REPORTER: Mary Ann Jolley
I'm flying across an ocean of sand, mixed with bitumen. From up here it looks like an industrial wasteland. But for some it's the key to the future of the Canadian economy and it could provide decades of secure energy to North America.
GREG STRINGHAM, CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PETROLEUM PRODUCERS: They saw this oil sands and really literally it was on the ground. They were walking up there and people were finding the oil because it was so close to the surface and they wondered how to use it as a useful commodity.
It wasn't long before the technology developed to separate the oil from the sand. Today the oil sands industry produces around two million barrels a day and business is now booming at sites like this.
OPERATIONS EXPERT: We were producing about 12,000 barrels - that was five years ago. Today we're producing about 135,000 barrels.
And this is the finished product, but the process releases three times the greenhouse gases generated by conventional oil extraction. The oil sands bonanza has attracted some vehement opponents. Legendary rock star Neil Young is one of them.
NEIL YOUNG: It is the ugliest environmental disaster that I not only have ever seen but that I could even comprehend.
The Alberta oil sands surround the Athabasca River north of the state capital, Edmonton. There are 900 residents in the small community of Fort McKay. The stacks of Syncrude and Suncor, two of the largest oil sands companies loom large over the frozen landscape.
REPORTER: And what do you call this area?
JIM BOUCHER, FORT MCKAY FIRST NATION: We call it the 900 block - also known as Beverly Hills.
Jim Boucher is the chief of the local Indigenous people, the Fort McKay First Nation.
JIM BOUCHER: All houses from now on will be built to this standard.
Fort McKay is held up as a good example of relations between oil sands companies and local people.
JIM BOUCHER: We're benefitting more from these relationships. Our community now has no unemployment. We have probably around eight different corporations actively engaged in the business. We gross probably about $600 million to $700 million a year.
But the new found wealth has come at a cost.
JIM BOUCHER: The sad thing is you have to generate revenues from economic activity that really virtually destroys the land. We're not in a position at this point in time to stop it.
Fort McKay is surrounded by open pit mines. Vast areas of forests have been cleared and layers of peat and clay peeled back to remove the bitumen close to the surface. Tailings ponds like this one are scattered across the landscape, in total they cover almost 170 square kilometres.
SIMON DYER, PEMBINA INSTITUTE: The industry hasn't been able to demonstrate how to clean these up so they are a toxic liability that continues to grow.
Simon Dyer is a director at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian NGO that advocates for sustainable energy.
SIMON DYER: Those tailings ponds include of course waste water and sand, they also include about 10% residual bitumen from the extraction process and solvents used in that extraction process and so there are also significant source of local air pollutants - volatile organic compounds and methane.
JIM BOUCHER: It used to be our food basket. Now it's a river of recreation. That's all it is.
REPORTER: Do people drink the water?
JIM BOUCHER: People can't drink the water, well, not unless of course you put it through a process - water treatment process.
A recent government report confirmed what has long been suspected - that the tailings ponds are leeching into the groundwater and seeping into the river system.
SIMON DYER: Canada doesn't do research on the health impacts. We have no specific data about this.
There have been conflicting studies. Some say that there's an elevated cancer risk downstream of the oil sands. Others say there's no elevated risk, the causality of that is unknown at this point. But it's clear there are unanswered questions and there is a growing pollution problem.
CENOVUS WORKMAN: Right here, this road here is steam generation.
At this operation run by the Canadian company, Cenovus, there are no tailings ponds.
CENOVUS WORKMAN: No digging. We simply drill. That allows us to access a large underground reservoir with very little ground disturbance.
It's a process known as in situ and is hailed by the industry as more environmentally friendly. But there's a serious drawback - it uses steam - a lot of steam.
CENOVUS WORKMAN: We're injecting steam deep down underground to soften the oil.
SIMON DYER: It's actually more greenhouse gas intensive than the mining process so the greenhouse gas profile of the industry as a whole is actually starting to worsen because of the greater deployment of in situ expansions.
