Breaking the trust

The story of the ongoing mercury poisoning of the people who live on the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog reserves is at best a story of broken trust and incompetence by a series of federal and provincial governments. At worst, it is dangerous, wilful blindness. Either way, the truth is finally out. And it isn’t good. As reported over the weekend by the Star’s David Bruser and Jayme Poisson, Ontario government officials knew in the 1990s that soil under the paper mill upstream from the reserves was laden with mercury, but kept that a secret. Indeed, the residents there did not find out until last week.

Worse, the report, commissioned by the current owners of the mill, Domtar, says the site was not only contaminated back then, it likely still is.

This flies in the face of repeated reassurances by both levels of government that the Wabigoon River had cleaned itself up naturally, since10 tonnes of mercury was first dumped into it between 1962 and 1970 by the company that owned the mill at the time, Reed Paper.

Indeed, as recently as last year the Ontario government was still insisting this was true. It continued to offer those reassurances in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Consider that a 2014 study by Japanese scientists indicated that 90 per cent of people on the reserves had a symptom of mercury poisoning. (Those can include loss of muscle co-ordination, slurred speech and tunnel vision.) Or that another study found the level of mercury in babies tested from both reserves between1978 and1992 was high enough to affect brain development. Or that as recently as 2014 a teenage boy from Grassy Narrows died from causes believed to be related to the mercury.

It’s not just the health of residents that pointed to ongoing contamination.

Soil samples the Star took from the old mill in January contained as much as 80 times more mercury than is normal. And provincial data indicated the walleye that people in Grassy Narrows are eating are the most mercury-contaminated in the province.

All this is information the province should have been investigating itself — and acting on for the sake of the residents. Shamefully, it didn’t.

That’s finally changing. Last February, then-environment minister Glen Murray announced the government would spend $85 million over 10 years to clean up the water system.

It isn’t enough. In light of this information, the province must now turn its attention to compensation. The package set up in the1980s as a result of an out-of-court settlement was created with the understanding that there was no ongoing contamination. It is, in fact, so inadequate that it no longer covers most of those sickened by the mercury.

The1,500 residents of the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog reserves have been robbed of their health, their lands and their livelihood from a closed fishing industry.

The waters must be cleaned up and they must be properly compensated. That’s the least the government can do in the wake of decades of potentially deadly misinformation.

Soil samples taken by the Star from the old mill in January had up to 80 times more mercury than is normal