the exact number of liters of remaining wastewater are hard to come by;  freezing and thawing alters levels in the ponds, dilution of the effluent causes spillage, illegal dumping is suspected and approximately seven million liters of supposedly treated wastewater was dumped into the sewage treatment facility in Windsor, N.S.

  

To complicate matters further, N.S. has ten million liters of wastewater in holding ponds in Debert that was accepted from Corridor Resources in N.B.  Nova Scotia has since passed legislation that prohibits all municipalities from accepting fracking waste from N.B.  

At present Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS) in Debert N.S. is actively seeking willing towns and cities, in either province, that will take and dispose of any or all of the remaining 30 million liters of flowback still sitting in open holding ponds in Debert and Kennetcook.  

Aside from the toxic chemicals found in the original fracking fluid, produced water contains heavy metals, volatile organiccompounds (VOC's) and radioactive materials.

Barbara Harris, author of "Out of Control:  Nova Scotia's Experience with Fracking for Natural Gas" explains:  "Fracking waste water is not normal sewage, nor is it highly salty wastewater, sewage treatment plants  such as the Windsor plant are not set up to remove either the chemicals, heavy metals or radioactive materials commonly found in fracking wastewater.  After treatment at the Windsor treatment facility water flows into Le Breau Creek which empties into the the Avon River and then into the Minas Basin."

All of this occurred because three exploratory wells were hastily drilled by a company that didn't have the technological expertise to maintain some level of control over events that caused serious environmental harm.  The government displayed a lack of regulatory oversight over an industry that was too pervasive to care about the health and safety of local residents. 

The same can be said for the industry's handling of wastewater anywhere in North America.  There are few, if any, active treatment plants with a technology specializing in the decontamination of produced  water.  And it certainly would not be feasible to truck

hundreds of millions of liters of fracking wastes throughout the U.S. and Canada to dispose of this highly toxic substance.

What industry has chosen to do in many U.S states, to avoid the expense and "nuisance" of water treatment, is to inject the  contaminated water back into the earth using older non-productive wells.  Evidence indicates, however, that wells used to bury 

wastewater threaten aquifers and increases the possibility of seismic activity.

In 2012 Exxon Mobil commented on water treatment as follows:  "More precise experiments and analyses are needed for a reliable evaluation.  The same is true of the treatment of radioactive polluted reservoir water.  We currently regard the treatment of waste water as possible, but not viable for economic reasons.  Hence the preference for deep well injection."*  With regard to this issue, nothing has changed since 2012.

The only interpretation we can take from all this, is that the industry that has been fracking for the last fifteen years, is allowed by governments in heavily fracked areas, to continue this practice without the knowledge or the means to effectively treat the hazardous waste they produce.

So, what might happen if N.B. establishes a fully fledged shale gas industry in the province?  If we were to see 50, 100 or 500 wells drilled over time, where would the hundreds of thousands of liters of produced wastewater go?

No one from government has so much as mentioned how such toxic waste would be disposed of.  There is no way to treat it and no place to put it.  When TAAHF asked MLA Bernie Le Blanc who would be responsible for flowback, he told us that it would not be

government's responsibility, industry would decide how to dispose of its own fracking wastes.  

If that is the case then industry would have an insurmountable problem to solve, because to date no cities, towns or counties in the Maritimes have been willing to entertain the possibility of accepting this waste.  More often than we know this type of scenario leads to the illegal dumping of poisonous effluents into lakes and rivers, out of sight and with no one the wiser.  

More and more the issue of rejecting shale gas development has a strong municipal connection.  Any residents in N.B. who have concerns about these issues  should check with their local government and see where they stand.                                                                                   

Shale gas, even on its own terms, is not even remotely sustainable, but when you add to that issues of climate change, air and water pollution, overuse of the finite resource of freshwater, danger to human health, infrastructure damage due to trucking and the conundrum of wastewater disposal, then we as citizens need to resolve that we will not allow the shale gas industry access to our cities, towns and rural communities.

* Rosenwinkel, Karl Heinz,  State of the Art and Progressive Approaches to Flowback Disposal, 2012.

Donna Mclellan for the Tantramar Alliance Against Hydro-Fracking

18 December 2014

Thank You, Premier Gallant

Huge news! Today, the New Brunswick government introduced legislation for a moratorium on fracking for shale gas.

