‘Water’ comes clean on Canada’s environmental sins
“What sort of country is Canada?” muses Ellen Page, Canadian co-writer and codirector of the modest-looking but also devastating documentary “There’s Something in the Water.”
The answer is not a pretty one.
With its universal health care and benevolent, “picture-perfect” image, Canada is a place that “takes care of its people.” But does it? Taking a cue from Academy Award-winner Michael Moore, Halifax-born Page and co-writer and co-director Ian Daniel (“Gaycation”) take their cameras and themselves to their subjects in the Maritime province of Nova Scotia.
Page’s form of muckraking journalism is arguably not as in-your-face as Moore’s. But what it uncovers in no less scathing.
In this case, it is the “environmental racism” practiced in Nova Scotia leading to the sickness and death among its indigenous and African populations.
After conferring with Canadian social scientist Dr. Ingrid Waldron, author of the 2018 book “There’s Something in the Water,” Page and Daniel visit local historian Louise Delisle of South Shelburne, a traditionally African Nova Scotian neighborhood, where a dump was located and where hazardous materials were improperly disposed of
for decades, endangering the population and poisoning the water.
Page and Daniel drive along the neighborhood nearest to the dump with Delisle, who rattles off names and deaths by clusters of cancer in the area. It is a litany of horror, arguably a slow-motion lynching.
Page the filmmaker is notably different from the charismatic actor we have seen in such films as “Juno” (2007) in which she gives an Oscar-nominated performance as a young pregnant woman, or “the “X-Men” films or Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (2010). We hear of contaminated family wells in a part of Shelburne where there is no deeper “town well,” which would cost — we are told — $7,000 to dig.
Anyone familiar with the work of Moore would know that he would be camped in front of the mayor’s office to ask her why this is the case.
Instead, we move on to another horrifying story — this one narrated in part by Mi’kmaq indigenous woman Michelle Francis-Denny.
Page and Daniel are the “Blair Witch Project” of documentary filmmakers, carrying their own equipment and working in front of and behind the cameras. They travel 3 hours northeast to the Pictou Landing First Nation, where 50 years ago, the chief of a tribe, the grandfather of Francis-Denny, was lied to and tricked into selling a body of water known as Boat Harbour to be used to store effluent from a nearby paper mill for the payment of $60,000.
The area, a sporting and hunting ground for locals, soon became a sickening, polluted lake full of dioxins, mercury and other heavy metals.
The pollution of the area and sickness and death from cancer of nearby inhabitants gave rise to a movement dubbed “Grassroots Grandmothers,” a group of local women who armed themselves with knowledge and used existing laws, treaties and public shaming to stop the owners of the paper mill and forced them to build a treatment plant. These grandmothers have also taken on Alton Gas, a corporation that wants permission to dump 3,000 tons of salt a day into a river on a different Mi’kmaq reserve.
Page and Daniel let these stories tell themselves. In one memorable scene, we see a Mi’kmaq grandmother-activist holding onto prime minister Justin Trudeau’s arm like she is never going to let him go.
(“There’s Something in the Water” contains scenes of emotional anguish.)