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Transcript - Getting Clean Drinking Water to First Nations Communities in Canada - w/ Ken Coates

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Table of Contents

Ian Van Harten (00:01.964) All right, Ken Coates, thank you for being here.

Ken Coates (00:05.797) It is my delight. Thank you for asking.

Ian Van Harten (00:08.755) Yeah, so would you mind just introducing yourself a little bit and letting people know a bit about who you are and what you do?

Ken Coates (00:15.288) Yeah, so I'm Ken Coates. I'm the president of Coates-Holry Consulting, but I'm actually a retired professor of public policy from the University of Saskatchewan. Things you need to know about me, I'm raised in the Yukon. I'm a non-Aboriginal person. I've worked on Indigenous issues for a very, long time. Interested in land rights, economic development, and national and international public policy. And I've had the really, really good fortune of having traveled quite literally around the world.

many times to Scandinavia, to Russia, to across the United States, but also into Australia, New Zealand, Japan, other countries, looking at the whole issues of Indigenous governance, Indigenous rights, Indigenous lifestyles. So I sort of bring that. I'm a Canadian, worked all across Canada, in universities from Yukon University in the far Northwest down to University of New Brunswick in the Far East, and have had the great pleasure of visiting many Indigenous communities across the country.

An Overview of the Water Crisis in Canada

Ian Van Harten (01:11.63) Awesome. So, so yeah, so we're going to be talking about this problem with getting clean drinking water to first nations communities in Canada. And I came across this paper you helped put together, together with Matthew Cameron, who I believe is also at the, or is at the Yukon university as well. And this paper is called the water conundrum and indigenous communities in Canada.

And, and it was put out by the McDonald Laurier Institute. And so I found this paper really helpful in getting a better understanding of this issue. And I'm going to be kind of using it as a basis for our conversation here, but I'm just wondering if you could get things started by sketching out kind of a high level overview of the situation. I, know, I think one thing that makes it troubling or difficult to, to understand is that Canada is a first world.

developed nation and we have lots of access to fresh water and yet we still have this problem. So yeah, so can you help just by giving kind of a high level overview of what the situation is?

Ken Coates (02:11.972) Yep.

Ken Coates (02:20.888) Sure. then had this problem, serious problem, about 20 years ago. It's been a serious problem for about 50 years. So that tells you something about how slowly we learn about the realities of Indigenous lives and how slow we are at taking them very seriously. So we don't react very quickly to the fact that you have so many people living well underneath the Canadian standard in terms of public facilities, infrastructure, standard of living, quality of life, that sort of thing.

It just doesn't bother us very much. And it actually started with the Harper government, of First Nations have been complaining about this for a long time, same with the Inuit, same with the Metis. And the country just didn't get it. They just weren't very interested in sort of responding in a significant way to this particular challenge, largely because it cost a lot of money. And you're talking about a situation where in some communities it's gonna take you $30 million to provide fresh water supply for

600 people and in the sort of moral calculus of Canada that just didn't work. You know could spend that 40 million dollars on transit system of Montreal and go a lot further in terms of improving the quality of life and you can by fixing a water system in the far north where in the back of everybody's head was this idea that those people really should just leave. They should go to a different place. They should go to a different community to a place who has better water supply.

So we let this linger for very, very long time. The Harper government committed to getting rid of the water advisories. When the Trudeau government came in, they used the fact that there were so many water advisories still around, about 150 at the time, that the government should use this to criticize the Harper government and say, listen, if you elect us, we're gonna make a real commitment to getting this down to zero within our first five years, our first term in office.

So they made, as the liberal government under Trudeau made a whole bunch of unrealistic promises, they really didn't know what they were getting in for. So they that promise. It sounds like a natural promise. It sounds like the right thing to do. And it's kind of hard to complain against it when you're sitting in Vancouver with the world's best municipal drinking water, when you're sitting in Calgary with wonderful drinking water. You know, don't begrudge this to indigenous folks in any particular way. So it's kind of an interesting sort of phenomena, I guess, from

Ian Van Harten (04:18.99) Hmm.

Ken Coates (04:39.842) from a political point of view. Government makes the announcements, they give themselves a real target. It's easy to quantify. You can look and say, hey, there's 150, now there's 138, now there's 121, now there's 97. You can just see it going down and it's gonna be a good new story. But of course, it took a lot more effort than they thought for reasons that we can talk about in a while as to why it does take so much. But looking at Manitoba, for example,

They've lifted 13 of the long-term drinking water advisories, but there's still six left. In Ontario, they lifted 77. Ontario has the most serious problem in Canada, but there's still 26 left. But in British Columbia, they lifted 20 and there's none left. And that has a lot more to do with geography than government will, but it still looks bad. If you look across the country, we still have about 50 communities. The number varies from year to year because these water advisories come and go based on climate.

and water supplies and flooding and a whole bunch of other issues. And so we haven't solved the problem yet. And it's one of these things where people who don't know much about the issue think it's really simple. That all you actually have to do is just snap your fingers and it's done. But it's not at all. But the reason it's not, and more complicated and kind of more unnerving than you might actually think. It isn't just a simple matter of putting some filters on the water. It's a much more complicated situation than that.