The Conservation Council of New Brunswick thanks Premier Brian Gallant's government for listening to our voices and putting the brakes on the risky business of shale gas fracking.

Let's thank the Gallant government for supporting drinkable water, breathable air and healthy communities with this moratorium.

 

Today's great news would not have been possible without all of you. Let's take a moment to recognize the folks across this province who worked tirelessly to protect our water, lands and people from shale gas fracking. We researched, educated, organized, talked to our neighbours and our elected representatives, put up signs, built strong coalitions and mobilized New Brunswickers against fracking for shale gas. Our collective actions have resulted in a fracking moratorium in New Brunswick and we should be proud.

 

In the coming months, we will work hard to ensure that the moratorium is a strong one and that those in our province who are currently affected by gas development are protected through stringent monitoring and enforcement. Today, we renew our calls for environmental quality monitoring stations in Penobsquis, a rural farming community that is the site of Corridor's gas development and other industrial development.

It's the start of something big! With extreme energy projects on our doorstep like the proposed Energy East pipeline and oil and gas development, a fracking moratorium signals that New Brunswick is moving away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past and towards a clean energy future -- one that protects our precious freshwater, one that generates meaningful employment and one that supports a green economy and healthy communities.

Sign up for updates from us on shale gas and the proposed Energy East pipeline.Together, we can blaze a path for a clean energy future in New Brunswick.
Conservation Council of New Brunswick /
Conseil de conservation du Nouveau-Brunswick
180 Saint John St.,
Fredericton, NB
E3B 4A9
Tel: 506 458-8747

www.conservationcouncil.ca
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Texas Town Sues to Uphold Fracking Ban, Protect Democracy

Anastasia Pantsios  ::  EcoWatch  ::  5 December 2014 

The little guys aren’t taking this one lying down. In November, voters in Denton, Texas—fed up with oil and gas drilling companies unwilling to work with citizens to put some reasonable protections in place and with state and local regulators for allowing new fracking wells near homes, schools, parks and hospitals—passed a ban on fracking, despite being hugely outspent. The Texas Oil and Gas Association, representing the fracking companies, and the state’s General Land Office responded with lawsuits to protect their “right” to push fracking on unwilling residents.

Even kids can’t help noticing the impact of fracking on their community.
Image credit: Frack Free Denton

Now Denton is fighting back with lawsuits of its own. Yesterday, with the fracking ban taking effect on Tuesday, the Denton Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) and Earthworks, the groups that led the Frack Free Denton ballot initiative, filed intervention papers in both lawsuits, seeking to assert the right of citizens to decide what happens in their own neighborhoods. The groups are represented by the Texas local government law firm Brown & Hofmeister; attorneys from national environmental organizations Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are asking the permission of the court to act as co-counsel.

“Denton residents, with Republican and Democratic majorities, voted overwhelmingly to ban fracking,” said DAG president Cathy McMullen. “Our city has the legal power to prevent bakeries from setting up shop in residential neighborhoods. To suggest that we don’t have the legal power to similarly bar fracking, a much more dangerous process, is the height of industry arrogance.”

“The state and industry could have respected Denton communities’ health, safety and property,” said Earthworks’ energy program director Bruce Baizel. “They chose not to. The ban is the result. Now, rather than constructively engage with the community, they simply overlook their regulatory failure and move to overturn democracy through legal action.”

Fracking wells are literally in residents’ back yards.
Photo credit: Frack Free Denton

At issue is whether local communities have the right to regulate oil and gas operations within their borders or whether, as the lawsuits by the oil and gas interests claim, Denton’s voter-approved ordinance is overridden by state regulators in contradiction of Texas’ long tradition of home rule authority over gas and oil development. There are many other local oil and gas regulations in effect across Texas, including in Dallas just to the south of Denton, which seems to contradict the contention of the frack-friendly interests.

“The State of Texas has granted municipalities the right to oversee oil and gas operations,” Earthjustice managing attorney Deborah Goldberg pointed out. “The people of Denton have exercised that right, and we intend to help preserve it. Communities from California to Texas to New York are fed up with the abuses of the oil and gas industry. When state and federal officials won’t stand up for the public, citizens must have the right to use local democracy to protect themselves.”

