When clean water is a luxury

KITIGAN ZIBI, Que. — There’s a small community barely 130 kilometres north of Ottawa where the well water has been on a ‘do not consume’ advisory since 1999.

More than half the homes there rely on this contaminated well water; people living in more than half the homes on this First Nations reserve can’t simply turn a faucet to access one of life’s basic necessities.

But this is an improvement. Until last year, every single one of the homes depended on well water for everything — washing fruit, brushing teeth, bathing, and cooking.

A few kilometres down the road from this community — the Kitigan Zibi First Nations reserve in Quebec — towns are equipped to provide clean drinking water for all.

In 1999, the government told the people of Kitigan Zibi their water was contaminated with naturally-occurring uranium. While boiling water can get rid of some bacteria, it does nothing to get rid of uranium, which can damage a person’s kidney.

So the government started distributing water bottles.

Once a week, empty 18.5-litre bottles of Labrador spring water are exchanged for full ones, with a limit of four bottles per household at any given time, regardless of how many people live there.

Mike Miljour, Leighann Cote and their two-year-old son, Wyatt, usually go through three bottles a week. They use it for cooking and drinking, but not for personal hygeine.

“It would be nice to wash our fruits and just be able to use our water,” Miljour said. “I mean, not even 10 clicks away, and people can drink out of their taps.”

As frustrating as their situation is — exacerbated sometimes by harsh winter weather that makes it impossible for the delivery men to reach their house — they realize they’re in a better position than some others in the community.

“At least I can pick (the bottle) up…But it’s like 45 pounds. It’s heavier than the baby,” Miljour said.

For some of the older people in the community, like his grandmother who lives down the highway, the water bottles are a enormous hassle, he said.

“It takes her 20 minutes to get her water bottle in (to the dispenser),” he said. “First she puts it on the chair, then on the table, then she takes a break, then she’ll get back to it.”

Thirteen years ago, the people of Kitigan Zibi were overcome with fear when they first heard there was a problem with their wells, Band Chief Gilbert Whiteduck said in an interview.

“And the worry got even worse when Health Canada came to meet with the community to explain that we would have to be moving to bottled water,” he said. “We weren’t sure with a lot of the information… Did it only have to do with drinking water, or did we need to be concerned about bathing babies or cooking food?”

Some of those questions were never answered, Whiteduck said, when the government decided to put a patch over the problem by providing bottled water for the residents.

Once the bottled water started arriving, Health Canada stopped testing the well water. Now nobody in the community knows whether their well water is contaminated — everybody on a well is simply advised to rely on delivered bottles.

“It’s unfortunate, because I think further study would have been warranted,” the chief said, days before dozens of chiefs descend on Ottawa for a Crown-First Nations meeting with government officials.

“We should be at least treated like other Canadians and receive the infrastructure to ensure all our homes receive potable water from their taps,” he said.

In 2009, then-Aboriginal Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl announced the government was to spend several million from its stimulus fund to build a water-purification and delivery system in Kitigan Zibi.

The $12-million project was completed in July 2011, but serves less than half of the roughly 530 homes spread across thousands of acres of land.

There were plans to have the balance of the residences hooked up to the clean supply within four years, but that’s all up in the air now, the chief said.

“OF COURSE WE WANT OUR INDEPENDENCE.”

Easily-accessible clean water is the most prominent problem facing residents of Kitigan Zibi.

But there are other priorities for Whiteduck’s reserve and the thousands of others across Canada, including housing, education, land rights and infrastructure.

“We`re hoping that in (these) key areas, the prime minister will lay out a plan,” the chief said. “It’s not an issue of just throwing money at the problem, as the government calls it… It’s about investment in infrastructure.”

The government and the bureaucracy have to understand they have a role to play in supporting communities that aren’t doing well — areas that have problems with accountability need to be guided and shown how to operate in a more effective way, Whiteduck said.

“They can’t act as a barrier in allowing First Nations to control what they want to control,” he said. “We’re hoping the federal government doesn’t create roadblocks…Do First Nations want to be dependent on the government? Of course we don’t want to be dependent on the government. We want to be independent, but we must be given the time.”

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