Ted Campbell explains how he would resolve the TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD PROBLEM in the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario, which is one of the many First Nation public health issues the federal government has been promising to address for years:
A few weeks ago I was horrified to read about the 25 year long water problems that continue to plague the Neskantaga First Nation in North-Western Ontario ~ yes you read that right: it’s been 25 years since these Canadians have had clean, potable water! I begged the government to Do Something! and I offered one concrete idea based upon by near certain knowledge of what the Canadian Armed Forces can and have done for people overseas. One of my readers, a retired colonel in our Military Engineering branch confirmed that what I suggested was doable.
Now I read, in a report by Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail, that the main problems are a combination of political over-promising and bureaucratic ineptitude. I am going to blame Justin Trudeau for pretty much all of the political over-promising: he made it a centrepiece of his 2015 election campaign and then totally failed to follow through. He has to wear at least a large part of the bureaucratic ineptitude, too, because he’s been prime minister of Canada for over five years. He’s failed, again.
OK, I can hear you saying: if you’re so smart how would you fix things?
For a start I would stick with the outlines of my earlier proposal: I would ask the Army to help, right now, using existing technology. We would declare this a disaster ~ and if Canadians going without clean water for 25 years doesn’t qualify as a disaster then I don’t know what does ~ and send the Canadian Armed Forces’ Disaster Assistance Response Team (the DART) to the Neskantaga First Nation and tell them to fix whatever needs fixing ~ using the Indigenous Services department’s budget. When they finished there we would buy them a new water purification system and send them the next First Nation that has a water disaster on its hands. People overseas will have to wait or we’ll have to build a second DART.
Next I would ask the Army and the Canadian manufacturers of water purification systems to work together with First Nations corporations, like Matawa First Nations Management, to develop (at the Indigenous Services department’s expense) concrete, workable plans to install, operate and maintain, over their complete life-cycle, water purification and waste disposal systems and the electrical power and the power and water distribution systems necessary to support them.
After this long, it may not be that the government can’t deliver these services, it might be that the government has deliberately chosen not to deliver.
