Ontario Urges Ottawa to Clean Up First Nations Drinking Water Immediately
Posted on: Monday, 23 October 2006, 21:00 CDT
TORONTO (CP) - Lives are being put at risk as Ottawa waits for an expert panel's report on the state of drinking water in First Nations communities, the Ontario minister responsible for aboriginal affairs said Monday.
David Ramsay accused the federal government of neglecting its responsibility to provide clean water, saying the situation is becoming "critical" in Ontario, where 33 aboriginal communities are under boil-water advisories.
"The systems are failing systematically right across northern Ontario and in other provinces too," Ramsay said.
"You can't wait. We've got to get on with this. We're starting to see system after system fall into disrepair. This is putting people's lives at risk."
In addition to the boil-water orders, Ramsay said there are larger failures occurring with water systems, including sewage discharging downstream of water intake systems.
Ramsay is set to meet with federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice later this week in Ottawa. The report is to be released "within weeks," said Prentice spokeswoman Deirdra McCracken.
McCracken said progress has been made in Ottawa's efforts to clean up drinking water on reserves, pointing to a new water treatment plant which opened Friday in Eden Valley, Alta., south of Calgary.
"We haven't sat idle. We have been making progress," McCracken said. $450 million was committed to aboriginal water and health in the last federal budget, she added.
Ontario's New Democrats say the province should be upgrading water treatment plants themselves instead of squabbling over jurisdiction with Ottawa.
Previous NDP and Conservative governments helped communities with infrastructure costs to allow homes to be connected to water treatment plants, said NDP Leader Howard Hampton.
"They made available funding so that . . . people wouldn't have to carry their water in dirty old pails and people wouldn't have to worry about pollution," Hampton said in the legislature.
There are dozens of reserves with homes that aren't connected to water treatment plants, including the fly-in community of Pikangikum, he added.
Source: Canadian Press
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