Trump’s Pipelines Have a Death Toll. Its Name Is Fort Chipewyan.
After signing nine Enbridge pipeline permits this week, Trump added his signature to a decades-long sentence already being served by a dying community in northern Alberta — one that sits downstream
On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed a stack of presidential permits authorizing Enbridge to expand and operate pipelines carrying crude oil and petroleum products across the Canada-U.S. border. Nine permits. The kind of paperwork that gets celebrated in boardrooms and energy conferences — at CERAWeek, where Alberta Premier Danielle Smith stood at a podium just weeks ago and declared her ambition to double Alberta’s oil production to 8 million barrels per day by 2035.
The same day those permits hit the news cycle, I was still processing the press conference I’d covered two days earlier from Parliament Hill, where Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro told Canada that in 10 to 15 years, there could be nobody left in Fort Chipewyan.
He wasn’t speaking in metaphors. He was announcing a trajectory. His mother died of brain cancer less than a year ago — stage four, by the time she saw a doctor, after ten visits to the community’s single clinic with headaches that kept being sent home. His best friend died of bile duct cancer — a rare cancer — 18 days from diagnosis. He’s away from Fort Chipewyan so often — lobbying, meeting, pleading — that the community’s grief reaches him at a distance. He gets the news, and then he has to walk back into another government office and make the case for his people’s survival all over again.
“Am I next?” he asked the crowd assembled at Parliament Hill. He let the question sit there, over the cameras, over the journalists, over the suited aides, over the ministers who sent deputies instead of coming themselves.
Let me tell you what those pipeline permits are really carrying.
A significant portion of the oil moving through Enbridge’s vast cross-border network originates from the Alberta oil sands — the largest industrial project on the surface of the earth, carved out of Treaty 8 territory. That black gold flows south through pipeline corridors to refineries in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast, fueling the economies and profit margins of two nations. And it flows north — through the open-pit mines, past the smokestacks that bellow toxic emissions into the boreal air, through the seeping tailings ponds and contaminated drainage basins of the Peace-Athabasca Delta — directly into the territory of the Mikisew Cree, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the Fort Chipewyan Métis. Into the lungs and water and food and bodies of people who have been raising the alarm for over two decades.
A 2024 study by researchers from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Yale University found that oil sands operations are emitting between 20 and 64 times more air pollution than industry has ever reported. Not a rounding error. A lie written in smoke, drifting north over the same communities whose cancer rates nobody in power wants to explain.
The Mikisew Cree’s own independently commissioned health study — funded themselves, because waiting ten years for Ottawa’s promised study was a luxury the dying couldn’t afford — found cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan at least 25 percent above the provincial average. Since 1993, 149 documented cases among Mikisew members alone. Twenty-four different cancer types. Fourteen members diagnosed with multiple cancers. The trajectory is worsening: 30 new cases between 2013 and 2017, and climbing. Chief Tuccaro estimates the real count is closer to 250 to 300, because people who leave for treatment vanish from local statistics. Fort Chipewyan has one clinic. No hospital. The nearest comprehensive care is more than 300 kilometres away.
Alberta’s response arrived within hours. Cancer rates were “largely within normal ranges.” There was “no known causal link” between oil sands development and cancer in the region. Thousands of water tests show the water is safe to drink.
A community is being poisoned. Make sure no one can say they didn’t know.
A member of Tuccaro’s technical team held up an iPad with a photo of the water — brown, murky, thick. “Would you drink this?” Tuccaro asked the room. “Would you let your children drink it? Would you let your children swim in it? Would you let your children get sick from it?”
The silence was its own answer.
“Then why should we?”
This is the context in which Trump signed those permits. Not in a vacuum. Not as a neutral bureaucratic act. But as the latest chapter in a story as old as colonialism itself — one that has played out on every continent where Indigenous people have had the misfortune of living above something the powerful wanted. The playbook never changes. Arrive. Extract. Profit. Leave the people who were there to absorb whatever remains. Fort Chipewyan is not an anomaly. It’s the template.
Trump’s administration has gutted environmental protections across the board. The EPA dismantled from within. Environmental review timelines slashed in the name of energy dominance. And now nine permits for Enbridge pipelines — signed the same week Mikisew Cree stood before Parliament Hill with evidence of what this industry does to the people it flows through and over.
