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From Montreal Gazette ...

Feds are targeting me for reporting cancer-pollution link: whistle-blower - Doctor blames contamination on oil patch

MIKE DE SOUZA, CanWest News Service
Nov 12, 2007

John O'Connor first suspected something was wrong a few years ago, after the family physician discovered a rare form of cancer in a small northern Alberta community of 1,200 people.

He recognized the illness since it was the same one that killed his father in Ireland more than 15 years earlier. He had never expected to see it again, and was alarmed to find it in at least five patients.

But O'Connor never anticipated that speaking out about his concerns would land him in a career-threatening clash against the federal government, with his medical licence on the line.

"Looking back, it's been a nightmare for me," O'Connor said in an interview. "It's just something I never expected in a million years. I just wanted to be the family doctor that I was when I went up there."

Fort Chipewyan is the oldest European settlement in the province, and it's also a few hundred kilometres downstream from Fort McMurray, at the heart of Alberta's oil patch and tarsands operations. But officials from Health Canada responded to O'Connor's warnings with a complaint to the Alberta College of Physicians that accused the doctor, who has practised in Fort McMurray since 1993, of raising undue alarm.

Federal Health Minister Tony Clement is defending his government's complaint.

"Health Canada physicians acted as they are ethically obligated to act," his spokesperson, Rita Smith, wrote in an email.

While a series of government studies have concluded there's no need to be alarmed about potential toxins and carcinogens spilling into the Athabasca River from oilsands operations and pulp mills, a new independent report issued last week has discovered serious flaws with the government research and appears to confirm some of O'Connor's greatest fears.

"The findings of my study indicate that there is cause for concern in that there are contaminants that are in the food supply that are associated with cancer and types of cancer observed in the community," said Kevin

Timoney, an Alberta ecologist and statistician, who issued his report to the Fort Chipewyan community last Wednesday.

"Certainly these contaminants come from tarsands. Now the question is how much of the contaminant amount comes from human activity vs. natural sources, and that we can't answer yet."

But the report concluded the contaminants have been on the rise since the start of major industrial development in the region in the 1960s. The contaminants are not only found in

deformed fish with bulging eyeballs, but are spreading throughout the food chain in moose and muskrats as well, it says.

Jeff Short, a supervisory research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Juneau, Alaska, compares the presence of cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the Athabasca's water to conditions following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Community leaders in Fort Chipewyan said last week they were not surprised. "You can only keep things hidden under the umbrella for so long before it becomes public information and, at this point in time, it's our public information and where we go from here is another step," said Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam.

With all the apparent evidence, O'Connor's friends and supporters in the community have little doubt the complaints against him were deliberate.

"In this case, this is very clearly politically motivated," said Michel Sauvé, a Fort McMurray doctor, who said he was speaking as O'Connor's colleague.

"This is very clearly to shut him up and shut him down. In this case, (it has) clearly escalated to a level that was only because of his media criticism of the government and the callous way in which the bureaucracy was dealing with the health concerns of the community. That, I think, is a feeling shared among physicians for sure."

Health Canada filed its complaint a few months after O'Connor wrote an open letter to a Halifax newspaper last December, urging Atlantic Canadians not to move out west. In it, he said he was moving to Nova Scotia, describing life in Fort McMurray as "intolerable," and accusing the Alberta government of playing down the health risks.

Clement's office said it will review Timoney's new report very carefully, but denies interfering with the case to silence O'Connor. "There was absolutely no political involvement in this decision," Smith said.

O'Connor said he has considered filing a complaint of his own against the government agencies, but added he would still like to work with them since he believes they are in the best position to investigate and resolve the region's health concerns.

Meanwhile, the doctor is confident he will ultimately be cleared by the College of Physicians.

"It's not just one physician's word. These people have been seen by specialists and operated on, and (there were) pathology reports, etc. It's clear," he said.

"If you can't basically advocate for your patients, then what the hell are we doing in this job?"

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007