Ian Van Harten (05:50.924) Mm-hmm.

The Walkerton Tragedy

Ian Van Harten (06:08.16) Mm-hmm. Well, and yeah, we'll get, we'll get more into some of the government response and just also just what's involved a little bit later here, but I'm wondering, in the, the paper, you mentioned the walkerton tragedy and it seems like in terms of the public being more aware of this issue, that that was sort of a flash point.

that brought more awareness to the issue and put more of a spotlight on it, even though I don't believe Walkerton is a First Nations community, unless I'm wrong there, but I'm wondering, can you talk about what happened at Walkerton, the Walkerton tragedy in 2000, and what were some of the ramifications and consequences that came out from that?

Ken Coates (06:49.856) So unlike most of the world, we take water for granted. Norway takes it for granted, so does Sweden, so does Finland, a other places like that. But we're very rare in the world in having almost unlimited supply of water. We have a huge percentage of the total fresh water in the world. We've got massive rivers flowing into the Arctic, into Hudson Bay, into the Atlantic and Pacific. We have all the Great Lakes and the Range area. We have lots of water in Canada.

we take it for granted generally. What happened in 2000, and it's really important that this was a non-Indigenous community, because we'd had similar problems in Indigenous communities for many, many years. But what happened in 2000 is, Walkerton, its water supply got contaminated, and contaminated with E. coli. There was a problem with mixing manure from the surrounding area, got basically a well seeped into the municipal water supply, and people started getting sick.

And when I say people are getting sick, seven people died. There were over 2,000 people who were seriously ill as a consequence. There was a massive public inquiry, lots of investigations, complaints about the Ontario government not monitoring this properly, not looking after it carefully, et cetera, et cetera. And it became a real touchstone for the country as a whole, that, my gosh, even our water supply is at risk. quite frankly, at the time, the Indigenous folks were saying,

What are you talking about? We live with this all the time. At that point, there were 150 communities of long-term water advisories. And on the prairies, they're actually quite common. Not just in the indigenous communities, but you have a lot of problem with the runoff of sewer systems that come in all the way from Calgary down the Saskatchewan River. But you also have runoff from the farming chemicals and things like that. So short-term water advisories are pretty common.

We have hundreds of them a year. But long-term ones like the one in Walkerton really struck home. And when they did the investigation, we basically found that it was a failure of maintenance. It wasn't a failure of government investment. They had the right technology in place. That basically the people who were maintaining the system didn't maintain it adequately. And therefore the contaminants got into the water supply and then seven people died. So one of those ones that changed the conversation and

Ken Coates (09:14.153) kind of frustrating for Aboriginal folks because it basically sends the very common message that if it's happening to us, it isn't a national issue. If it happens to non-Aboriginal people, it really is. And kind of another slap in the face for Indigenous folks who express long, long-standing concerns about the problems in these areas.

Ian Van Harten (09:33.966) But I think some of the inquiries and reports that happened afterwards helped shine more of a light that, because they did more investigations, right, in surrounding communities and found the problem. And that's what brought more awareness to more of the indigenous communities. Is that right?

Ken Coates (09:50.354) absolutely. I mean, as soon as you start doing more investigations, you discover this is very common and in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. And at the same time, Indigenous folks were sort of finding their finding their feet politically on these kind of topics. Because the standard line in Canada has always been that Canada is very generous with Indigenous peoples. It gives housing, it provides social assistance, it does all these incredible, incredible things.

But the underlying infrastructure is often so poor. I used to the analogy, it's not a water related analogy, but if you're driving in Saskatchewan, you're driving along paved public highways and you come to the access road living under the reserve, the moment you get off the highway, the road is not paved. The access roads for everybody else are paved, but the one going into the reserve is not paved. So First Nations are used to this kind of an issue.

And it's really hard to get the nation's attention, the government's attention. But at the time when Prime Minister Trudeau was promising to solve all the country's ills in the first term in office, he made his bold promise about water advisories. And I can tell you from talking to folks inside the government, they were saying, Prime Minister, know, be careful what you promise. This is very, very, very expensive.

How Water Gets Contaminated

Ian Van Harten (11:09.07) Yeah, so, you know, you mentioned how we take water for granted here in Canada, and I think that does contribute to how difficult it is to wrap our minds around this, because we don't think about water, and we just turn on the tap and there it is. But there are lots of ways that water does get contaminated. So I'm wondering if you can just explain some of the ways that water gets contaminated to begin with.

Ken Coates (11:28.712) Yep.

Ken Coates (11:37.726) So that's a very fair question. the short answer is there's lots of answers. And it depends on a whole bunch of things. The standard one is E. coli, where you get bacteria from sewage, bacteria from natural environment, they step into the water system, gets into the tap water, into the drinking water and stuff like that, and people start having problems. There's lots of other contaminants as well that get in. They can be fertilizer, as I mentioned already. They can be...

sort of the peat moss, for example, in a lot of areas in Northern Ontario. The problem is that the water, water goes through peat moss and picks up a whole bunch of impurities, water impurities that then get into the drinking water. So you have a lot of contaminants can get onto the system, natural, naturally, or unnaturally, in the sense of industrial waste or agricultural runoff or things of that sort.