Denton citizens mobilized to ban fracking in their community
and aren’t going to back down in the face of gas and
oil companies’ lawsuits. Photo credit: Frack Free Denton

“This fight cuts to the heart of our democracy, and it is far from over,” said Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Dan Raichel. “The people of Denton have voted to keep fracking away from their homes and schools—they will not be bullied by powerful oil and gas companies that want to make a profit at the expense of their health. Denton is a pioneer in Texas, but it is not alone. This community joins hundreds of others around the country—and in Texas—that are demanding the right to determine what happens within their own borders.”

This article sums up the elephant in the room when it comes to the fracking industry and its effect on individuals and communities.  The proponents of the fracking industry see nothing wrong with concept of industrializing (sacrificing) 1/7 of the provincial land mass, numerous communities and villages, and the assets of individuals for the benefit of a foreign corporation and a small select group of individuals.  Even if the fracking industry were not inherently dangerous, toxic and promoting climate change, the industry is not feasible unless the process has not limits.  Should not this industry be forced to compensate the individuals, towns and villages affected, i.e. purchase the land mass that they need in lieu of royalties? Should not individuals, villages and towns be able to say yes or no to what industries they wish to have as neighbours?    Richard Lachance

Proposal to ship AIS frack water to New Brunswick raises concern for 

Colchester County council

Published on August 19, 2014

TRURO - A proposal by Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS) in Debert to transport treated frack water to Dieppe, N.B. for disposal in that city's municipal sewer system is not sitting well with Colchester County council.

But an AIS representative says that every drop of the 30 million litres of water being proposed would be treated through reverse osmosis and will be completely safe to drink.

"It will meet all the discharge requirements for the Canadian guidelines for unconditional release. So, technically it is so clean we could open the tap and let it go, that's how clean it is," said Clint Stewart, the company's vice-president for enviro systems.

The Dieppe proposal was raised during a recent meeting of Colchester County council when Mayor Bob Taylor reported that he had been interviewed by reporters from CBC's English and French stations on the subject.

"This would amount to three tankers hauling 36,000 litres each, five days a week for two years," Taylor told council.

Taylor said he was left with the impression from those interviews that Dieppe residents believe the issue is being dumped on them because of Colchester County's decision not to let AIS release treated frack waters into its municipal sewer system.

Council ultimately decided to have staff contact the City of Dieppe with an offer of sending a contingent of councillors to New Brunswick to provide first-hand information on what led to Colchester's decision on the matter.

AIS had previously received permission from the Nova Scotia Department of Environment to conduct a pilot test for disposing of two million litres of frack water from the company's holding ponds in Debert by burning it in the kiln at the Lafarge cement plant near Brookfield after it had been treated through reverse osmosis.

During council discussion, Coun. Doug MacInnes questioned why AIS was now proposing to send frack water to New Brunswick, other than to avoid the expense of fully treating it.

"It is extremely disappointing to see what they are doing now," he said, of the prospect of the frack water being released into the Petitcodiac River and eventually into the Bay of Fundy, which Colchester had attempted to avoid by banning the water from its sewer system.

"It is going to ruin the Bay of Fundy," he said. "I cannot trust this company. I've caught them in too many mishaps, or lies, because that's what it is."

Stewart, however, said any concerns about the treated water having a detrimental impact on the environment are based on emotion instead of fact.

"We're looking at cleaning the waters up and then shipping them to New Brunswick for end disposal. So the product will be fully cleaned before it leaves our Debert facility," he said.

"I mean this water, well, there's no other way to describe it, it's completely clean. It is the cleanest water we've never discharged, let's put it that way. This is cleaner than any municipal system it is going into by far," he said.

"Fully drinkable."

Stewart said the company has successfully completed the two-million-litre pilot test at Lafarge and has applied to the province for further testing.

But that is a slow process for disposal, he said, and the Dieppe proposal is part of the company's plan to explore all available options.

Stewart said eight million litres of the frack water remains in Debert and the proposal to ship 30 million litres to New Brunswick includes water being stored in holding ponds in Kennetcook.

If the Dieppe proposal is successful, Stewart said it could also offer a long-term solution for the disposal of water from future fracking operations in that province.

"It looks like there's a brighter future potentially for the oil and gas industry in New Brunswick and we want to start to set up for that as well," he said.

But for anyone who has doubts about the status of the water that has been put through reverse osmosis, Stewart said they are welcome to have it tested themselves.

