The Federal Approach to Reserve Drinking Water Advisories - Equal Parts Flawed and Financially Odd
2024-02-21 11:20 AM
Analysis: Faryal Ansari
With Canada being one of the world’s wealthiest countries that is globally considered to be one of the best regions to live, it becomes difficult to justify the existence of inequalities, and few are as extreme and apparent as the issue of drinking water advisories on Indigenous reserves nationwide.
Drinking Water Advisories (DWAs for short) are, in essence, a warning to the people of a particular area that they are not to drink their own water out of a concern for safety. On Indigenous reserves, these advisories arise from a variety of problems, including inadequate water treatment systems and water contamination. This does not account for the fact that water is harder to access on many reserves than in other parts of Canada.
An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that the drinking water on multiple reserves in the country commonly contained E. coli, uranium, and cancer-causing chemicals such as Trihalomethanes. Some of these harmful substances are emerging directly from the water source, while others are byproducts of faulty attempts at water treatment and filtration. With the increased physical and emotional toll that this issue has on Indigenous populations across the country, Human Rights Watch asserts that “the Canadian government has violated a range of international human rights obligations toward First Nations persons and communities by failing to remedy the severe water crisis.”
The real question we must ask is how our federal government plans to deal with this problem, and to what extent their method will help address its root causes.
The federal government has promised approximately 15 billion dollars towards rectifying the water crisis across Canada, of which only 2 billion will be controlled by the Assembly of First Nations. Further detailed in their approach is the subsidization of plumbing services for reserve residents along with the further construction of pipes leading to their homes, and what they have described as instilling “incentives and training for jobs in water treatment and wastewater management to increase the number of reserve residents running these facilities”. Without examining some of the more ambiguous aspects of these plans, including what these “incentives” are and how such massive amounts of funding will actually be used, the federal government has done a good job diversifying its approach in order to target multiple causes of the water crisis.
That being said, there appear to be some major pitfalls to this approach, one of which being that improving the actual quality of wastewater systems is not addressed, which, as described earlier by Human Rights Watch, is one of the chief causes of unsafe drinking water. Increasing the number of jobs in facilities that are not supported with adequate resources will not improve the quality of water on any reserve.
Another significant flaw in the federal approach to drinking water advisories is lack of attention towards the contamination of source water. Industrial activity near reserves has resulted in significant pollution of drinking water. In the federal government’s Ministry of Environment position paper, the discussion on current investments into non-renewable energy is shut, as what is described as a “cold stop” in such activities is currently “not available”, and there is not an intent for “old investments [to] be withdrawn completely”. In an economy that is built on “old investments”, there appears to be no hope for Indigenous peoples that the basic right to clean water and sanitation will be provided. It is the responsibility of the government to measure its actions in accordance with the impact they will have on vulnerable populations, a responsibility the federal government is currently failing to uphold.
As the federal government uses large amounts of funding to compensate for its lack of a critical approach, the issue of drinking water advisories remains to be solved. The United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples describes how any activities related to water must be done with the “Free, Prior and Informed Consent and full participation in decision-making by [Indigenous] authorities and representatives designated by [Indigenous] Peoples”. If the federal government were to utilize cooperation with Indigenous leadership to create a system of quality assurance in water management and resource allocation, and expressed a willingness to employ traditional knowledge to a problem that impacts Indigenous peoples disproportionately, Canada would be one step closer to rectifying the water crisis. When asked about their approach to the problem and its ability to resist further human rights abuses, the federal government provided no comment.