The second one is the one we don't talk about very much, and that is a failure of the water maintenance systems. And in fact, many of the short-term drinking water advisories come because of a breakdown in the water purification plants. Almost all the communities, all communities now have a water purification system. So I say it doesn't really matter. They pick up the vast majority of the impurities and the contaminants that come into the system. But if your water purification thing isn't working,

and then it breaks down for any one of a variety of reasons, you can have all sorts of difficulties. Then why does that happen? Well, you actually have trouble getting trained, skilled people to actually stay and work in the communities on an ongoing basis to maintain the water supply. And there's a simple rationale for that. The reason for that is somebody gets trained on the water supply system. They're a very good technician managing the system very well.

A mining company comes into the area and hires them away. And the mining company offers a lot more money and lot more benefits than actually working for the local First Nation community. And so that person leaves and it takes six months to get somebody trained up and replacing them. So one case in the Yukon, the community is about maybe 455 kilometers away from the Whitehorse, the capital city, and they have exactly this problem. And the person who is responsible for maintaining the water supply lived in Whitehorse.

Ken Coates (13:59.837) So if you had a problem in the water system, he had to take a minimum of five hours, and sometimes that's at 40 below in a storm, driving up these back roads to get up to this community to look after the water system. That takes a long time. People drink the water by mistake, and they have all sorts of problems with it, and they suffer health consequences. So these are really, really multi-layered sort of challenges that have, I wouldn't say, as much to do with public administration.

as it does with the actual impurities in the water themselves. We have very good water purification systems in the world now. We can actually take effluent coming out of very bad industrial or natural environments. We can clean it up, make it palatable, make it acceptable. That palatable meaning it tastes okay, acceptable meaning it hasn't had impurities in it. We're really good at that. But you have to have a robust system and it can't cost too much money and it has to be maintained properly.

So you can have a breakdown anywhere along the line. We don't have money to put them in the place first place. We don't have the ability to train people or to hold them in their jobs. The mechanical stuff breaks down and people still have to have something to drink. So these things can go up for a long time. Let me add one other sort of challenge. We have a lot of emphasis. We talk about getting rid of long-term drinking water advisories. That really means that there's a safe water supply in the community. In most communities,

the water then is delivered to the homes, but not all of them. And we don't have a good number on this one, but a fairly surprising number of communities. The water supply is fine, but it comes to a central repository and you have a tanker that has to be up and it drives around to all the houses and fills up their cisterns. So every house has to have a cistern and they get a weak supply of water all at one time.

It's fine as long you don't use too much water and that's a really, really serious limitation in a lot of communities. But the cisterns themselves can cause a lot of problems because they have to be cleaned regularly, they have to be maintained, have to have filters, that sort of thing. And so if the individual cisterns aren't looked after, even if the community has safe drinking water, an individual house may not have safe drinking water. So a cistern model is not used very much in non-Aboriginal communities, but in fact, these tankard water delivery trucks

Ken Coates (16:22.189) are very common in Indigenous communities across Canada.

Ian Van Harten (16:25.486) And I guess that's in part because it's more expensive and complicated to lay pipe down to pipe water into people's homes. Is that right?

Ken Coates (16:35.675) Oh, absolutely. And you look back at that sort of thing. How often do we hear that same sort of observation in non-Aboriginal communities? We don't. If you have an existing community, know, the government plans for a replacement and fixes the system up and replaces the water pipes and all that kind of stuff. And a new community is built into the development process. But we don't do that in Indigenous communities. And there are places on the prairies where you have...

a reserve and a non-Indigenous community, say two kilometres apart. In the non-Indigenous community, you have a completely safe water supply with piping systems that go in directly into every home, but a couple of kilometres away, you have a cistern-based truck delivery system, and they're really close together. This is just a good example of sort of different standards.

How Water Advisories Are Triggered

Ian Van Harten (17:25.422) Well, can we talk a bit about the, how a community gets placed on a water advisory and sort of, kind of implies that there, there is monitoring, there is some reporting and testing that that's going on. But so can you talk about how, does a community get placed on a water advisory?