"This water has been analyzed more than any other water I've seen," he said. "If someone wants to take a sample and go get it analyzed, sure we can provide them with product."

hsullivan@gmail.com

NDP Government Gives Fracking Waste Handler Free Ride: Colchester County Left Holding Bag

Short deadline for appeals leaves groups scrambling

Ken Summers  ::  Halifax Media Co-op

Report Release Monday 7:00 22 April Kennetcook Fire Hall [behind Home Hardware]

Atlantic Industrial Services is the Maritime's largest processor of industrial wastewater. They are looking to dump fracking wastewater down the Debert sewer system. [Photo: K. Summers]

Noel, Nova Scotia - Fracking waste water has now been sitting in two Kennetcook storage ponds for 5 years. In 2011 one third of the frack wastes still there was transferred to a facility in Debert, where it has been in a pseudo-regulatory purgatory ever since. Also 5 years ago, another 4 plus million litres of untreated waste water was taken to some unknown location and just dumped. Our government says it does not know where, and did not need to know. 

Three years ago, 7.3 million litres of fracking wastes was dumped untreated into the Town of Windsor's Sewage Treatment Plant, with the blessing and facilitation of our provincial government.  The government’s approval of that was secured on the basis that the waste water would come from the Kennetcook waste ponds, and was based on an analysis of those wastes. That analysis was fundamentally inappropriate for the environmental risks involved. 

At least another 10 million litres of fracking wastes has been brought into Nova Scotia from New Brunswick by Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS). Apparently the company was not required to report that fact to anyone in the Nova Scotia government, and no one made it their business to know until the process was well underway.

Some of those fracking wastes did eventually make their way to the AIS Debert facility, after Nova Scotia Environment realized the New Brunswick wastes were being brought in, and retroactively deemed that AIS “had always been approved to process fracking wastes”…

The facility is NOT approved to process Waste Dangerous Goods (WDG); fracking wastes are treated as WDG across Canada, and the Department of Environment had classified the Kennetcook fracking wastes as waste dangerous goods. 

Out of Control: Province Abdicates as Regulator

The thread in all this willful abdication of regulatory responsibility is that the government of Nova Scotia decided early on that, “As the Department did not attribute a significant risk associated with these (Kennetcook) ponds and the water contained in them, the Department had no reason to verify where the water was ultimately disposed.”

Department of Environment spokesperson Lori  Errington followed up that the department was unable to release the data that this decision was based on, even through Freedom of Information [FOIPOP], because it was ‘proprietary information’. But the list of chemical compounds used in the fracking compound did make it intoNOFRAC’s Freedom of Information trove, and the documented correspondence establishes that the Department simply accepted Triangle Petroleum’s assertion that the amounts used were “minimal.” [pages 183-5]

Very late in the process- more than 3 years after the fracking in Kennetcook, Nova Scotia - Environment took note of a crucial and commonly occurring issue with high volume hydraulic fracturing of shale beds: elevated levels of naturally occurring radioactive materials [NORM] brought to the surface with the “flowback wastewater.”

Given the arduous process that has unfolded since test results showed elevated NORMs, one might expect that Nova Scotia Environment would revisit their early acceptance of the presumption that the chemical compounds in the Kennetcook fracking wastes is not an issue requiring their attention.

But no attention has been forthcoming.

Instead, the NDP government has passed the buck on regulating the chemical compounds in the fracking wastes, which has landed by default in the lap of the Municipality of the County of Colchester- home to Atlantic Industrial Services' Debert waste treatment facility, which discharges into the municipality’s Debert sewage treatment plant.

Since another Media Coop article first brought the very unresolved radioactivity issue to light last year, the public focus of the fracking wastes has been on that vexing question. What to do with it is indeed a very complex and contentious question. The glare of public scrutiny and need to literally invent a regulatory process has been neatly downloaded onto a municipal government.

Colcehester County Municipality Forced to Fill Void Left by NDP Government

To its credit, Colchester County has addressed the issue of radioactivity in the waste water, and has taken a step back and away from the NDP government’s abdication of responsibility to at least look at the issue of what toxic chemicals in the fracking wastes need to be tested for.

Spurred by the issue of the fracking wastes, Colchester County has drafted and enacted a new Sewer Use By-Law. And they have determined the need that the wastewater be tested at many stages of processing for the what are known as theBTEX group of chemicals. 

 These are toxic volatile organic chemicals [VOC] commonly used in hydraulic fracturing. The suite of chemicals the County is requiring tests for can be seen here. 

