Staccato IV beeps and electrical whirs disrupted the worried air of Chris Wemigwans’s son’s quarantined hospital room in Sudbury, Ont.
It was 2017, and Wemigwans’s 14-year-old son had spent the past week being poked and prodded to determine what illness was ravaging his growing body. Every test only muddied potential diagnoses, but all signs pointed to meningitis.
“My son was on death watch,” Wemigwans said.
It wasn’t until a spinal tap ruled out meningeal swelling that doctors realized what Wemigwans’s son was afflicted with: group C streptococcus. It’s a bacteria that can be transmitted from animals to humans through the respiratory tract, digestive system or skin and can cause serious infections including necrotizing fasciitis, better known as flesh-eating disease.
Wemigwans thought back to the previous week’s activities. Looking at his son’s inflamed patches of skin, he remembered.
Wemigwans’s son was playing manhunt in the bush of their home in Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation when he stumbled across shrubs of poison ivy and broke out in a rash. Later that day, as he’d done countless summers before, he went for a swim in the nearby north channel of Lake Huron — the community’s popular local beach.
Wemigwans had just begun working in water treatment at the community’s plant. Aundeck Omni Kaning has a reserve with just under 300 residents on Manitoulin Island, 120 kilometres southwest of Sudbury.
Wemigwans suspects poor water quality in the channel that day caused his son’s hospitalization, but with an absence of timely water testing, he can’t say for sure.
“That shouldn’t happen. Our water should never be that dirty,” Wemigwans, whose son has since recovered, told The Narwhal.
Despite having just begun working in water treatment at the community’s plant, Wemigwans took it upon himself to routinely test the recreational water around Aundeck Omni Kaning.
“I wouldn’t want that to happen to anybody else,” Wemigwans said.
Without consistent recreational water testing, people can unknowingly be put in harm’s way if they come into contact with contaminated water. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
Water treatment operators are often unsung heroes tasked with the enormous responsibility of ensuring the communities they serve are engaging with safe, clean water. But Wemigwans also knows firsthand how precarious that protection is for many First Nations, including his own, where he has been the only water treatment operator for over the last three years. In Toronto, by contrast, this duty was shared by over 700 people in 2021.
Water treatment plants understaffed across Ontario First Nations
Many Canadians are familiar with the crisis of long-term drinking water advisories in Indigenous communities across Canada. Notably, former prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to eliminate all advisories by 2021, but dozens persist in various communities — and some have lasted for years. Some also deal with wastewater contamination, which makes local fish and game unsafe to eat and increases health risks, like the infection contracted by Wemigwans’s son. The causes are complex, including infrastructure deficits and inadequate funding. But staffing the facilities that treat water, removing contaminants and bacteria, is a big piece of the puzzle.
Across Ontario there are 340 wastewater treatment plants and 423 drinking water treatment plants as of 2018.
In Aundeck Omni Kaning, there’s just one drinking water treatment plant and it’s an entirely one man show. Wemigwans is responsible for any and all repairs, operating control systems, conducting chemical and bacterial tests and collecting water samples from surrounding lakes. He is also the only set of eyes on any and all documented operational data.
Chris Wemigwans has been the only water treatment operator at his community’s plant for more than three years. Photos: Supplied by Chris Wemigwans
Wemigwans says he doesn’t get sick, but if he’s ever under the weather, he’ll just come in anyways.
“There’s no one here to infect,” said Wemigwans — and it’s not like he has much choice.
Wemigwans is entitled to four weeks of time off. However, to use his vacation time, he must coordinate with the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising’s technical services department in advance.
The tribal council’s water hub is a team of three people who are responsible for covering staffing gaps and assisting with intensive repairs for all of their six member nations, including Aundeck Omni Kaning.
This delicate staffing dance is not a new problem. In fact, the current water operator capacity situation with the tribal council is actually quite an improvement from where they started over a decade ago.
While there is no available data on the staffing shortage for water treatment plants on reserves, the issue is pervasive. Kevin Debassige, technical services manager for the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising, said that leadership has been looking for pathways to build staffing capacity since 2014.
“Before we started this, we pretty much only had one operator at every plant,” said Debassige.
In 2018, a partnership between United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising and Water First, a non-profit organization, launched to provide 10 Indigenous youth with the opportunity to graduate from a 15-month water internship program, where they’d learn the trade and obtain certification to work as operators in their communities.
So far, 65 interns have graduated from Water First programs, which has partnered with First Nations from across Ontario and Manitoba. Next year, 10 more certified water operators will graduate into the workforce, with another internship cohort kicking off this past summer.
However, the field is still struggling to drum up interest to meet the needs of every community.
A Water First internship graduate working at their local water treatment plant. Photo: Supplied by Water First
Dan Clark, the lead water hub operator for the tribal council, says older people he’s spoken to have expressed concerns about all of the exams and training required to receive certification, while the 24/7 on-call nature of the job, especially in communities where they would be the sole operator, seems to be a big deterrent across all age cohorts.
However, Clark thinks a large impediment is that water treatment operation is not recognized by Skilled Trades Ontario. Clark said that recognition by the province as a skilled trade would boost awareness of the profession as a career path and potentially improve wages.
