Empty water jugs hang outside a door in October, 2020, in Neskantaga First Nation, after the community was evacuated due to a water crisis.DAVID JACKSON/The Globe and Mail
The word deadline has a dark origin, the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s website says, dating back to prisons in the U.S. Civil War. It referred then to a line in the sand that, beyond which, a prisoner should expect to be shot. By the middle of the last century, it had acquired its current, less literal meaning: A time by which something must be done.
Deadlines, as editors at The Globe and Mail and other newsrooms will say and reporters will begrudgingly acknowledge, are very effective at forcing flawed humans to stop procrastinating and just get on with it.
That’s why this page has praised Prime Minister Mark Carney for imposing tight deadlines for Ottawa to approve selected resource or infrastructure projects deemed to be of national importance, a measure to concentrate minds and limit bureaucratic foot-dragging and paperwork.
But it seems his Liberal government is not as keen on the clarity and accountability that come with hard deadlines in another area: clean drinking water for First Nations.
Ottawa won’t set deadline to lift all First Nations drinking water advisories
Canada had already blown past a previous deadline to end the shameful number of boil-water advisories on reserves across the country. Back in 2015, Justin Trudeau pledged to get it done by 2021. It didn’t happen. Subsequent deadlines were discarded almost as soon as they were set down.
Neskantaga First Nation, seen in August, 2019, has not had access to clean drinking water for 31 years and counting.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
To be fair, significant progress – spurred by that deadline that was ultimately missed – was made, with 150 water advisories lifted over the past decade. But the number of affected communities, the bulk of them in Ontario, remains at 36. Some have been forced to boil their water for decades. If this was happening in a big Canadian city, the deadline to fix it would be set in days, not years.
Recently, Mr. Carney’s government unveiled new legislation that would require the application of either federal minimum standards, or the relevant provincial or territorial standards, to water quality for First Nations communities. But Ottawa has also adopted a new approach to deadlines on this issue: Do away with them altogether.
“The deadline goal is not part of my narrative,” Mr. Carney’s Indigenous Services Minister, Mandy Gull-Masty, told The Globe in an interview.
Ms. Gull-Masty, the first Indigenous person to lead her department, says the government is not going to “pressure” communities with deadlines. Instead, Ottawa will instead ask them what they need, and what timeline works. She says her “ultimate goal” is zero boil-water advisories. Well, good. But when?
The narrative has changed in other ways. The new proposed legislation waters down language that had been in a previous bill that died on the order paper when Mr. Trudeau prorogued Parliament and resigned last year. That bill would have recognized a human right to clean drinking water.
The current bill says it is the government’s policy to “further the progressive realization” of “the human right to drinking water” for people on First Nations lands. The Liberals had promised in last year’s election to “immediately introduce and pass legislation affirming that First Nations have a human right to clean drinking water.”
Even this new bill is itself the result of a blown deadline: It was supposed to be tabled last year, and wasn’t. And it was required by a class-action settlement, in a case launched against the government for its failure to clean up dirty drinking water, five full years ago.
Ottawa’s deadline-free plan does include more money, with $4.6-billion pledged over five years. The government says it comes on top of the $9.4-billion it has committed to the problem since 2015.
First Nations leaders had warned that without more funding, more water systems would fail, adding to the list of boil-water advisories that is supposed to be shrinking. So the added cash is welcome.
But not having a deadline is a cop-out.
It’s also unfair. Indigenous leaders have raised alarms about Ottawa’s push to impose those deadlines to speed up approvals for major resource and infrastructure projects, on which First Nations are supposed to be consulted.
They wonder why the plight of people like those in tiny, remote Neskantaga, in Northern Ontario – 31 years and counting without clean water – is not treated with the same urgency. They are right to demand their own deadline, and to see it met.