They Are Dying. And Canada Is Watching.
Mikisew Cree’s own health study confirms what the community has always known: the oil sands are killing them. If governments and industry don’t act, they say they will shut it all down.
Billy-Joe Tuccaro’s mother died of brain cancer less than a year ago.
She at least made it to a diagnosis. In Fort Chipewyan, the remote fly-in community on the western tip of Lake Athabasca in northern Alberta, people don’t always get that far. By the time they see a doctor at the community’s single clinic — there is no hospital — the cancer is already stage three, stage four. Already a death sentence. It’s how Tuccaro, chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation (MCFN), describes what a cancer diagnosis means in his community.
“My mother went back to the clinic ten times,” he told me in a phone interview from Ottawa before a press conference held this morning, April 13. “Headaches, headaches, headaches. By the time it was stage four.”
He paused. Then he told me that according to the community’s own health study, six out of ten households in Fort Chipewyan have been directly touched by cancer. He told me he can’t get home anymore. He’s away so often lobbying for his people’s survival that he finds out about the latest deaths while in airports, while sitting in government waiting rooms, while standing in hallways outside ministerial offices where he’s been made to wait. Last week, another woman in the community. Another family swallowed by grief. His best friend died of bile duct cancer — a rare cancer — given 18 days from diagnosis. The previous chief, Peter Powder, died of cancer. The chief before him, Steve Courtoreille, also died of cancer.
“Am I next?” Tuccaro asked the crowd gathered at the press conference inside Parliament Hill. He let the question hang there, over the cameras, over the journalists, over the suited aides, over the ministers who sent deputies.
This morning, the Mikisew Cree First Nation announced the findings of a health study they commissioned and funded themselves — because they couldn’t wait a decade for the federal government to get around to it. The full report is forthcoming.
The findings confirmed what this community has carried in their grief, in their graveyards, for generations: cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan are at least 25 percent higher than the rest of Alberta. Since 1993, there have been 149 documented cases — and that number, Tuccaro says, is a gross underestimate. People who leave the community for treatment are no longer counted in local statistics. Factor those in, and the real number for Mikisew Cree members alone, he estimates, is closer to 250 to 300.
Since Tuccaro became chief in October 2022 — the same year Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine spilled 5.3 million litres of contaminated wastewater into the surrounding environment and said nothing to the community for nine months — he says there have been an additional 50 to 60 cancer cases.
Tuccaro believes the study implicates industry as one of the causes driving the health crisis. It points to cumulative effects. It connects the dots that governments and regulators have spent decades refusing to connect.
And it names what’s happening in Fort Chipewyan for what it is: not a tragedy or an unfortunate side effect. A slow, ongoing sacrifice of an Indigenous community for the benefit of one of the most profitable industrial operations on the planet.
There’s a reason it has taken this long to be heard. Tuccaro said it plainly at Monday’s press conference: when Mikisew Cree raises the alarm, industry reaches for the contracts. “We raise our voices right away,” he said. “They wanna pull our contracts. To shut us up.” The impact benefit agreements that are supposed to compensate communities for the disruption of industrial development become leverage — a financial leash. “When we sign these impact benefit agreements, it says clearly right there: impact, benefit, agreement, impact,” Tuccaro said. “That’s what you’re paying. You’re paying to kill us and it’s gotta stop.”
Now Mikisew Cree has the evidence in hand — and an ultimatum to go with it. If the federal and provincial governments do not act, Tuccaro told me, they will use their treaty rights to stop the oil sands. Blockades are not off the table.
“We will stop the oil sands in the Wood Buffalo area until this is finalized,” he said. “Enough is enough.”
Fort Chipewyan sits directly downstream from the Alberta oil sands — the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen, and the engine of Canada’s petro-economy. The tailings ponds that service the industry now hold 1.4 trillion litres of toxic wastewater, covering an area larger than the city of Vancouver. They are not properly lined. They seep. They have always seeped.
Tuccaro is 48 years old. He remembers drinking straight from the creeks as a boy. He remembers going out on the land with his uncles, taking an auger in winter and drawing water directly from the Slave River.
