Cleanup, at last
It’s taken decades of dithering. But Queen’s Park is finally committing to cleaning up the mercury-polluted waters that have poisoned generations of people living on the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog First Nations.
It won’t be cheap. It comes at a price tag of $85 million. That’s a far cry from the $2 to $3 million it would have cost if the government had followed its own environment minister’s advice to clean up the English-Wabigoon River system back in1984 after the now-defunct Reed Paper dumped 10 tonnes of mercury into it from 1962 to 1970.
But it didn’t. And since then, government after government has shamefully ignored the devastating effects of the mercury poisoning on the 1,500 residents of the two reserves.
In the end, it took a whistleblower, the persistence of First Nations leaders, shocking studies from top scientists, and an explosive series of stories on the contamination and its effects by the Star’s Jayme Poisson and David Bruser to shame the government into action.
Now the province must do the right thing and make sure its commitment is not just an empty promise that can be overturned by a future government.
Understandably, after all his community has gone through, Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister is nervous about that. And with voters headed to the polls on June 7, 2018, he has reason to worry.
Environment Minister Glen Murray is adamant the money is committed. And he says the “joint governance” of the fund by the province and Grassy Narrows and Whitedog First Nations “makes it very hard for someone in the future to mess with.” Still, Fobister’s suggestion that the funds be put into a trust is a good one.
History has given his community reason to doubt the good will of future governments. As Murray rightly pointed out, mercury dumping would never have been permitted in waters near Toronto. “It just horrifies me that we actually allow these things to happen and it speaks to the systemic racism and the colonialism in our society,” he said. Nor has any previous government been willing to invest in cleaning up the river system no matter what information came to light — including a study that found 90 per cent of residents from the two reserves tested in 2014 had at least one symptom of mercury poisoning. Those can include loss of muscle co-ordination, slurred speech and tunnel vision.
“I have never seen a case of such gross neglect,” Murray admitted. “I am embarrassed as a Canadian that this ever happened and I can’t understand how people for 50 years sat in that environment office knowing this was going on as a minister and simply didn’t do anything about it.”
To be fair, up until May of last year, the Wynne government, too, argued the river system would clean itself up. Thankfully, it has finally changed its tune. Now it must make sure that its commitment can’t be reversed.