This story is about how last spring the conservative Canadian government started denying chemotherapy to immigrants; not only that, they are forcing native Canadian communities to live amid carcinogenic tar sands. Chemotherapy uses chemical agents to treat diseases, infections, and other disorders, especially cancer. Carcinogenic Tar sands oil is a high carbon fuel strip- mined from beneath Canada’s Boreal forest. The mining of tar sand is being done in areas where many native Canadians live. This mining has been known to interfere with many cultural traditions of the natives because of the destruction caused by trailing ponds which are ponds with materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction of an ore. Tailings are waste rock or materials overlying an ore or mineral body that are displaced during mining without being processed. When these ponds run into rivers they get into the water system; these minerals cause many natives to have a high rate of rare cancers, like renal failure, lupus, and hyperthyroidism.
This is a known problem but still the Canadian government is going through with it and in order to justify it they are saying this will open up new jobs for the locals. Fossil fuel jobs have been known to produce little to no jobs; not only that, work at these places is just as dangerous as living in the area where the tar sand plants are located. There has been a great deal of manipulation by making it seem like the reason the economy was so bad was because of the refugees. The government has then used this as a reason to make cuts to healthcare of immigrants and then to put a cancer-producing mine in an area that is home to many native Canadians.
Student Researcher: Joel Collins, Indian River State College
Faculty Researcher: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., Indian River State College
Source:
Jesse McLaren, Resisting the Cancervative agenda, Rabble.ca, Nov. 24, 2012 http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/jesse/2012/11/resisting-cancervative-agenda