No more broken promises: holding government and industry accountable for toxic tailings ponds: Since time immemorial the Athabasca River has been a powerful source
of life in what is currently called Alberta. A Canadian Heritage River –
a designation given to rivers with “outstanding natural, cultural and
recreational values” – the river and its basin is one of the world’s “most ecologically significant wetlands,”
and serves as a home to a variety of flora and fauna, including white
and black spruce, balsam and alpine firs, bears, bighorn sheep, the
endangered whooping crane, and the world’s largest herd of bison, among
many, many others. It is, and long has been, home to many communities of
people, including the Dane-zaa, Sekani, Ktunaxa, Secwepemc (Shuswap),
Salish, Nakoda, Woodland Cree, Chipewyan, and Metis.

But the Athabasca River’s long history as a source of life has also,
ironically, put it in serious danger. Millions of years of ecological
evolution and the Earth’s natural rhythms of flourishing and decay
formed what has become the Alberta tar sands, a sprawling mass of
extractive development that has consumed enough land that it is visible
from space. Part of this sprawl includes tailings ponds, highly toxic
pools containing nearly 500 billion litres of
water, sand, clay, and residual bitumen that contain mercury, arsenic,
benzene, and naphthenic acids that pose a catastrophic risk to life.

On the brink: Global crises ranging from climate to economic meltdown demand radical change: We have damaged our planet through destructive exploitation of fossil
fuels and the insatiable demand for things we don’t need. We are
cooking ourselves to death and it may already be too late to do anything about it.

Multiple and intersecting crises — the pandemic, a changing climate,
wars in Ukraine and elsewhere and associated economic sanctions — have
produced real hardship for millions of people. The effects include food
shortages, hunger, inflation, recessions and soaring energy costs that
undermine climate action as coal-fired generation resumes.

Economically, wealth inequality is unprecedented. The poorest half of the global population hardly owns any wealth, just two per cent of the total. The richest 10 per cent of the global population own 76 per cent.

Yet we continue to believe that the marketplace, left mainly to
self-regulate, will naturally stabilize economies. That belief has led
to unlimited growth and minimal intervention by governments to resolve staggering inequity or even to manage the economy at all.

No New Jobs Came from Alberta’s $4B ‘Job Creation’ Tax Cut for Big Oil: Instead, a total of 3,452 jobs with oil sands majors
were lost to automation and consolidation since 2019, concludes the
report from the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute. “Meanwhile,
those same companies added millions of dollars to the compensation of
their CEOs and rewarded their shareholders with generous dividends,” the
institute says.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s United
Conservative Party (UCP) government said 55,000 new jobs would be
created, offsetting a projected $2.4-billion loss in revenue, from its
plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 12% in 2019 to 8% by 2022. But
three years later, and with the 8% tax cut delivered two years ahead of
schedule via Alberta’s Recovery Plan, Parkland says that the boon to the
corporate sector enriched the coffers of the oil sands “Big Four,” even
as provincial revenues tanked by twice the projected amount. And 3,452
oil sands workers have been given pink slips.