As it stands, Indigenous Services Canada says they provide financial support for “the day-to-day costs to operate and maintain water systems,” including “training and certification of water and wastewater operators” and for “ongoing operator support and retention.”
However, Ray Moreau, the infrastructure specialist for the tribal council, says government funding is “restrictive,” forcing Indigenous communities to fully cover the wages for any operators they employ in their plants.
Indigenous programs, including water treatment, risk defunding
There’s another problem on the horizon: Indigenous Services Canada funding may soon be gutted.
Last July, a leaked letter by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne revealed all cabinet ministers had been directed to “bring forward ambitious savings proposals to spend less on the day-to-day running of government, and invest more in building a strong, united Canadian economy.”
It was later confirmed the federal government is looking for $25 billion in budget cuts to fund Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Trump-extracted promise to double military expenditure, as well as offset income tax cuts for the “middle class.”
While the Liberal government has not officially stated their intended budgetary victims, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report predicts that the Caveman Steak from Carney’s soon-to-be-slaughtered cash cow will come from “programs delivered to Indigenous Peoples” estimated at “$4.51 billion a year by 2028-29,” with Indigenous Services Canada bearing the brunt of the thrashing.
Billions of dollars in funding for Indigenous Services Canada are now on the chopping block following a leaked letter from Minister of Finance and National Revenue François-Philippe Champagne. Photo: Chris Young / The Canadian Press
On the flip side, the First Nations Clean Water Act has made its way back on the table. Bill C-61 looks to “recognize and affirm the inherent right of First Nations to self-government in relation to water, source water, drinking water, wastewater and related infrastructure on, in and under First Nation lands”— something Canada signed onto with the United Nations 13 years ago, but has so far failed to deliver.
The bill was halted when Trudeau prorogued Parliament to resign at the start of the year, but has since returned to the legislative floor — to mixed reactions.
Alberta and Ontario have been very vocal in their opposition to the bill, citing concerns that focusing on water protection in Indigenous communities would hinder provincial economic goals. While the provinces haven’t stated what specific projects they’re referencing in their opposition, Alberta and Ontario have notably set their sights on hoovering up as many data centre contracts as they can.
As of last year, Ontario is leading Alberta by 83 data centres. However, if quality is weighted heavier than quantity, Alberta may pull ahead with Kevin O’Leary’s proposal for the largest data centre in the world on Treaty 8 land, a region that’s endured severe drought lasting several years.
However, some critics worry the bill is largely symbolic, as it doesn’t include any projects to increase drinking water accessibility other than the commitment to “make best efforts to provide adequate and sustainable funding for water services on First Nation lands,” Deborah McGregor, a professor and Canada Research Chair for Indigenous Environmental Justice at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, told The Narwhal.
She said that C-61 is a solid step forward, but that it may not be able to compete with all the federal backward steps like Indigenous Services Canada budget cuts and Bill C-5.
“You’re having all this investment and trying to protect drinking water, but then at the same time, you’re opening up a whole bunch of First Nations land to resource extraction, which contaminates the water,” McGregor said.
“Like, what do you think is going to happen?”
C-61 seems to have learned from the mistakes of the 2013 Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, McGregor explains, a process that did not adequately consult Indigenous communities about what would best serve them. In Bill C-61, it’s unclear whether the nations who need the most help with their water infrastructure — remote communities — will receive it.
Many First Nations still under boil-water advisories
Unlike the member nations of the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising, or the First Nations supported by the Ontario First Nations Technical Services Corporation, remote Indigenous communities are a special case because their locale forces them to be dependent on the federal government. When their water infrastructure fails them, they must wait for the government to act.
Neskantaga First Nation, a community with a similar number of members living on reserve as Aundeck Omni Kaning, has been waiting for 30 years and counting, living under the longest boil-water advisory in the country. The advisory was issued just two years after the nation’s water treatment plant opened in 1993, when tests showed high levels of harmful chemicals.
Similarly, Attawapiskat First Nation, whose number of on-reserve members is more than six times that of Aundeck Omni Kaning, also has a water treatment plant, but the amount of necessary repairs have piled up over time. Six years ago, the nation declared a drinking water crisis when testing showed high levels of harmful chemicals leaching from their ailing treatment plant, though residents say that Attawapiskat’s water has been undrinkable for much longer than six years.
Neskantaga First Nation, located over 400 kilometres from Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, has lived under a boil-water advisory for the last 30 years. Photo: Sara Hylton / The Narwhal
McGregor is unsure whether Carney’s regime is prepared to craft equitable solutions to improve the material conditions in remote communities.
“[There’s] a lack of working with the people to make sure that you’re not taking a techno fix that works in a southern First Nation and popping it up north and calling it a day,” McGregor said.
As Bill C-61 wends through Parliament, 40 Ontario communities are currently under boil-water advisories: 28 long-term and 14 short-term as of Sept. 16.
In Aundeck Omni Kaning, Wemigwans is enjoying some company at his treatment plant for the first time in years: a fellow community member has joined him as a Water First intern.
When his intern graduates from the program, they will become a permanent water operator at the band’s plant and will eventually take over Wemigwans’s position when he retires.
With billions of dollars in budget cuts hanging in the balance, it’s unclear how programs like Water First will be affected.
In the meantime, Wemigwans is looking forward to not being the lone protector between his community and waterborne illness — and more flexibility with his schedule.
