Water On Reserves - Government Red Tape
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
203.36037
Summary
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
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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.
00:00:16.760
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.
00:00:27.200
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?
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What I've seen happening in my own community is that
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So we were on a boil water advisory, you know, 17, 20 years ago,
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and our issue was a simple filtration change, essentially.
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What ended up happening was we spent about seven years going back and forth
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with the government, you know, not having a proper hydrologist come in
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You know, it just kind of went on, negotiations.
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And that's exactly what is going on in most communities.
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like an environmental company or like a drilling company.
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They don't hire them directly to go into First Nations communities
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And they can drag this on for years, which they have.
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And each visit that they make, you know, they get paid for it.
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You know, they're not in no rush to fix our water issues.
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And by the time money is allocated for these, you know,
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for these to fix the issues, it's already gone through their federal department.
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And probably only a third, less than half of that money is spent.
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You know, you start the project, you stop it because you have no money.
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And I think we need to start eliminating these middle people.
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And we need to start working with reserves directly
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and with water companies directly and have those two talk.
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And maybe we would get a lot further and we'd get a lot more money.
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We'd get a lot more progress with the money that's allocated.