150 kilometres north of Fort McKay is the fishing hamlet of Fort Chipewyan - one of the oldest settlements in Alberta. On the shores of Lake Athabasca, abandoned boats are everywhere and not just because it's winter.
RAY LADOUCEUR: We can't fish because we don't want to hurt people. We don't know how much chemicals there are in those things.
Ray Ladouceur fished on the lake for more than 50 years. He's in no doubt the oil sands operations downstream are poisoning the water.
RAY LADOUCEUR: The last 40 years they have been discharging deadly chemicals and they're denying it.
Back at home, Ray shows me photographs of the deformed fish he's caught.
RAY LADOUCEUR: The fish they're getting deformed the last 20 something years, getting worse and worse. The pickerel, they're deformed, they're hump backs, pushed in faces, rolled out eyes, crooked tails, belly deformed and they're breaking out in lumps on them.
REPORTER: And how often would you come cross a fish like that?
RAY LADOUCEUR: A big volume of fish come into the plant and one time we took over 200 counts in a couple of days there of deformed fish.
With a population of just 1100 people, word spreads quickly in Fort Chipewyan and so too does fear.
PATIENT: I don't eat fish now. I haven't eaten fish for years. And there's going to be a lot more things coming up.
DR ESTHER TAILFEATHERS: Yeah I think people are worried.
PATIENT: The whole town is worried.
At the medical clinic Dr Esther Tailfeathers is at the coalface when it comes to local health concerns.
DR ESTHER TAILFEATHERS: The fear is huge that cancer is rising in the community. You know everyone has ideas and feelings because of the number of people that are sick and the number of people that have past.
REPORTER: The people of Fort Chipewyan don't fish anymore, they don't want to eat the fish, they no longer drink the water. What responsibility does the industry take for their situation?
JOHN STRINGHAM: What they choose to eat and what they choose to drink is their choice. If there are lakes that are getting above human health contamination, none of that's been found.
REPORTER: So you're completely confident that people of Fort Chipewyan that their belief that they are getting sick because of the oil sands and you think that's unfounded?
JOHN STRINGHAM: From an industry, I'm not a medical expert and can't answer that question. We want the science to be able to be there to answer that question.
Two recent government reviews of cancer data for Fort Chipewyan revealed heightened levels of an extremely rare and deadly cancer. In the past decade, there have been five cases of bile duct cancer in this towns tiny population. The most recent is Chadi's restaurant owner and local councillor John Chadi. Not an easy cancer to diagnose, it took a doctor sometime to confirm their suspicions.
JOHN CHADI: The question I posed to him was, "I need you to be perfectly frank and totally blunt. I need to know what's going on here? It's been a little over three weeks and I still haven't, no-one has really told me anything." Just that in itself, the wait of that in itself was, if it wasn't affecting me as much as it should have, it was affecting my family. My wife, who is a rock...
It's not the first time John Chadi's wife, Claris Voyageur has supported a family member in their fight against this aggressive cancer.
CLARIS VOYAGEUR: For me, this is the second bile duct cancer in my family. My uncle died nine years ago with the same thing. To me, when John started feeling sick, the symptoms, It brought back memories of my uncle. And it hurts. It hurts to see the small community Fort Chip with all this cancer. And the government lying saying it's nothing.
Way back in the mid 2000s, Dr John O'Connor was so concerned about the number of bile duct cancers he was seeing in the Fort Chipewyan community, he went to the health authorities. He wasn't prepared for the response he got.
DR JOHN O'CONNOR: I was attacked. I was victimised. There was a concerted effort made to take away my medical licence and with their efforts to do that, it could have, I don't know how close it came to succeeding.
The Alberta government likes to portray the oil sands as a source of ethical oil - unlike the oil from the warring Middle East, but to many people who live north of Edmonton, near the oil sands operations, the oil is anything but ethical. The government's health, energy and environment departments all declined Dateline's request for interviews about community health fears.
