Ohsweken waits for funding to deliver clean water to more people.
Four years after a multi-million dollar water treatment plant was built in the Six Nations of the Grand River community of Ohsweken, the public utility service is hoping to receive new federal funding to feed new lines of fresh drinking water into approximately 480 more homes.
Michael Montour, Director of Public Works for Six Nations of the Grand River, has been waiting since March of this year and says the government’s commitment to lift boil water advisories in other first nations community may put their project plans lower on the priority list.
"We’re all shovel-ready: meaning we’ve had the extension designed, gone through INAC’s approval processes, but now we’re just waiting for the money and we’re basically being told we’re not a priority because we don’t have a Health Canada boil advisory imposed on us."
In 2013 the community opened a water treatment plant outside Ohsweken that could treat water for 27,000 people living in the community.
Michael Montour describes it as "a picture of success."
The other 91 per cent of residents not on the treated water line get their water through various methods.
She lives in Cayuga on the Six Nations of the Grand Reserve, and tells CBC she buys bottled water because the water from the well system she is on is "undrinkable" and burns her skin when she bathes in it.
Sheri Longboat, assistant professor at the University of Guelph in the rural planning and development program, says because the First Nations community is under the jurisdiction and responsibility of the federal government, people aren’t getting the same sort of municipal water services other communities would expect to have.
Longboat says the federal government five year plan may address the water problems, but she doesn’t think it addresses the fundamental issues that have left many Indigenous towns without the infrastructure and services seen outside First Nations communities.