Procedural Injustices surrounding oil sands extraction in Athabasca

Procedural justice refers to the fairness within processes of decision-making, particularly defined as the “justness of the institutional processes and procedures through which decisions are made” (Holland, 2017). Unjust outcomes resulting from the failure to recognise or respect other cultures within institutional processes is a type of procedural injustice, the repeated action of which will sustain unjust outcomes until institutional change is made. Procedural injustice can form environmental harm towards the particular groups that are disrespected within the institutional framework, this paper now turns to the Athabasca oil sands as a case study to outline the procedural injustice in an environmental setting.

Northern Alberta, Canada, has the world’s third largest bitumen deposits located in the Athabasca oil sands; these oil sands make up 97% of Canada’s oil reserves and serve as a powerful economic driver for the national economy (Kurek et al., 2013). Simultaneously, Alberta has the third highest proportion of indigenous peoples, comprising 6.5% of the state population (Government of Alberta, 2021), this primarily includes the Métis and First Nation tribes and most individual tribes are located within Treaty 8 in northern Alberta. As a result, the intensive oil sands mining activities in Athabasca have caused destructive environmental harm which has been disproportionately imposed on the indigenous tribes within and around Athabasca - this is a form of distributive injustice. More importantly, these distributive injustices are engendered by an initial ignorance and repeated unrecognition of the indigenous peoples' voices through a decision-making process within an imperfect institutional framework creating procedural injustices.

The procedural injustices seen in the Athabasca oil sands can be described through the idea of ‘cultural domination’ which, as defined by (Fraser, 1997), is the action of “being subjected to patterns of interpretation and communication that are associated with another culture and are alien and/or hostile to one’s own”. In particular, Canada has roots as a colonial-settler nation and indigenous people have been historically marginalised, cultural domination occurred when Canadian governments agreed to sign 11 numbered treaties with the indigenous peoples. These treaties, in particular Treaty 8, vowed to protect the subsistence rights of indigenous people by giving them access to ‘reserve areas’ in exchange for the land rights given to the state government and that indigenous people will adhere to Crown rules and customs; i.e. forcing the indigenous people under state control (Heydon, 2018).

In the contemporary era and after the discovery of the massive economic resource of Athabasca’s oil sands, marginalisation has continued within procedural processes. The voice of indigenous people has been diminished within stakeholder engagement to a single and narrow category of ‘directly and adversely affected persons’ (Heydon, 2018); thus indigenous people have had very little say over the land conversion activities in Athabasca. The Government of Alberta additionally has a much narrower interpretation of Treaty 8, which the First Nations believe gives protection to a broad suite of subsistence activities and ancestral rights, allowing there to be legal development of the oil sands area despite much of the land being owned by First Nations. The Aboriginal Consultation office claims that not only is it not site‐specific, but their right to hunt is not species‐specific and as such there is no requirement for the Government of Alberta to provide a specific location or abundance of a particular species to the First Nations as long as they can operate their subsistence activities. Thus, First Nations experience procedural injustice even at the lowest level of decision-making - the allocation of rights - resulting in environmental harm that is unjustly imposed on them.

References

Fraser, N. 1997. From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Postsocialist” Age. [Online]. [Accessed 6 November 2024]. Available from:
https://ethicalpolitics.org/blackwood/fraser.htm

‌Government of Alberta. 2021. 2021 Census of Canada - Indigenous People. [Online]. Available from: https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/487a7294-06ac-481e-80b7-5566692a6b11/resource/257af6d4-902c-4761-8fee-3971a4480678/download/tbf-2021-census-of-canada-indigenous-people.pdf

Heydon, J. 2018. Sensitising Green Criminology to Procedural Environmental Justice: A Case Study of First Nation Consultation in the Canadian Oil Sands. International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy. 7(4), pp.67-82.

Holland, B. 2017. Procedural justice in local climate adaptation: political capabilities and transformational change. Environmental Politics. 26(3), pp.391-412.

Kurek, J., Kirk, J.L., Muir, D.C.G., Wang, X., Evans, M.S. and Smol, J.P. 2013. Legacy of a half century of Athabasca oil sands development recorded by lake ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110(5), pp.1761–1766.