“Now,” he said, “people take more water than gas when they go out on the land.” Drinking water, that is.
The fish are sick. The moose are sick. The study recommends pulling back on moose consumption. People who have eaten from this land their entire lives — whose grandparents ate from this land, whose culture and identity and survival are woven into this land — have long suspected it’s poisoning them. Now there’s a study that says they were right.
Children have cancer. Children have lupus. Autoimmune diseases are spreading through the community.
He believes the correlation to the Imperial spill is why.
Alberta Health and Alberta Health Services, Tuccaro told me, will not provide the community with health data from 2022 to present. He believes the correlation to the Imperial spill is why. (Neither Alberta Health nor Alberta Health Services responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.)
He believes the correlation to the Imperial spill is why.
Imperial Oil was fined $50,000.
When Premier Smith was confronted with that 2023 spill — the one that sent 5.3 million litres of toxic tailings into the environment while the community harvested food downstream in the dark — she dismissed it, claiming the release had no effect on local waterways or wildlife. In a 2023 interview with me, ACFN Chief Adam called it an environmental catastrophe that Imperial and the AER “tried to cover up,” and said Smith and her environment minister were “trying to minimize” it. The Alberta government declined to fund or partner on the community health study. When asked to comment further on Indigenous criticisms of its oilsands committee recommendations, the province declined to respond.
In 2024, after decades of being ignored, the federal government announced $12 million over ten years to fund a community-led health study. Chief Tuccaro said then what the community had long known: “This should have been done 32 years ago, maybe 40 years ago.”
Ten years was too long. Mikisew Cree said we’re not waiting. They did it themselves.
Tuccaro hand-delivered a letter about the cancer crisis directly to Prime Minister Mark Carney at the First Nations Major Projects Summit in Gatineau last summer. Carney’s office acknowledged it. Nothing followed. When journalists sought comment from the Prime Minister’s office about whether Carney would accept an invitation to visit Fort Chipewyan, his office acknowledged receipt of the questions and did not respond.
The federal government did issue a statement reaffirming it was “committed to ensuring that decisions affecting the environment are based on the best available science and respect Indigenous rights and interests.” During the 2025 spring election, the Liberal Party promised to “immediately introduce and pass legislation” affirming the First Nations right to clean drinking water. Seven months after the election, no such bill had been tabled. Ontario and Alberta’s environment ministers had jointly lobbied Carney to abandon the plan, warning it would “undermine competitiveness.”
At the press conference Monday, a member of Tuccaro’s technical team held up an iPad displaying a photo of the water — brown, murky. Tuccaro pointed to it.
“Would you drink this?” he asked the room. “Would you let your children drink this? Would you let your children play in it?”
The silence in the room was its own answer.
“Then why should we?”
Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro addresses a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 13, 2026, announcing findings from an independently commissioned health study showing cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan are at least 25 percent higher than the rest of Alberta. "For too long the almighty dollar has ruled Alberta," he said. "For too long my people have been collateral damage."
Treaty 8 Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi stood beside him and didn’t mince words.
“We are burying our families and our children, our grandparents earlier than other races of people,” he said, “just because of the location and the lack of inactivity when it comes to protecting our people.”
He’s previously called on governments to stop letting solutions be ruled out because they’re too expensive. “There is no price for the health of our people,” he said during a rally in Fort McMurray in September 2024. “If it increases the cost of a barrel of oil by $2 a barrel, then it has to be looked at.”
Mercredi, who also sits on the Indigenous advisory council in the federal government’s Major Projects Office, was blunt about Ottawa’s priorities. He told reporters earlier this year he doesn’t know if the government will “ever deal with it” — that the federal government just wants to “get through these projects” and deal with the fallout later.
This crisis didn’t begin last week. It didn’t begin in 2022 with the Imperial spill. And it didn’t begin with the first cancer diagnosis, the first funeral, the first unanswered letter to Ottawa.
It began the moment the oil sands were handed their social licence to operate with Indigenous communities as an afterthought — or not a thought at all.
