A tale at a Timmies in Taber
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
- Written by editor
It all started at a Tim Hortons in Taber, Alta., in 2018.I had just begun working as a reporter for The Narwhal and I was meeting with a farmer to talk about orphan wells in southern Alberta. It was one offhand comment that got the ball rolling. Word was spreading, he said, that some government research had shown old oil and gas sites — even ones that had been officially certified as reclaimed — were in nowhere near as good shape as they should have been. He didn’t know any details.
I’ve spent years tracking down that research about how the cleanup of oil and gas sites might not actually be up to snuff. It kept coming back to the work of one government soil scientist: Arnold Janz at Alberta Environment and Parks.
I first requested an interview with Arnold back in 2018. The department’s response? “We are not able to get you in touch.”
Fast-forward a few years and Arnold had had enough. At 76, and finally retired, he wasn’t willing to fade into obscurity. Arnold wanted to tell his story.
First off, he told me, he had known about my interview request all those years ago. His cubicle was just down the hall when my call came in. He was most certainly available that day. He wanted to talk. But he was not allowed to. And his managers, he said, told him that if he were to talk to journalists he should learn to “use the three most powerful words in the English language: ‘I don’t know.’ ”
This was, as he told me for this story we just published, part of a larger pattern of being stonewalled and sidelined for trying to share his findings — and his concerns — with Albertans. (Not to mention the funding for the research that led me to him in the first place had been reduced to zero.)
I went to Arnold’s house with photographer Amber Bracken in January. When we got there, we found him sitting at his kitchen table with a massive stack of diaries he'd been keeping for 30 years.
Over coffee and butter tarts, we pored over those diaries and dug into his research. As Arnold went through them, he was able to piece together how things had taken a turn in his career. There was the time he was accused of “seeing ghosts” when he reported contamination. Or the time he was asked if he was “on a witch hunt” against industry when he discovered a methane gas leak at a certified well site.The result is this in-depth feature about Arnold’s frustrations — and about the reality of reclamation in Alberta today.
Arnold was nervous to speak publicly about this, but ultimately felt it was his duty to share his story. I’m so happy he did.
But Arnold wasn’t the only one sharing his frustrations with the oil and gas industry and governments with our Prairies team this week.
My colleague Drew Anderson recently got wind of a family in Yorkton, Sask., and their years-long fight to have Imperial Oil clean up the contamination spilling from its land next to their family business — a business they’ve been forced to shutter as a result of the contamination.
Take care and don’t gaslight scientists,
Sharon J. Riley
Prairies bureau chief
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