Vanessa and Beze Gray run an annual “Toxic Tour” of the siblings’ childhood home — Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

The 2,500 acres of ancestral land is wedged on three sides by sprawling petroleum and chemical companies that, for generations, have discharged pollutants into Canada’s Chemical Valley. On Saturday, the Grays guided more than 200 people around the Indigenous territory near Sarnia as part of their environmental activism to show what Vanessa describes as the “scary reality for people living so close to these industries.”

The Grays also announced a new tool to aid their cause: the Pollution Reporter app.

Developed by an Indigenous-led lab at the University of Toronto — the Technoscience Research Unit, in collaboration with researcher Vanessa Gray — the free app allows users to easily fill out pollution reports in real time and send the information by email to the provincial environment ministry. Users can report all pollution incidents, not just air emissions.

“The need for the app is crucial and the lack of (public pollution) information is allowing industries to get away with more than what we really know here on the ground,” said Vanessa Gray, 27, a grassroots organizer and educator from Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

“The most important thing to me about the app is thinking about the families here when there’s a spill or release,” she continued, referring to fluid leaks and air discharges, such as acid gas flaring that produces sulphur dioxide.

“We know it’s not whether (industrial facilities are) going to spill or release; it’s always ‘When?’”

The app launch comes shortly after a government whistleblower, Scott Grant, claimed the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks has for years failed to properly protect the Aamjiwnaang First Nation from potentially dangerous levels of sulphur dioxide air emissions due to “systemic discrimination” that includes yielding to “secretive” industry lobbying to relax compliance standards.

Grant also filed an Ontario Labour Relations Board grievance application against the ministry regarding the air pollution engineer’s claims of workplace reprisals. That grievance was settled on Oct. 10 but terms were not disclosed.

The ministry rejected both Grant’s allegations of systemic discrimination and his claims of workplace reprisals.

Chemical Valley’s petroleum refineries are subject to ministry regulations regarding acid gas flaring. In Ontario, currently there is no limit to the number of times plants can flare but facilities can be fined for exceeding set sulphur dioxide emission amounts within a 24-hour period.

The Technoscience Research Unit “examines, creates tools and responses to the relationships between data, pollution and colonialism,” according to lab director Kristen Bos, an app project researcher and PhD candidate.

Prof. Michelle Murphy is the unit’s director. Murphy is also Canada research chair in science and technology studies and environmental data justice. She and Vanessa Gray were co-leads on the project, the genesis of which occurred after a large acid gas flaring event at Sarnia’s Imperial Oil refinery in 2017.

Murphy said there was no public data provided after that 2017 acid gas flare, which was captured on cellphone video and was “obviously a major event.” Murphy and Gray decided to initially focus the app on the Imperial Oil refinery, which is just steps away from Aamjiwnaang land, and chemicals it has reported to the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI).

The NPRI is Canada’s public inventory of releases, disposals and transfers. It tracks more than 320 pollutants from over 7,000 facilities across Canada and reporting facilities include factories that manufacture a variety of goods, mines, oil and gas operations, power plants and sewage treatment plants, according to its website.

Murphy said the list of chemicals loaded in the app “are chemicals Imperial Oil has admitted to releasing, so that’s our starting point.” She said other Chemical Valley refineries will be added to updated versions of the app.

“We were thinking about the relationship between environmental data that the government creates and corporations offer and its relationship to colonialism,” Murphy said.

“We’ve been interested in understanding not just that pollution is a form of colonialism, but that the kinds of data the government provides — and doesn’t provide — as well as (refineries’ data) is also a form of colonialism because it mostly functions to hide the harms being done.”

Vanessa Gray said the environment ministry’s existing reporting system, called the Spills Action Centre, is slow and frustrating. She said the app provides users with immediacy and context; users can add extra information, too, such as sensory feedback.

“If (a pollution event) is happening in the moment, users can document exactly what hour and what second it occurred and any details,” Gray said. “It’s going to be 100 times easier than what the ministry is giving a frontline Indigenous community for options.”

The app’s reporting function combines write-in questions (for example: what happened or is happening; what do you see, smell, feel or hear; what impact is the pollution having on bodies and/or the environment) and pull-down menus for others (for date and time; weather conditions, for example). Users can retain a copy of their report to share, if they desire.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Users can also link pollution emission data loaded into the app (from the public NPRI site) with research about known health harms based on peer-reviewed medical literature, Murphy said.

“We see this as complementary” pollution reporting to the ministry, Murphy said.

“If there are people in the ministry who really care about the pollution in Chemical Valley, hopefully they’ll be pleases to get more reports and more detailed reports,” she said.