Dr. John O’Connor, the physician who served Fort Chipewyan for nearly 16 years, was accused of raising “undue alarm” after he first reported the elevated cancer rates in 2006. He was vindicated when the Alberta Cancer Board confirmed rates were 30 percent above expected — and still, nothing substantively changed. The machinery kept grinding. The tailings kept seeping. The people kept dying. O’Connor, who sometimes refers to the province as “Oilberta,” has said of Smith’s government and conservative governments before it: “They’re so anti-people, so anti-environment, so pro-industry.”
In a previous interview, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) Chief Allan Adam told me that Fort Chipewyan lives with the highest cancer rates in the province — more than twice that of the rest of Alberta. His community launched a $500 million lawsuit against the Alberta Energy Regulator for failing to inform them about the Kearl spills. In a 2024 press conference over contamination at the community dock — where a 2017 Transport Canada study found toxins above legal limits at 33 of 35 test sites and was buried for seven years — Adam said what has become the defining phrase of this crisis: “This is environmental racism. And it’s deadly.”
I was in Fort Chipewyan in 2024 when ACFN councillor Mike Mercredi stood chest-out in a packed community meeting and shouted across the room at the Alberta Energy Regulator’s CEO: “Regulated murder. Slow industrial genocide. How many bodies? How many billions are you going to make before we’re all dead?”
Now, a new and more urgent threat looms over everything.
Smith has mandated her environment minister to fast-track a “treat and release” plan for oil sands tailings — a proposal that would allow companies to treat their toxic wastewater using unproven technology and release it directly into the Athabasca River system. The Athabasca flows north into the Northwest Territories, feeding the Mackenzie River, which drains all the way to the Arctic Ocean. The provincial Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee that produced the recommendations was dominated by industry representatives and included a single Indigenous voice. Alberta’s Ministry of Environment has framed the release of toxic waste into this vast living watershed as a matter of practical necessity, saying the province cannot “continue to ignore this challenge or let water keep accumulating for 50 more years.” Northwest Territories Premier R.J. Simpson has said his government is “very entrenched” in its opposition — that it will not change that position until safety is proven “beyond all doubt” — underscoring that this is not a local problem. It is a continental one.
The federal government recently signed a pipeline memorandum of understanding with Alberta — opening the door to a bitumen pipeline to B.C.’s coast — that doesn’t mention water. Not once. The Canadian Press asked the Privy Council Office why water was omitted from the agreement. It didn’t directly respond.
And in a move that has alarmed Indigenous leaders and environmental advocates alike, Ottawa has since handed environmental oversight of major projects to the province — the same province that fined the company that poisoned a First Nation’s watershed $50,000 and called it accountability.
Tuccaro’s message to both Carney and Smith on Monday was the same one he has been delivering for years, stripped now to its bones:
“Build a pipeline to Calgary and Ottawa. You drink it first. Let your kids swim in it. Let your kids get sick. We’re done being your guinea pigs.”
If nothing changes — if the tailings are released, if the water quality standards aren’t overhauled, if the federal government continues choosing industry over the people downstream — Tuccaro says Mikisew Cree will be gone within his lifetime.
“In 10 to 15 years,” he said, “there could be nobody left in Fort Chip.”
He’s not being dramatic. He’s counting bodies. He’s watching his graveyard — the one that had only two rows when he was a boy, the one that has grown into the middle of the cemetery and forced the community to build a second one — fill up with people who should still be alive. In a community of approximately 1,000 people.
In Fort Chipewyan, there are people who will not go to a hospital to die. They go home. They choose to be surrounded by their families on their land — because it is still their land. Because they are Mikisew Cree, and they have been here long before the first well was drilled, and they intend to remain.
Tuccaro says Canada parades the oil sands around the world as safe, ethical, responsibly managed — travelling to Saudi Arabia and other nations to sell that story — while the people who live downstream are too afraid to get tested because they already know what the results will say.
“Our story needs to be told,” he said Monday. “For far too long, industry has controlled the narrative. Same with government.”