It’s not just the source communities that don’t want this oil. On the other side of the border, tribal nations are in their own legal battles against the same company, the same pipelines. All twelve tribal nations in Michigan oppose Enbridge’s Line 5. The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa has been fighting in federal court for years to shut down the pipeline trespassing through their reservation. A federal judge ordered Enbridge to reroute or shut down by June 2026 — weeks away.
The Trump administration’s response? The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest asking the court to delay the shutdown, arguing pipeline closure would disrupt America’s energy supply. Separately, the administration argued in the Michigan Supreme Court that a binding treaty between the U.S. and Canada governing the pipeline supersedes the state’s authority to protect its own waters — that a tribal nation’s right to its own land loses to a pipeline company’s treaty with another country.
From Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta to the Straits of Mackinac — from the Athabasca watershed to the Great Lakes — Indigenous nations on both sides of the border are telling the same story. The industry and the governments that answer to it are covering their ears.
Premier Smith has been busy. At CERAWeek last month she laid it out plainly: 8 million barrels per day by 2035. She and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a memorandum of understanding last November to fast-track a new bitumen pipeline to B.C.’s north coast — reached without coastal First Nations, without B.C.‘s premier, and without a single mention of water anywhere in the text. The Canadian Press asked Carney’s Privy Council Office why water was omitted. No direct answer came.
The same province that dismissed the Mikisew Cree health study within hours wants to fast-track a “treat and release” plan allowing oil sands companies to discharge processed toxic wastewater directly into the Athabasca River system — using technology that has not been proven safe. The Athabasca flows north through the Northwest Territories into the Mackenzie River, to the Arctic Ocean. The Dene Nation, the Inuvialuit, the Northwest Territory Métis Nation, the communities of Fort Resolution and Hay River — every nation that draws water from that corridor stands in the path of what Alberta decides next. The committee that produced these recommendations was dominated by industry representatives. One Indigenous voice sat at that table. One.
This is what consultation looks like in Alberta.
Dr. John O’Connor first raised the alarm about Fort Chipewyan’s cancer rates in 2006. Health Canada filed misconduct complaints against him for it. He was cleared. The Alberta Cancer Board confirmed elevated rates in 2009. Nothing changed. When I reached him this week after Alberta’s denial, he was blunt: “This is environmental racism. It would not happen upstream of non-Indigenous communities.” Twenty years later, the province is still giving the same answer.
Imperial Oil spilled 5.3 million litres of contaminated wastewater from its Kearl Mine in 2022 and said nothing to the downstream community for nine months while people harvested food from the land. The fine: $50,000. This week — the same week Tuccaro stood in Ottawa and Trump signed his permits — Imperial reported another spill: 843,000 litres of bitumen and saltwater near Cold Lake on April 9, on Cold Lake First Nations territory. Another apology. Another cleanup. Another community left to wonder what entered their watershed before anyone told them.
The Alberta Energy Regulator is not a neutral party. Its board includes a member who simultaneously consults for the oil industry and advises the Premier, and who led development of a strategy to weaken industry cleanup obligations — a conflict of interest so stark that Ecojustice has filed a formal complaint with Alberta’s Ethics Commissioner. This is the regulator overseeing treat-and-release of 1.4 trillion litres of toxic tailings into the Athabasca. And Ottawa has handed it more environmental oversight over major projects.
Fort Chipewyan is home to the Mikisew Cree, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the Fort Chipewyan Métis — three distinct peoples who built their lives around one of the largest and most biodiverse freshwater deltas on earth. They are being sacrificed. This isn’t rhetoric. It is the word their own leaders use. “We are the people in the sacrifice zone,” ACFN Chief Allan Adam said. The zone has only grown.
There is a direct line from the oil sands of Treaty 8 territory to the permits Trump signed this week. The oil flowing through those expanded corridors — past tribal nations who don’t want it, past the Bad River Band whose land Enbridge has been illegally crossing for a decade — originates upstream of a community where a cemetery has doubled in a single generation. Not from age. Not from time. From disease that arrived with the industry upstream.
Chief Tuccaro delivered the same message to both Carney and Smith on Monday: “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.”
The answer has always been the same people. The ones who were here first and still hold sacred, covenant rights to the land. The ones whose consent was never sought. The ones whose warnings have been filed, shelved, denied, or bought into silence.
A reckoning must come. Not as a distant hope but as a material, legal, political reality — because the alternative is that Tuccaro’s count becomes a prophecy fulfilled.