Ken Coates (17:44.901) So, and there's a lot of testing now, and this is one of the main contributions of the Walkerton tragedy, terrible as it was, is it really increased the standard. And to test it is now relatively simple. There was a time when you actually had to take complicated chemical process to go through the business and sort of figuring out what are the impurities, how strong are they, how dangerous is this, that kind of a thing. And we've gone way past that now. have quite since.

systematic systems that are available. And we actually have some that are remotely done. There's some new discoveries being done at some of the universities in British Columbia where they've developed systems that you can monitor remotely. And by digital technologies, get us up to the second sort of indication of the quality of the water system. So we now can monitor it better, but as soon as you hit a certain level. And the government has established these standards as to how much E. coli you can have, how many other contaminants you can have.

lead and things like that in the water. Maybe just for tests for fertilizer, industrial waste, that sort of thing. And as soon as you hit that level, basically warning bells go off, literally they do go off, know, alarm bells, and you shut the water system down. And they then have a further evaluation. And there's a difference between a short-term drinking water advisory and a long-term one. So the short-term one would be something like flooding in an area. And say there's an ice dam on the river,

the water backs up and you have a real problem with circulation of water for a week. So the water gets stale and stagnant, the impurities build up and the water supply just is shut down for a week until the ice dam breaks. All of a the river is clear, everything gets flushed out and you're start drinking the water again. But these are tested on a sort of a regular basis. As soon as they deem that it's safe to consume, you just consume it again. Most people keep boiling the water even if they tell you it's safe.

because they don't trust the system all that much. And they've learned how to do this on a regular basis. And it seems odd in Canada with so much fresh water that we're doing so much boiling of water to make it safer for human consumption. But it's a very, very interesting process and across Canada, quite reliable. So, you know, it's been quite a while since we've had a huge outbreak. You will remember the one perhaps in Kassatuan in 2006, where this is Northern Ontario.

Ken Coates (20:09.917) They had a huge problem with the water supply. is six years after Walkerton. Basically, people were getting blisters on their skins and having all sorts of infections and getting sick because of those. They moved the entire community out. They moved it down to the of actually the University of Waterloo at the time. They moved people from down to the, from Kizachewan down to the University of Waterloo. There were four or five hundred people living on campus for a couple of months.

We haven't had very many of those in recent years. And we do have problems where they break down for a while, and we have to have alternative water systems and boiling of water and that sort of stuff. But we've actually done a pretty good job of keeping a lid on the problems.

Living Under a Water Advisory

Ian Van Harten (20:54.348) Hmm. Well, can you talk a bit more about what life is like living under a water advisory? I mean, clearly it's not good, but I think, you know, a lot of communities have been under long-term advisories and living under these conditions for a long time. And so I think it's in order to give us a better appreciation for really what it's like living in these conditions. I think maybe it's important to kind of go into some detail about what they're dealing with.

Ken Coates (21:22.809) So I'm really glad you asked the question because we make it sound like this is a technical process. And then all you do is put a few tablets into a water container and everything's fine. Recognize number one, a lot of the indigenous communities have really poor water service anyway. If you have a cistern, they fill it up once a week. And if you use up the water, you're out of luck. You have to go down by with pails or with containers and go down to the main center to a pump.

and pump it out yourself. There's Aboriginal communities where 70-year-old women are sort of walking down, picking up these pails and bringing them back to their house on a daily basis. Most Canadians don't, very few Canadians have to deal with that kind of approach to water supply. Secondly, when you have a water advisory, number one, it usually means you can't drink it. But it also means you can't brush your teeth in it. It obviously means you probably really don't want to have a bath in it or a shower in it. And if you do,

and sometimes it takes a while to identify it as a water problem. You end up with blisters on your body or infections on your body, your health deteriorates. You can't have the recourse to the things we take for granted. Just go have a drink of water, clear your throat kind of thing, or have a quick shower, have a quick bath. You can't do those kinds of things. And so it's a huge, sort of almost a symbol of the incredible inequality between infrastructure for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada.

And the people that live with it, particularly it's hard on children because they end up with scabs on their arms and they go to school and they're picking and falling off and they're blistering and get pus coming out of them and horrible to use this kind of language. But this is really, really uncomfortable. And you get long-term itching sort of problems and you get problems with the scabs building up underneath your hair that are really hard to get rid of. It makes it hard for kids to sleep. It makes it for kids to study.

It makes hard for kids to be kids. These are really frustrating, debilitating, long-term problems. It isn't something that's really simply solved. Any person, indigenous or non-indigenous, who has to go on a long-term drinking water advisory means you have to collect the water, you have to put it in your tablets, or have to boil the water, you put it back in the fridge until it cools down. That's an extra half an hour a day of just getting basic water so you can have your cup of tea.

Ken Coates (23:48.248) And that's a huge imposition on one tiny group of people, when the rest of the country enjoys the best and safest and most easily accessible water in the world.

Ian Van Harten (23:59.566) And it's not even just the physical harms of it, There's sort of a psychological dimension of this too, living under this, the kind of anxiety of getting in contact with contaminated water and just living under the stress and anxiety of living under those conditions too, I imagine, is another aspect of this.