Many Parties Appeal After County Approves AIS Discharging Fracking Wastes

Council and staff of Colchester County have spent many hours discussing the substantive issues surrounding the proposed discharging of fracking wastes, and in re-vamping their by-laws, policy and decision process. The Public Works Director’s Approval of discharge by AIS into the Debert Sewage Treatment Plant has always been seen as the first step of a process, and formal appeals of the decision were expected.

Despite most appellants having less than 2 weeks notice before the April 10 filing deadline, County Council received more than 30 appeals, many with substantial documentation prepared on the short notice. Appeals were filed by Millbrook First Nation, the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq Chiefs, the Sierra Club, the Council of Canadians and the Ecology Action Centre, among others. As Chief Julian opened in theAssembly’s appeal,“The primary concern for the Mi'kmaq is to avoid any irreparable harm to the environment and we wish to ensure that our lands and waters are protected.”

Adequacy of the Information Gathering and Decision Making Process

Without being provided documentation of the chemicals known to be present in the fracking fluids, the County made a prudent choice in requiring tests for the BTEX group. But both the Province and AIS do have documentation

It is a mystery why the provincial government has always accepted the dismissal of a need to test for chemicals documented to be present in Triangle Petroleum’s Kennetcook fracking wastes. Given the vested interest AIS has, it is easy to understand General Manager Andre Lachevrotiere  waving off any concerns in his submission to the County.

Colchester County’s conditions for the discharge of the fracking wastes were recently developed. Since they required testing only for the BTEX group of chemicals, apparently they accepted the earler assurances of AIS General Manager Lachevrotiere about other chemicals present that “these two chemicals at the time of their use comprised less than 0.1% of the total volume of the fracturing fluid”. [page 1]

Reasonably accurate estimates cannot be calculated from the documentation AIS and the provincial government have, so the basis for that claim is another mystery. Even if the volume of a chemical is known, that is only relevant in the context of information on its toxicity.

In fact, the two “chemicals” that Lachevrotiere is referring to are actually commercial products that are a combination of chemical compounds [pages 29-37] . Since there a number of other products documented as used in the Kennetcook frack fluids, it is unclear why he refers only to these two. But there is one very notable risk in just these two, that should have jumped out at somebody.

Biocides are used in most high volume shale bed hydraulic fracturing. The documents submitted by AIS include data for the product ‘B4,’ which contains significant amounts of Methylene Bis (Thocyanate) and 2-(Thiocyanomethylthio) Benzothiozole. 

Both of these biocides are rated with the highest toxicity category of the US EPA. The concentration of 0.1% which AIS minimized in its submission, would behundreds of times greater than any of the exposure thresholds of concern for Toxicity Category 1.

Emblematic of the strains this issue has put on the municipal government’s process and capabilities, is that the crucial documentation of the AIS application and submissions for discharging the wastes, including those that entail the presence of chemical compounds, only became available on the deadline day for filing appeals. Appellants seem generally to see this as a consequence of the County having to scramble.

This obviously raises a number of specific questions about the adequacy of the appeal process, and of the information that is being put to the Sewer Use Committee. But perhaps it most of all illustrates that no municipal government should be responsible for such complex regulation that is the responsibility of the provincial government.

“The provincial government needs to take some leadership on this issue. Nova Scotians need to be protected against an industry who as we have seen through AIS will try to push against what the precautionary principle demands of us,” said Angela Giles, Atlantic regional organizer with the Council of Canadians.

                             FRACKING WASTEWATER TIMELINE

March-April 2008 Triangle fracks two wells in Kennectccok- 7 million litres of flowback wastes into two waste ponds.

June 2008 Kennetcook #2 mostly drained. 3.5 million litres required to be taken to an “approved facility” [none in the Martime region then]. Nova Scotia Environment [NSE] says it does not know where because chemical composition of wastes not a concern. No testing done.

June 2008 Additional frack treatment for Kennetcook #2. Large amount of “formation water” returns to surface and into the waste pond.

April 2009 Triangle fracks well at Noel Lake. No storage pond, and wastewater taken away as produced. Again, dumped at a location still unknown to NSE. No testing of wastes.

September 2009  AIS gets approval of provincial government for its 200 page environmental assessment submitted so that it can construct expansion allowing it to process Waste Dangerous Goods. Business opportunity of processing fracking wastes emphasized.

September 2009  Expansion of Debert facility is not undertaken, ever. AIS instead proposes dumping of untreated Kennectook fracking wastes into Town of Windsor Sewage Treatment Plant.  NSE approval process concerns itself solely with salinity.

