First Nation Takes Fight With Oil-Sands Giant to Shareholders by Robert Tuttle, April 30, 2024, BNN Bloomberg News
An indigenous community in Alberta’s oil-sands region submitted a proposal to Imperial Oil Ltd. shareholders that would require the company to disclose the financial effect of the energy transition.
Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s proposal, scheduled to be voted on Tuesday at Imperial’s shareholder meeting, would require the company to determine the effects of different transition scenarios on its asset-retirement obligations, including future reclamation costs. The proposal is being made on behalf of shareholder Leanne Baer.
The proposal was drafted after wastewater seeped
terrible reporting, seeped makes it sound natural, which I expect is the intentfrom a tailings area and a wastewater pond in May 2022 and February 2023 at Imperial’s Kearl oil-sands mineand worse, the leaks contaminated groundwater, with the company and AER hiding it for months, even keeping it from harmed First Nations. Local indigenous communities criticized the company for failing to adequately disclose the nature of the spills until months after the first incident.
The leak and Imperial’slack ofresponse “raise serious questions about Imperial’s ability to manage the risk of long-liability assets like tailings ponds as well as its commitment to transparency,” Pfffft. Transparency in Alberta’s oil, gas, frac and bitumen patch, AER and or gov’t? Transparency does not exist, lies and secrets are the toxic name of the leaking, frac’ing, spilling, contamination cover-up gameaccording to the proposal.
The conflict is the latest between Canada’s oil and gas industry and indigenous communities, whose traditional territories are often close to production sites and pipelines. Indigenous communities need to know that oil-sands producers will pay to clean up toxic tailings ponds and other polluted sites when when the crude they produce is no longer in demand, Chief Allan Adam said in a phone interview.
“This puts all of the oil-sands players on notice,” he said. “This is the start of a new way of raising concerns. It’s a new way of doing things.”
Imperial opposes the proposal.Of course the mega polluters oppose it, they oppose anything responsible, honest, accountable, appropriate and diligent.
“Calculating asset retirement obligations as per the resolution presented would produce a set of arbitrary, uncertain and hypothetical realviews of the future rather than the bullying, lying, propagandizing, aggressive get out of our profit-raping, polluting, destroying, law and regulation violating ways that our self-regulator, the AER, and our bribed and bought politicians let us get away with for decades. We have no intention of ever cleaning up, we never did, we plan to dump our toxic waste into the watershed, with glowing lies and approval from AER and our owned politicos, while also stealing $billions more in subsidies from Canadians to pay for more rape and pillaged profits for us, while we pretend clean-up thoughtful, fact-based approach used to produce asset retirement obligation estimates that are aligned with legal and regulatory requirements,” the company said its proxy.
Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation isn’t a shareholder in Imperial, but does business with the company, Adam said.
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