Ken Coates (24:19.192) Well, remember that I always try to describe it this way, that indigenous people have a very, very strong sense of history. That when they're looking at issues in front of them, they see them in a very strong historical lens. Non-indigenous people forgive the past very quickly. We sort of say, okay, that happened before, we're going to forget about it, it's going to be a big deal. We're going do better in the future. So when you've had a problem in the community with water supplies, and then all of sudden people start getting itchy.

and they start getting scabs on their arms or in their legs or something like that. Their recollection is of the last time that it was really bad. And it sets them off for months on end because now you're worried about it coming back. You're worried about how much is already in your body, what impurities are there, what illnesses you're gonna have, how many kids are gonna get sick, how many elderly people are gonna get sick. These are just long-term living frustrations. And it's so upsetting for people living in these worlds.

to then come down to Thunder Bay or go down to Saskatoon or come down to Edmonton and realize in the hotel room they're staying in they leave the water running 24-7 and nobody would even notice. Whereas they can't get proper drinking water in their own community. And it's just intensely, intensely frustrating. And just as a sort of reminder of the fact that, you know, Indigenous people are not permitted the same standard of life and quality of infrastructure as everybody else in the country takes for granted.

Ian Van Harten (25:44.75) And even another aspect that adds to the problem too is when these conditions are happening, a lot of people will choose to leave, including, you know, in some cases teachers will leave or other service workers. So not only do you have these conditions with the water, but schools get shut down and other services aren't available anymore, right? Because people just can't take it anymore and fair enough. And then they leave.

Ken Coates (26:14.198) It's a bit of a cascading challenge because how many people will say they're leaving because of water supply problems? The answer is relatively small. How many people leave because of really sustained problems with infrastructure? The answer is quite large. We did a really small study a long time ago in northern Saskatchewan where we asked kids what was the most difficult part of living in their community. And the interesting thing they put up there was dust. And where does this come from?

And the reality is their community is not paved. So whenever cars drive around in the town, they just kick up really soft powdery dirt. They kick up a whole bunch of dust that lingers for a long time. And so when they went down to the big cities, the one thing they notice is there's no dust. Then, you know, the roads are all paved. You don't get dust in the same sort of way. It's accumulation of these things. It's lousy roads. It's lousy fire protection. It's the terrible drinking water in some communities.

the unreliability of the system, the fact the electrical system goes down all the time, fact that the internet is lousy. So the water system, in many ways, is the most dangerous of these. The other ones are irritations. The water one's just straight on dangerous. And so you can just see people, you know, more than half of the indigenous First Nations people in the country live off their preserved communities. And most of them are going to big cities or regional centers. So they're moving to Prince Albert or moving to Saskatoon.

in Saskatchewan, they're moving to Montreal or Ottawa and Quebec, and Hull, Gatineau, they just give up because they know more all the time about how unfair the system is and how far their communities lag behind other population centers in the country.

Building and Maintaining Water Systems

Ian Van Harten (28:00.078) Well, let's move to the water treatment facilities and what's involved in setting something like this up. You know, you've mentioned already, the systems are pretty complicated and it's not just flipping a switch or a simple solution to get clean drinking water. And it's not just setting up the infrastructure, but it's also getting the training and the resources because they're sophisticated to run and operate as well.

and, and it's exacerbated, think, by how remote these communities are. it's already like, it's difficult to get resources to them too. But can you talk a bit about what's all involved in getting a water treatment facility set up?

Ken Coates (28:44.31) So it really depends on the community. So if you have a community that has a fast flowing river or stream close by, with a very consistent year round flow, you don't need that much or expensive of a system. And that's why British Columbia has right now no long term water advisories. Alberta has none as well. Northern Quebec has none. If you look at them, these are places that have big rivers.

can talk about the other rivers on the other prairie provinces, they're quite different. Same with Northern Ontario. If you have a fast-moving river system, you still have to have the purification process. So the plant is often quite large. These plants cost sometimes tens of millions of dollars. And the problem has always been for Canada, that we don't want to spend that much money on that few people. And so the folks are saying, well, why not? This is our territory. We've been here for thousands and of years.

And you're telling us that because you can't give us a decent water supply, we have to leave. I should add really quickly before I forget that one of the real frustrations is when a mining company comes into the area, they might be 40 or 50 kilometers away, have a mine. One of the first things they do is build a water purification system. And so their community, that white community, non-Aboriginal community for a mining calendar, some other construction project, they have really good safe drinking water day one.

whereas the indigenous community a while away, can't do the same sort of thing. So what happens is you have to figure out the way it works, the kind of system you have, what's the source of water, how much purification do have to dig out. And just to go back to the question of Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, these are areas that have a whole bunch of low-lying rivers, Saskatchewan less so, but northern Manitoba has a whole bunch of still water.

That's why Northern Northern Ontario is the most difficult place. They've lifted almost 80 water revisions in the last 10 years, but they have 26 remaining. And the reason is because these are still water. They're in sort low-lying areas. This is the Hudson's Bay Company, Lowlands. The water doesn't go very fast. It gets stagnant, it gets stale. Impurities build up within them. And it's got nothing to do with Indigenous Services Canada. This is just the way the water is.