DR JOHN O'CONNOR: People outside are shocked. And yet the silence is deafening both provincial and Federal government departments. The public health physicians should be all over this. If I'm concerned as a family physician that this is causing a problem, maybe causing a problem, then they should be climbing the walls trying to get at it.
Riding his dog sled through the Fort Chipewyan woods, Robert Grandjambe is the picture perfect Albertan. But these days he's a rarity amongst the first nation people.
ROBERT GRANDJAMBE: I'm still very traditional in my teachings of my traditional upbringing as an Aboriginal first nation. So I do hunt and trap. I fish off the land.
The First Nation are the traditional owners of the land here and they're guaranteed by law the right to hunt and fish - but it's a way of life that's increasingly limited by the spread of the oil sands operations.
REPORTER: Do you worry that the oil sands could threaten your lifestyle?
ROBERT GRANDJAMBE: I think they can threaten everybody's lifestyle in a sense that not only myself, but I am worried for generations down the road that they're not going to have the opportunity that I've grown up with. If this is going to be taken away, it won't be rejuvenated to its natural state, you know.
The Athabasca Fort Chipewyan First Nation is gearing up for a legal battle against oil sands operations encroaching on their traditional land. Neil Young had thrown his star power behind them, recently touring Canada to raise funds for their cause.
NEIL YOUNG: I see a government just completely out of control - money is number one integrity isn't even on the map.
Neil Young is on stage with the First Nation Chief, Allan Adam. The Chief takes a hard line against the oil sands development - comparing it to an act of genocide.
ALLAN ADAM, FIRST NATION CHIEF: Every time we approve a project it's like we're killing our people softly. Don't give into government and don't give into industry when they're going to have adverse effects to your wellbeing because your future generations of people are at stake. Your very existence as a human being is at stake. Would you rather give up your existence as a human being for a major development that is going to occur on your traditional territories. We won't and that's why we continue to fight.
But for many of those who work in the oil sands industry, it's a different story. The main oil centre is Fort McMurray, known locally as Fort McMoney. People flock here from all over Canada looking for jobs with a dream of making it rich. A shortage of accommodation has seen house prices skyrocket and trailer parks like this one have sprung up on the outskirts of the town. It's hard to find anyone here who has anything bad to say about the industry.
MAN: If there was no oil sands here, there would be an awful lot of hungry people in every province because this is where the most work is and you have to work to survive.
A couple of trailers away, a woman tells me how the industry is giving her stepson a future.
KAREN GOLDIE: He loves the team that he works with, he feels he's safe and taken care of. He doesn't feel he's doing anything wrong. He works as an electrical apprentice and he's going to have the opportunity to complete that apprenticeship here. Companies make enough money to sponsor him.
These two young women form Ontario are moving into the trailer park today.
GIRLS: I'm not going anywhere. This town, I love the feel of it, I love the job. I love the oil sands. Yeah. I think it's great. It's a wonderful place to live. Yeah.
As for any criticism of the industry's environmental record, they're not concerned.
GIRLS: It is bad for the environment but at the same time the world needs it and it's good for the Canadian economy. Yeah.
The oil sands industry is going full steam ahead. A pipeline to the United States is waiting for approval from the Obama administration and companies are proposing new and expanded pipelines that will connect the oil sands to markets in China and the rest of the world. There's unlikely to be a slowdown any time soon.
SIMON DYER: Clearly the way development is currently occurring is not responsible and we need to have much higher environmental standards, much better performance from the companies, but also Canadians and Albertans, we need to have a discussion about what level is appropriate and if there's such a thing as too much oil sands development? I don't think that's happening in the discourse in Canada right now.
Reporter/Camera
MARY ANN JOLLEY
Producer
ALLAN HOGAN
Researcher
CALLISTE WEITENBERG
Editor
DAVID POTTS
Additional stills provided by John Ulan
Additional footage provided by Greenpeace Canada