Canada's Environment Minister will review the Alberta agency responsible for overseeing water quality in rivers around the province's oil sands, including the Athabasca River.
Minister Jim Prentice said Friday he was "disgusted" by images released this week showing deformities of fish pulled from the Athabasca. He made the comments two days after travelling to Edmonton to meet with David Schindler, a University of Alberta researcher who authored a report last month revealing levels of harmful elements, such as mercury, found in the Athabasca.
Dr. Schindler, a vocal oil sands critic, was also among the group who made public the images of deformed fish, and gave Mr. Prentice a sneak peek.
"I will tell you the photographs of the fish I've seen are disgusting. As somebody who's been a fly fisherman my whole life, you know, this is something we need to take seriously and get to the bottom of," Mr. Prentice told The Globe and Mail.
He's going to commission a Canada-wide panel of researchers to review whether the model used by Alberta's Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program is appropriate. The agency is led by industry and the provincial government, but is criticized by environmentalists as toothless.
"We will get the advice from the best scientists in Canada about what's going on, and we will take action," Mr. Prentice said. "I want to ensure that we have the best advice from Canada's best scientists on what a state-of-the-art monitoring regime will look like, and I intend to make sure that we have that."
He expects to strike up the panel and hear their recommendation very quickly - "within the next two months."
The pledge came as welcome news to Dr. Schindler. "I get the impression that he is genuine, not a spin-doctor type," the professor said in an e-mail. "I am hopeful that EC [Environment Canada]will take over the monitoring, but as I told the Minister, they will need new resources to do the job well."
RAMP is already undergoing its own peer-reviewed assessment, said Fred Kuzmic, who once led RAMP's steering committee and now serves as its spokesman. He welcomes Mr. Prentice's scrutiny.
"I guess it's good news, in a way, " Mr. Kuzmic said. "We're interested to see what people have to say about the program, and want to understand if we are meeting the mandate."
The fish were displayed at a news conference on Thursday. RAMP issued a response immediately, saying it has monitored the Athabasca since 1997 (about two decades after oil sands development began) and the rate of deformities in fish has not increased. Last year, it was about 2.1 per cent. Mr. Kuzmic described this as a natural occurrence.
Environmentalists praised Mr. Prentice's decision.
"You have an industry-led monitoring program that's not transparent, its data sets are not freely and widely available, and they're saying it's all hunky dory. And that's coming into conflict with peer-reviewed science," said Joe Obad, associate director of the advocacy group Water Matters. "It's a step in the right direction for the minister to review the process and to try to find a way in which we can resolve the difference."