Ken Coates (31:05.78) And this is why you get still water if you go anywhere you are, you don't drink still water and you're walking in the bush. Because impurities built up and that's where you get a beaver fever kind of stuff, kind of problems coming out. Still water accumulates impurities. So in these areas, which are the most remote areas in Canada, flying communities in Northern Ontario, flying communities in Northern Manitoba, and you've got still water, you've got a small population, and you're gonna cost you $30 million to build a...

a water purification system. And these are big complicated things. So first off you chlorinate, that's the one we get rid of a whole bunch of the things. You then have filtration systems. They basically, and there are different kinds of filtration systems where they take out the remaining impurities as you go along. They also sometimes use ultraviolet disinfection. you have ultraviolet light goes in there and actually gets rid of the last sort of ones. And there are three or four other sort of

more complicated ones that you use for places with systemic problems. Because it's very still water, you're always going to have more systems. There's other ones that they're trying to use to sort of figure out what works the best. But these are expensive propositions. And the more expensive they are, the more complicated they are to maintain. And you're talking here about a community that's saying, let's pick a number and say it has 800 people in Northern Ontario. And it's a flying community that costs an awful lot of money to get in and out.

and you're hiring a water maintenance person, ideally you're training them locally. That takes a fair long period of time to train them. Once they're trained, they're mobile. They can easily take those skills and do a whole bunch of different sorts of places and ways that they can use their skills and earn a higher income. So you train them up to do this kind of thing. If something breaks down, you don't just phone up the local hardware store and say, send me a filter.

And actually, if you're lucky, it's in Toronto. If you're not lucky, it's in the United States or in China or in Japan or someplace like that, you got to order the replacement parts and fly them in. So you're automatically down for three, four, five, 10 days while you wait for the supplies to come in. And you have to have somebody there who can actually maintain the system and install the replacement parts, which means you have to fly somebody in at great expense. So this is not a cheap date.

Ken Coates (33:31.206) This is very expensive long-term commitment that you have to make.

The History and Placement of Reserves

Ian Van Harten (33:37.046) Yeah. And so they, the, the resources with, with people, you know, it seems like getting people trained and getting people to, be accessible in these communities is one of the biggest things. And you've mentioned how some people will just get hired away because they can make more money and maybe, you know, it probably sounds bad, but have better living conditions elsewhere. and so just retaining people to stay here, but, but it kind of.

And this might be a subject for a separate discussion, I guess it connects to how these reserves were set up to begin with. And just, you know, with little consideration given to the suitableness of the locations of some of these, locations for these reserves.

Ken Coates (34:08.74) Thank you.

Ken Coates (34:26.482) That's a really good question. The reserves were set up mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. Before that time, they might have had a fur trading post, they might have had some other sort of summer camp where people went. But people moved around a lot until the 1960s. The Indigenous folks in the north

moved a tremendous amount. They moved from season to season in different locations. in the summertime when the water was still and most serious problem, they might be on a lake and the lake has better water supplies. Then in the winter they come back to this other place along the river. The reserves were generally set up for locations of administrative convenience. They weren't set up for reasons of what met the First Nations needs or whatever else. And they were trying to

concentrate Indigenous peoples in central locations so that you look after them and manage them and administer them and run the government programs as much effectively as they could. So it's a really interesting and complicated sort of patterns to how they got into place, but they were not, nobody did any careful research just to make sure they were okay. They were really done for administrative convenience from Ottawa's point of view.

But also remember at the time in the 1950s and 1960s, the government was making a huge effort to make sure that Aboriginal people did not stay there. They did not think these communities would actually survive. They certainly wouldn't thrive. And their goal was, through residential schools, through education generally, through economic development strategies, their plans were to get these people to leave and go into smaller regional centers and bigger towns.

So in other words, it's not gonna be a long-term problem. This is gonna be a short-term problem. So they built these communities, built them very poorly. And we also became much more aware over time as to how serious the problem was. And that we finally turned our attention to it. But notice that it took until, the problems started emerging in 1960s and it took until 2015, 2020.

Ian Van Harten (36:26.19) Well, cause it.

Ian Van Harten (36:38.318) And, know, I wonder, is, this idea of maybe they should relocate or move elsewhere? Is that still something that's discussed or is that kind of, to, don't know, offensive or controversial to, discuss or what, what's the thinking around that?

Ken Coates (36:56.133) Well, it's an interesting question. think for most Canadians, would be really upset if the government told us to leave and to relocate from our communities, we'd be really upset about it. So they're not likely to do that. But they are increasingly thinking about it internally. When Kisatchewan happened, they actually had a vote at the end. A very interesting situation because Kisatchewan is not that far away. It does take a while because of the geography to get there, geographically not that far away.

from Timmons, Ontario, was a lovely mining community. And Timmons had unused capacity in their hospitals, their schools, and their urban infrastructure. So Timmons said to them, you know, if you folks want to relocate your community to Timmons, you can be right close in town, you can be five miles away, you can be 10 miles away, we'll rebuild your town here. And the community gave very serious thought to it, and the vote was very close, they decided to stay. But interestingly,

Because in 2006, a lot of people left, not everybody went home again. They said, okay, now I've seen what life is like in Waterloo or what life is like in Timmins or what life is like in Ottawa. I'm not going back. And you increase the migration outside. So if these communities in Northern Canada were of the same quality as a mining town, you probably wouldn't have as much mobility. If they had...

proper internet, proper electricity, proper water supplies, proper sewer supplies, proper roads, you probably wouldn't have the same movement. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy the way it is, except Indigenous people are very tenacious. They don't want to leave.

