A National Shame (en francais)

Now here's a situtation where the Government could have deployed the CF's DART team to effective use. Instead, we have deployed DART to Pakistan at great expense when most NGO's claim the aid could be provided by them at a fraction of the cost, over a longer term.

Boil water advisories for over two years? A treatment plant built downstream from a sewage lagoon? Opposition MPs have been calling for action on this issue for weeks now in the House of Commons. The Liberal response? Bluster and rhetoric.

For this situation to develop the way it has is almost unbelievable. For it to have reached this crisis point is inexcusable.

Residents at Ont. reserve to be evacuated
Steve Erwin
Canadian Press

October 25, 2005
TORONTO -- More than half the people living on a remote northern Ontario reserve where the threat of contaminated water has been a daily fact of life will be evacuated, Ontario's minister for aboriginal affairs said Tuesday.

David Ramsay said the province plans to fly roughly 1,000 of the Kashechewan First Nation's 1,900 residents off the reserve on the western shores of James Bay starting late Wednesday.

"It is a medical emergency so these people really need to be removed," Ramsay said after a two-hour meeting with native leaders and Premier Dalton McGuinty.

The reserve, 450 kilometres north of Timmins, Ont., has had chronic problems with its local water treatment plant and is currently struggling to deal with a water supply that has been laced with potentially deadly E. coli.

Roughly half of the reserve's residents are also suffering from skin infections such as scabies and impetigo -- conditions that are exacerbated by the high levels of chlorine being used to disinfect the water.