He’s not alone. The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation stands with him. Treaty 8 stands with him. And behind them, a community marked by cancer, by grief, by decades of being told their lives are an acceptable cost of doing business.
Now there is a study. Now there’s evidence. And the people of Fort Chipewyan are watching to see what the governments and industry that have ignored them for decades will do with it.
“At least our words are heard now, Canada,” Tuccaro said. “This is your warning.”
Indigenous Insider reached out to both the Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services and Alberta Health Services for comment on why community health data from 2022 to present has not been provided to Mikisew Cree First Nation. Due to the breaking nature of this story, responses had not been received at time of publication. This story will be updated if and when they respond.
Brandi Morin is an award-winning Cree and Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. Her documentary Killer Water, investigating the oil sands’ impact on Fort Chipewyan, won the 2024 Canadian Hillman Prize.
Sources:
Brandi Morin’s Reporting (Ricochet/IndigiNews/TRNN):
National Observer: 11. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/11/06/news/alberta-first-nations-chiefs-oilsands-tailings 12. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/04/09/news/kearl-oilsands-tailings-lawsuit-alberta-energy-regulator 13. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/05/30/news/oilsands-tailings-toxicity-Liberals-investigation 14. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/03/news/alberta-oilsands-spill-hidden-first-nation-act-environmental-racism
CBC News: 15. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/first-nations-water-oilsands-9.7057845 16. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/mikisew-cree-first-nation-opposes-releasing-treated-oilsands-tailings-9.6949079 17. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/canada-to-fund-health-study-for-indigenous-communities-downstream-of-oilsands-1.7287640 18. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fort-chipewyan-m%C3%A9tis-nation-rejects-alberta-s-oilsands-tailings-recommendations-1.7641352 19. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/water-nwt-ab-9.7134277 20. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/first-nations-water-bill-9.7001699
The Narwhal: 21. https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-oilsands-tailings-drinking-water/ 22. https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-oilsands-cancer-fort-chipewyan/ 23. https://thenarwhal.ca/fort-chipewyan-residents-portraits/ 24. https://thenarwhal.ca/bill-c-5-first-nations-summit/
APTN News: 25. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/indigenous-leaders-in-northern-alberta-accuse-ottawa-of-environmental-cover-up/
True North Wire: 26. https://truenorthwire.com/2025/12/treaty-8-chiefs-denounce-alberta-ottawa-pipeline-agreement/
Mikisew Cree First Nation (official statements): 27. https://mikisewcree.ca/indigenous-leaders-denounce-plans-to-treat-and-release-oil-tailings 28. https://mikisewcree.ca/the-price-for-growth-shouldnt-be-peoples-lives-indigenous-leaders-tell-ottawa
Hillman Foundation: 29. https://hillmanfoundation.org/canadian-hillman-prize/2024/brandi-morin-and-geordie-day
Red Deer Advocate: 30. https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/news/first-nations-chiefs-criticize-alberta-premiers-oilsands-tailings-spill-comments/
Dr. O’Connor: 31. https://paherald.sk.ca/oilsands-whistleblower-says-federal-pledge-is-bittersweet/
Government of Canada: 32. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2024/08/federal-government-announces-support-for-community-led-health-study-in-athabasca-oil-sands-region.html 33. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/managing-pollution/sources-industry/mining-effluent/oil-sands.html
Saskatchewan Government (confirming Sam Blackett contact): 35. https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/news-and-media/2025/june/18/united-in-call-for-change-joint-statement
I’m livid! Watching CBC this morning. Headline was “Multiple cancer types on the rise across Canada”. No mention of Fort Chipewyan or any other First Nations communities.
It's been going on for a long long time. ..I've known this for years...as I've heard on the grapevine from anthropologist, archaeologists and other researchers. But some people don't speak out as they feel that they risk loosing research funding, others do speak out and are blackballed by their colleagues so they loose their livelihoods, ..others say to those who are junior to them.."you speak out and no-one will employ you". You soon learn that even many researchers won't challenge the oil corporations who pay their bills.