March 2010 to August 2011  AIS discharges 7.3 million litres of frack wastes at Windsor. Mathematical impossibility that amount came from the Kennetcook waste ponds. During the same period, AIS brings more than that amount of frack wastes from New Brunswick.

During 2011  Environment allows AIS to begin bringing New Brunswick frack wastes to the Debert facility. When questioned about the change, NSE claims AIS "was always approved to process fracking wastes”.

October 2011  AIS contracts with Triangle Petroleum to bring the14.5 million litres of frack wastes in the Kennetcook ponds to the Debert facility for processing. NSE requires Triangle to test wastes for radioactity [NORM], but allows transport of wastes to begin.

December 2011  NORM test results show elevated levels. Transport suspended, with 4.5 million litres of the frack wastes now at the AIS Debert facility.

August 2012   AIS gets NSE Pilot Project approval to remove sufficient radioactive material to make possible treated frack waste discharge into Colchester County Debert Sewage Treatment Plant. Project completed in October.

March 2013   Colchester County Public Works Director approves discharge of the treated wastes into their sewage system. Appeals known in advance to be virtually guaranteed.

May 2013  Effective date of County's Approval for AIS to discharge fracking wastes.

Companies Illegally Dumped Toxic Fracking Chemicals in Dawson Creek Water Treatment Systems At Least Twice, Officials Report

Image Credit: Fracking water storage near Hudson's Hope in B.C.
Image from the CCPA report: Fracking Up B.C. 

Although city officials from Dawson’s Creek won’t disclose the names of the companies involved, they are confirming that fracking waste has been illegally dumped into the city’s water treatment system on at least two occasions.

Jim Chute, administrative officer for the city, told DeSmog Canada, that illegal dumping has occurred at least three times, but twice the waste was “clearly” related to fracking.

“It has actually been on three occasions in the last 18 months where we’ve caught inappropriate materials being dumped,” he said. “One of those was a load of contaminated diesel. It’s not clear to us exactly how that diesel got contaminated so we don’t know if that was frack-related or not.”

“The other two were a mix of compounds that were clearly flowback waste from a frack operation.”

Chute said the chemicals used in the fracking process can damage the city’s water and sewage treatment facilities which are unable to handle industrial waste. Chute told the Alaska Highway News the waste could cause irreversible damage to living organisms that play a crucial role in the city’s water reclamation system.

Fracking in northeastern B.C.

Fracking, otherwise known as high-volume slickwater hydraulic fracturing, is a controversial extraction process used to free oil and gas from tight rock formations using extremely high pressures and large amounts of toxic chemicals.

The incidents in Dawson Creek involved subcontractors of the gas companies, Chute told DeSmog Canada, saying “virtually all jobs are outsourced to subtrades.”

“If you’re Encana Corporation, you probably don’t drill that well yourself, it’s probably contracted out to a subcontractor like Precision Drilling. And then Precision Drilling themselves don’t build the lease roads, they contract that out to a subcontractor…and they don’t do their own waste disposal, they contract that out.”

“It’s so busy up here,” Chute said.

“The situations we’ve encountered in every case has been an independent contractor to a company who signs on to a company [saying] they will dispose of the waste in an appropriate manner…and then behave badly, try to save themselves some money by coming to our dump instead of going to the proper spot.”

Chute told the Alaska Highway News the contractors were fined and responsible for cleaning the contaminated holding tanks.

Toxic wastewater a problem for industry

The B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, the provincial oil and gas regulator, is responsible for monitoring the activity of fracking companies, including the disposal of wastewater. B.C. has several private wastewater facilities where recyclable water is separated from toxic waste, which is then disposed of in underground injection wells.

In an emailed statement, B.C. Oil and Gas Commission communications coordinator Hardy Friedrich said, “B.C. has strict regulations related to the disposal of oil and gas waste in the Oil and Gas Waste Regulation and the Hazardous Waste Regulation.”

He added: “Fluids used in hydraulic fracturing must be disposed in a deep underground formation via a service well. Most other waste must be disposed at an approved disposal facility. There are currently 106 operating deep well disposal sites in northeast B.C.”

The difficulty of disposing of wastewater from fracking operations is a problem that has plagued the industry across North America. Flowback fluid from a fracking well includes toxic chemicals and oftentimes radioactive elements from extremely deep wells.