Ian Van Harten (38:39.082) Mm-hmm and fair enough. I mean, yeah, like you said we wouldn't want to leave either if we were told to go so

Ken Coates (38:45.637) Well, you see the issues like that in Newfoundland when they were trying to close down the outports and there's people who are just even now still sticking it out in these very remote locations.

Government Response and Challenges

Ian Van Harten (38:58.926) Mm-hmm. yeah, let's move to some of the government response to this problem. You know what? It's interesting because you were speaking about this earlier, with some more, maybe skepticism, I would say, but because when I was reading the paper, I thought, okay, well, it seems like there have been genuine efforts made with, you know, substantive programs with, you know, money in the billions, right? To, provide resources and infrastructure and training.

when Justin Trudeau came out and Made this promise to lift the water advisories within five years back in 2015, you know, there's there's part of me that thinks well Well, it's good to you know He has a makes a concrete promise that at least they can be held accountable to it brings more attention to the problem But yeah, I'm kind of misguided and how I'm seeing this but but maybe can you just talk more about the government response and Some things that they got right and things that maybe they missed

Ken Coates (39:58.291) Well, the only thing they missed was not understanding ahead of time how difficult the work was going to be. If anything characterized the

the Trudeau government in the first 2015 and the next little while, next first term and even beyond that, was sort of this lovable naivete. These are hard problems. They took a long time to create them. You're not going to solve them really overnight. And they made these promises without knowing the nature of the issue. The Trudeau government committed to...

adopting under it, United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People in 2015, and then started backing away from it because before they made the promise, they didn't realize what they were doing. But it was at least with the right spirit. They realized there was a long-standing problem here and it deserved to be addressed, and so they tried to address it. So good on them for that part. They attached a whole bunch of money to it, didn't realize how much money it was going to cost, and that's

That's always one of those, that's a planning sort of issue. You know, I'll tell you for sure, the folks in the Indigenous Services Canada knew how much it was going to cost. You know, they were under no allusions to this whatsoever, but the politicians jumped ahead of them very quickly and made a bold, bold promise that they shouldn't have made. And they should have actually been, the only thing they should have always, always did with Indigenous folks is make those policies with them.

Don't make them for them. And talk to them, you know, of all the things we have to do in your community is the water number one. If it is, then we're going to put money into it. If not, we shouldn't. The second thing is that we've never in Canada come up with a clear policy sort of framework for all of this. If you look at Norway, Sweden and Finland, they all drop the same sort of thing where they basically say every community in our country deserves the same quality of services that all the communities have. So if you go to remote areas of Northern Norway,

Ken Coates (42:01.027) you will find high-speed internet is basically the same as it is in Oslo. We've never come to that realization in Canada. We're very comfortable having rural areas, small town areas that are way behind. And so when you talk about Canada being a sort of a well-developed industrial country with all these facilities, that applies for 150 miles north of the Canada-U.S. boundary. And it means that about 85 % of Canada is not covered. We're really lousy at dealing with northern remote regions.

We've never completed confederation with those folks. We've never brought them into the same standard of services. When Newfoundland joined in 1949, they were not the same standard as Canada. We put a lot of money into Newfoundland to raise most of the people in Newfoundland up to national standards in terms of infrastructure, but we left Labrador out. And Labrador is still struggling to get back to that same level. So it's taken us a long time to take the North seriously. And when I say the North, don't think of this as the Arctic. Think of this as anywhere more than 250 kilometers, 200.

maybe 200 kilometres north of the Canada-U.S. boundary. And quite frankly, it's embarrassing. We should not have 26 communities in Northern Ontario that have clean drinking water. And if you look at it in different way, we know this is a long-standing problem. We know it's going to be a continuing problem. We're going to expand communities. We're going to build new communities in these mining areas. We should be world leaders in the purification of water in remote regions, and we're not there yet at all.

A Success Story: Shoal Lake First Nation

Ian Van Harten (43:26.466) Hmm. Well, can we just spend some time talking about a success in this, in this area? And I think the paper mentions Shoal Lake First Nation. So I believe this is kind of on the, on the border between Manitoba and Ontario and a very small community, I think about 300 people that had been on an advisory for over 20 years, I believe. And, but they, and they didn't even have a road accessible.

Ken Coates (43:43.841) Yes.

Ian Van Harten (43:55.83) all year round, right? And so this, but this is one of the success stories. Can you spend some time talking about what happened there?

Ken Coates (44:02.551) Well, you summarized it very nicely. This is a place that's actually relatively close to the south. It's not that far from Winnipeg. And it's an area that has been disrupted by flooding to actually serve Winnipeg communities generally. And that actually caused some of the water problems. So you have no road access because of flooding. have a safe water supply system because of the flooding, which causes that still water problem that I talked about before. And it's easy to get into the system and build up because of the...

of the changing of the water system in the area. And it took forever to get the government of Canada to sort of take this as a, make it any kind of a priority item. And so of course the government argument, I remember reading about this before, the government's argument was, the population is declining. And so therefore we don't have to do very much about this. It'll take care of itself over time. And you think, well, but it's declining because you don't have proper systems in the area. You you can do so much better than this.

