Western Standard - May 05, 2022


Water On Reserves - Government Red Tape

Topics
red tape
Mentioned
Cheryl Dawn
The Pipeline： Emergency Act inquiry off to a bad start. Families torn apart by lingering vaccine travel restrictions in Canada and US

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

203.36

Word count

468

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Clean drinking water is something we take for granted just about everywhere. We can wash our clothes with it, we can drink it straight out of the tap, but countless First Nations communities can't do that. What is the problem? Why is this happening? And what can we do about it?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Yeah, so to pivot to something on a bit of a broader issue,
00:00:03.000 since one of our commenters, Cheryl Dawn, brought it up,
00:00:04.940 and you've spoken on that on Twitter quite a bit,
00:00:06.760 and a lot of people have, and that's what the clean drinking water,
00:00:09.820 it's something we take for granted just about everywhere.
00:00:11.540 We can turn on our tap, and what comes out is safe.
00:00:14.000 We can wash our clothes with it.
00:00:15.180 We can drink it straight out of the tap.
00:00:16.760 But countless First Nation communities can't do that.
00:00:19.680 They can't seem to resolve this clean water issue.
00:00:22.740 I mean, government after government has promised to do something about it.
00:00:25.620 It never seems to get solved.
00:00:27.200 But what Cheryl's asking, like, what is prohibiting it, though?
00:00:30.740 I mean, they keep saying they're going to address it.
00:00:32.520 I believe some money is spent, but it just never seems to work.
00:00:34.780 Are there regulatory problems, or what's happening with this?
00:00:38.640 What I've seen happening in my own community is that
00:00:42.380 there's a lot of government red tape.
00:00:44.940 So we were on a boil water advisory, you know, 17, 20 years ago,
00:00:49.840 and our issue was a simple filtration change, essentially.
00:00:55.500 What ended up happening was we spent about seven years going back and forth
00:01:00.060 with the government, you know, not having a proper hydrologist come in
00:01:03.820 and assess the situation and diagnose it.
00:01:06.660 You know, it just kind of went on, negotiations.
00:01:09.040 You know, we had people coming out.
00:01:10.680 Nothing was done.
00:01:11.700 And that's exactly what is going on in most communities.
00:01:14.760 You know, they don't hire directly, you know,
00:01:18.020 like an environmental company or like a drilling company.
00:01:20.520 They don't hire them directly to go into First Nations communities
00:01:25.440 and diagnose the issue.
00:01:26.620 They use their own internal staff to do that.
00:01:28.760 And they can drag this on for years, which they have.
00:01:31.700 And each visit that they make, you know, they get paid for it.
00:01:34.820 You know, they're not in no rush to fix our water issues.
00:01:37.780 And by the time money is allocated for these, you know,
00:01:41.080 for these to fix the issues, it's already gone through their federal department.
00:01:44.800 And probably only a third, less than half of that money is spent.
00:01:50.940 So that's where we are.
00:01:52.520 You know, you start the project, you stop it because you have no money.
00:01:56.560 Then you have to go back to the drawing board.
00:01:58.360 There's just too much red tape.
00:02:00.300 And I think we need to start eliminating these middle people. 1.00
00:02:04.020 And we need to start working with reserves directly
00:02:06.760 and with water companies directly and have those two talk.
00:02:10.380 And maybe we would get a lot further and we'd get a lot more money.
00:02:15.000 We'd get a lot more progress with the money that's allocated.