Most municipal wastewater systems are not equipped with the technology to handle such toxic waste in such high volumes.

Dawson Creek, located in the shale gas-rich Montney Basin, has seen a major increase in gas companies in recent years. The Montney Basin, along with the Horn River Basin also in northeastern B.C., could potentially account for 22 per cent of all North American shale gas production by 2020 according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

In the early years of B.C.'s shale gas boom, Grant Shomody, president of Grantech Engineering International, warned of the potential problems producers would face when it comes to wastewater disposal in the Montney:

“If this play develops as producers hope, the number of wells being drilled would severely tax local water resources. In that case, we can expect a lot of ecologically related criticism. There’s also the problem of disposing of the frac water or treating it for reuse. It’s expensive, and Montney producers have not installed water treatment capabilities at their plants.”

A challenge and liability for Dawson Creek

Chute expressed concern with illegal dumping of fracking wastewater, especially in light of new Environment Canada rules, which could hold city officials accountable for negligence.

“Previously there had been less onerous regulations, around how anyone who is a sewage treatment operator or handler of sewage…in order to prevent unauthorized discharge into watercourses,” Chute explained.

These new federal regulations are more strenuous and more robust than any that had been in place in the past, Chute said.

“The onus was put on us to ensure we had the safeguards in place that nothing escaped into the environment. Part and parcel because of that, and [how] thinking changed around Enron and evidence of bad corporate behaviour, part of the regulations imposed personal liability on the people responsible.”

“In Dawson Creek, that would be me,” he said.

Dawson Creek is moving to a new system, said Chute, where a failsafe dump station will monitor regularly for harmful compounds. If those compounds are found, the waste will be prevented from entering the regular treatment system.

Chute says the new facility, which will cost nearly $4 million to build, will be continuously monitored during open hours, 12 hours a day, six days a week.

“All of this is to make sure unauthorized industrial waste doesn’t go into our system.”

“We are going to make sure that we catch anybody that tries to circumvent the system by coming to us because we’re a shorter haul than they’d have to go to the proper spot.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Bottom line: Unconventional oil and gas development by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is a toxic and dangerous industry.  The industry has a track record of environmental contamination and degradation, social and health impacts, and public infrastructure degradation wherever it has occurred.  The large industrial scale and nature of the industry means that there have been and always will be spills and accidents and, inevitably, unscrupulous contractors and subcontractors no matter how strict the rules and regulations placed upon it by government.  The amounts of toxic waste generated and the permanent loss of fresh water (a finite resource) is enormous.  Once a spill, accident, or illegal dumping occurs, the environment can never be cleaned and put back to the state it was before.  The fines imposed by government are too often meaningless and do not deter bad or lack practices - Why do it right? Just pay the fine.  If government oversight was thorough and the fines had teeth, the industry would not be “economically viable”.

VOTE ON SEPTEMBER 22

Richard Lachance & Eveline Haché

Kent South NO SHALE GAS Kent Sud

Dieppe needs answers before wastewater decision, mayor says

Atlantic Industrial Services in Debert, N.S., wants to dispose of 30M litres of fracking wastewater

CBC News Posted: Aug 07, 2014 1:47 PM AT Last Updated: Aug 07, 2014 1:47 PM AT

The mayor of Dieppe, N.B., says council needs answers before making a decision on whether to dispose of treated fracking wastewater from Nova Scotia.

Dieppe Mayor Yvon Lapierre says council will be better equipped to make a
decision about accepting the treated fracking wastewater once all
of its questions have been answered. (CBC)

Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS), a company that takes wastewater from other companies and treats it, needs to get rid of 30 million litres of wastewater currently being held in Debert, N.S., near Truro.

Officials in Debert have unanimously rejected allowing AIS to put the so-called flowback water into the town's sewer system, so the company is looking to Dieppe as a disposal site.

Mayor Yvon Lapierre said he's committed to protecting the city's citizens and infrastructure, but it's impossible to make a decision on the proposal without more information.

“Our staff have a list of questions to inquire about — Why is this practice been discontinued in Nova Scotia? Why is it that they want to come here? Why was this site selected? — a whole series of 14 questions that we have sent back to ministry of the environment that we are asking them to answer," he said.

Lapierre said almost 50 questions have been sent regionally to New Brunswick's environment minister.

This AIS facility in Debert, N.S. was told it could not dispose of
its treated fracking wastewater in the town's sewer system. (Google Maps)

The Department of Environment is currently considering the environmental impacts of AIS's proposal.