And as a country, you have to do so much better than this. So they have done better. You give full credit to the First Nation, who pushed and prodded and fought, came up with all sorts of ideas, lots of suggestions and lots of encouragement and all that kind of stuff. And they just never stopped. This is not because Ottawa sat there and said one day, let's be nice to Shoal Lake. Because Shoal Lake said, we just won't take us anymore. You would deserve equity of treatment, equity of care, equity of infrastructure.

and they pushed and they pushed and they pushed.

Looking Forward: Solutions and Next Steps

Ian Van Harten (45:33.986) Hmm. Yeah. Well, let's, let's, kind of, coming towards the end here, but I'm wondering if we can finish up just by talking about looking forward and what some, some ideas for solutions to get us to where we can be lifting all the remaining advisories. And, even though, you know, as we've been talking, it seems like this, this issue really goes beyond just clean drinking water. Like there's a lot of different things that

that are implicated in here, but there, are some solutions that are, that are mentioned in this paper, like, regional wide systems so that communities can share resources more, just getting more data and more reporting so that there's kind of a higher level of awareness of, of the situation. yeah. Can can you just talk about looking forward? You know, what, what are some things that, might help, to improve this situation?

Ken Coates (46:17.848) So.

So two things really stand out. And we have Vigilance, the First Nations and Interim AT are on top of this. They're trying to push their arguments all the time. So we've got that. That's one that's been solved or addressed in many ways. But we have several others. And we should be scientific leaders in this field. And we should be experimenting proudly. We have some really interesting developments at a couple of universities, Simon Fraser in particular, that has been doing some real work on remotely managed water support.

water supply systems. should be, government should be embracing these and trying them out, running them in parallel with communities and sort of seeing how they work compared to the existing systems and invest in Canadian technologies to solve a Canadian problem. The rest of the world has different problems than this one, but this is a very Canadian sort of one. So that they can do on that side. Secondly, you know, I don't mean this with any criticism of the Indigenous communities, they've got more than enough on their plate, but

Water management is a highly complex issue. So if you look at it, I live in Saskatoon, and if you look at Saskatoon, they've got a very complicated water supply system. They've got multiple centers and multiple servers that are service providers that look after the water. They test it all the time. And it's very, good. If you've got a community of 800 people and you've got a huge public policy agenda and a huge managerial problem, this is not going to solve instantly.

It's going to take a long time. So if the communities actually work together, if you took an area in northern Manitoba and said we're going to hire three professionals who are going to be in a central location, maybe they're in Thompson, maybe they're in the Paw, maybe they're in Winnipeg, and their job is to be available to fly on a minute's notice to any of these outlying communities and treat it as a bit of a crisis management system. But let this be indigenous controlled. Don't wait for...

Ken Coates (48:27.966) Ottawa to send somebody, don't wait for the Manitoba to send somebody, have an indigenous controlled water maintenance system where they train their own people, they manage their own system, and they respond as quickly as they possibly can. And I think those two things, technology is gonna be a huge part of the answer. There's no question in my mind that that's true. But I think the other one is actually indigenous management.

But so that's two. Let me put a third one down. It's interesting, the long-term drinking water advisories have given us a metric we can use to see whether Canada is doing a good job. But nobody even discussed that metric. was the, Liberal government came up with it before they were even elected. And it's stuck with us now for 10 years, or 15, yeah, 10 years. 10 years of that same metric. Is that the right metric? They don't necessarily have connective water to your house.

I don't know if your grandmother is taking pails and going down to the central meeting place and putting 25 gallon jugs and hauling them back to her house every day. Probably not. But that's fairly common in Indigenous communities. So what is the right metric? Is it a long-term drinking water advisory? No. It's actually have safe and secure water supply in your home on demand. That should be a national standard. So we need to have a conversation about the national standard.

So we're gonna get rid of all the water advisories and we're still gonna have half our work left to go. And yet we'll be patting ourselves on the back and it'll stay that way until another crisis hits and all of sudden a community that relies on cisterns has a brout break of something like E. coli and you get people ill and sick and perhaps hopefully not dying. And then all of sudden we go, we have to do something about the cisterns. We know we should do something about the cisterns now. We should have piping through the system. We should have sort of an absolute standard across the country. You have to make the communities

you know, of viable and sustainable in the long run if you want people to stay. So if you under supply this infrastructure in the community, it becomes less attractive, you more crises like this and people give up and leave. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ian Van Harten (50:37.198) Well, you've given us a lot to think about here. so Ken Coates, just really appreciate you taking the time to walk through and helping us understand more of what's going on and all that's involved. So I really appreciate you taking the time and thank you very much.

Ken Coates (50:57.098) You're more than welcome, sir.

#transcript