Alberta cannot sprint toward 8 million barrels a day while Fort Chipewyan runs out of living people and call it progress. Canada cannot sign pipeline memorandums that don’t mention water while communities downstream drink what the industry leaves behind. And the United States has never stopped violating Indigenous rights on the soil of its own continent — it has simply changed the paperwork. Its Department of Justice files court briefs to keep a trespassing pipeline on tribal land, overriding the sovereign rights of nations who never ceded that ground. Its president signs permits to accelerate the very oil that is poisoning a community in northern Alberta.
“For too long the almighty dollar has ruled Alberta,” Tuccaro said. “For too long my people have been collateral damage.”
The oil keeps moving. The permits keep getting signed and the dead keep accumulating in a community that had the misfortune of being in the way.
Fort Chipewyan is still here. How much longer should they wait for for someone with power to decide that their lives are worth more than a barrel?
I’m on the ground, on the phone and on deadline- doing the work the big outlets won’t. These stories need to be told. I need your support to keep telling them. Hiy Hiy-Brandi.
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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. Read more of her reporting on the Fort Chipewyan health crisis at Indigenous Insider.
Sources:
Indigenous Insider
• Indigenous Insider: “They Are Dying. And Canada Is Watching.” — April 13, 2026
• Indigenous Insider: “A Community is Dying. Alberta Says It’s Within Normal Range.” — April 14, 2026
Trump Pipeline Permits
• White House Presidential Actions, April 15, 2026 — whitehouse.gov
• Global News / Sean Boynton, April 15, 2026 — globalnews.ca
• Bloomberg Law / Robert Tuttle, April 15, 2026 — bloomberglaw.com
Enbridge Line 5 / Tribal Opposition
• Great Lakes Now, March 2, 2026 — greatlakesnow.org
• Native American Rights Fund — narf.org
• U.S. DOJ statement of interest, Line 5 Wisconsin — WTMJ, February 7, 2026 — wtmj.com
• Wisconsin Examiner, December 17, 2025 — wisconsinexaminer.com
• Wisconsin Public Radio — wpr.org
• Sierra Club Wisconsin — sierraclub.org
Fort Chipewyan Health Crisis
• Mikisew Cree First Nation official press release, April 13, 2026 — mikisewcree.ca
• Canada’s National Observer / Sonal Gupta, April 15, 2026 — nationalobserver.com
• Cabin Radio, April 14, 2026 — cabinradio.ca
• CBC News, multiple reports — cbc.ca
• Mongabay, July 2024 — news.mongabay.com
• The Narwhal, multiple reports — thenarwhal.ca
Dr. John O’Connor
• Provided direct quote to Indigenous Insider, April 14, 2026
• PA Herald — paherald.sk.ca
• CBC News profile — cbc.ca
Air Pollution / Oil Sands Emissions
• Mongabay / Environment and Climate Change Canada & Yale University study, May 2024 — news.mongabay.com
Imperial Oil Spills
• CBC News, April 15, 2026 — cbc.ca (Kearl Mine 2022 and Cold Lake 2026)
• BNN Bloomberg, April 16, 2026 — bnnbloomberg.ca
• DeSmog — desmog.com
Alberta Energy Regulator
• Ecojustice conflict of interest complaint, October 2025 — ecojustice.ca
• APTN News, April 2026 — aptnnews.ca
• The Narwhal — thenarwhal.ca
Alberta / Smith Pipeline Expansion
• World Oil / CERAWeek, March 2026 — worldoil.com
• BNN Bloomberg, March 2026 — bnnbloomberg.ca
• CBC News, January 2026 — cbc.ca
• Institute for Energy Research — instituteforenergyresearch.org
Treat and Release / Tailings
• The Narwhal — thenarwhal.ca
• CBC News — cbc.ca
• Ricochet Media — ricochet.media
Fort Chipewyan Community / Nations
• Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo — rmwb.ca
• Fort McMurray Wood Buffalo tourism site — fmwb.ca
Chief Allan Adam
• CBC News longform — newsinteractives.cbc.ca
Photo: The construction site of an Enbridge pipeline near Fort McMurray, AB. Source: Kyle Bakx/CBC.
| Themes |
| • Access to natural resources • Climate change • Destruction of habitat • Displacement • Indigenous peoples • Project management • Regional |