The company has proposed getting rid of the 30 million litres of wastewater over two years by shipping three tanker truck loads every day, five days a week.

"We haven't closed the book. We're saying, 'answer our questions,'" said Lapierre.

"We don't want this to be an emotional reaction, or a political reaction, so we're trying to analyze the answers we expect to get and from there, council will be in a better position to make a decision."

The provincial government has to approve the AIS's environmental impact assessment before Dieppe council can even consider the project.

That assessment said the treated water "meets the Dieppe municipal sewer discharge criteria, and if released to the environment would pose no human health risk or environmental risk.”

In Debert, the municipal council rejected treated wastewater from the same company over concerns about high levels of sodium chloride and some radioactive material.

AIS says it has improved its treatment system to reduce those levels.

Related Stories

• Wastewater treatment company seeks to dump 30M litres in N.B.
• Leaking fracking waste still worries Kennetcook crowd

Wastewater treatment company seeks to dump 30M litres in N.B.

Atlantic Industrial Services in Debert, N.S. is hoping to ditch its wastewater in Dieppe, N.B.

CBC News Posted: Aug 06, 2014 8:37 PM AT Last Updated: Aug 06, 2014 8:40 PM AT

This AIS facility in Debert, N.S. was told they could not dispose of their wastewater in Debert's municipal sewer system. (Google Maps)

Thirty million litres of fracking wastewater could be disposed of in a New Brunswick municipal sewer system if the province gives permission to the Nova Scotia company seeking to dump it.

Atlantic Industrial Services, a company that takes wastewater from other companies and treats it, needs to get rid of 30 million litres of wastewater currently being held in Debert, N.S., near Truro.

Officials in Debert have rejected the wastewater so AIS is looking to Dieppe, N.B., proposing to get rid of it over two years. The whole process would require shipping three tanker truck loads of wastewater every day, five days a week.

The waste would eventually be released in Dieppe’s municipal sewer system.

City officials in Dieppe say the province has to first approve the company's environmental impact assessment before it can even consider the project. 

Cleared by environmental report

That assessment said the treated water "meets the Dieppe municipal sewer discharge criteria, and if released to the environment would pose no human health risk or environmental risk.”

In Debert, the municipal council rejected treated wastewater from the same company over concerns over high levels of sodium chloride and some radioactive material.

AIS says it has improved its treatment system to reduce those levels.

Stephanie Merrill, the director of Fresh Water Protection Program with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, said there are still too many questions about the impact of the water.

She says the province doesn't have a policy on how to deal with the wastewater.

No decision yet

“The rules for industry that were released in 2012 I think, said that we will cross that wastewater bridge when we get there,” she said. “Now all of a sudden the bridge is in front of us.” 

“We're reacting very quickly to a problem that was created in Nova Scotia without a policy for documenting and a process for a longer term situation to release shale gas waste.”

City officials in Dieppe said they were only recently informed about the project through the Department of Environment and the company's environmental impact assessment.

In a statement on Wednesday, the province of New Brunswick said no approvals have been made.

Related Stories

• Leaking fracking waste still worries Kennetcook crowd
• Fracking waste water leak in Kennetcook investigated

**********************************

Following is the comment made to the CBC by Richard Lachance and Eveline Hache:

30 million liters (or about 8 million gallons) of "treated" frack water takes 2 years to transport and dispose? The fracking of just one unconventional shale gas well requires 1-5 million gallons of clean water mixed with a stew of toxic chemicals of which half may stay in the well untreated and the other half comes back as flowback that needs to be processed or "treated". Each well may be fracked multiple times. Each well pad contains multiple wells. The GNB want to authorize thousands of these wells. Are we the only ones who see a potential disaster with this scheme? 

Where are the independent testing reports that certify the safety of this so called "treated" flowback water? Where are the review and comments from the NB scientific and engineering communities? If this "treated" flowback is as clean as AIS claims, why not pump it into our public drinking water systems? If it isn't safe enough to drink, then why would we feel it would be safe enough to dump billions of gallons into the Petitcodiac (and other rivers) and eventually the Bay of Fundy? Are we actually considering death by a billion cuts? 

Is this the future legacy we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren? This is a legacy of environmental destruction and death on an industrial scale. They will ask us how we ever considered such an absurdity. We can and must do better than this.