NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

A federal plan to begin more rigorous tests of the Athabasca River downstream from bitumen mines at Fort McMurray should be extended to the Slave River, says Environment Minister Michael Miltenberger.

Unveiled just before the Conservative government was defeated, the plan for the Athabasca will cost an estimated $20 million a year, and should be paid for by industry, federal Environment Minister Peter Kent said when he announced the new testing regime.

"It's a good first step, but we hope they look farther downstream," said Miltenberger, who supports the idea that polluters should bear the cost of environmental monitoring.

"We're a small jurisdiction with a lot of demands on resources that are spread pretty thinly on a file that is large, complex and very important to all communities in the Northwest Territories."

The new testing plan followed studies led by University of Alberta researchers David Schindler and Erin Kelly, now an adviser to the territorial government on water issues, that found past monitoring efforts were not good enough to accurately detect industrial impacts on the Athabasca and its tributaries.

The first phase of the plan will determine what kind of contaminants are finding their way into the Athabasca River system. The second phase will address the "so what" question by looking at impacts on fish and other aquatic organisms.

Residents in downstream communities of Fort Chipewyan and Fort Smith have long complained of impacts from the mines, linking those to air and water pollution, high rates of cancer, low water levels and deformed fish.

The plan gave no date for extending the enhanced testing regime to the Slave River which depends on the outflow from Lake Athabasca for 30 per cent of its volume.

Most of the water in the Slave comes from the Peace River and its tributaries, said Miltenberger, "and that's a major concern for us right now. Water levels on the Slave have never been so low."

For the past 18 months the territorial government has been pressing the four western provinces and the Yukon territory for legally-binding agreements to protect the quality of water flowing into the Mackenzie River.

B.C. Hydro plans to start building another dam on the Peace River in 2013 and the territorial government wants an agreement on water before work begins on the project, which is scheduled to start generating electricity in 2020.

"The B.C. government wants to separate negotiations on the water agreement from the dam, but we're insisting that they deal with the issues together," Miltenberger told News/North in an interview.

Mining projects proposed for the Peel River watershed have forced the territorial government to revisit the treaty it signed in 1997 with the Yukon government as part of the Mackenzie River Basin trans-boundary agreement.

It proposes that basin waters be managed in a way that "does not unreasonably harm the integrity of the aquatic ecosystem in any other jurisdiction."

"The agreement we signed with the Yukon is not legally-binding," Miltenberger said.

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