Canada's Water Crisis: Canada's Dirty Little Secret

Why Things Aren't Being Solved

The main reason things aren't being solved is because of systematic racism. We'd have to go all the way back to when Canada became a nation to figure out why the system is so flawed.

Systematic racism is in place in many governments from when their countries became countries and that's one reason why I think this is so ridiculous. Times are changing, people are changing, opinions are changing, so why isn't the racism being taken out of the system?

But back to the water.

The reserve system is deeply flawed and is impossible for me to cover completely and I wouldn't feel comfortable touching on a topic I don't know much about, but from what I know, the reserves system was put in place when the colonists came to Canada and when they discovered it was not actually empty land. People already lived there.

And so, reserves were born: places where the First Nations people could live.

The people living on these reserves were under the authority of the crown, but not directly. These people only held certain rights and were denied others. For example, they could live on the land, but they couldn't own any land themselves.

The system was riddled with racism.

This eventually turned into the British's attempt to make the people British using residential schools and many other tactics.

Children were separated from their families and culture to be taught about the 'right' beliefs and some adults, deemed as useless to society, were killed.

That is a problem that I couldn't do justice in this book, so I'll be getting back to current times as of now.

First Nations peoples still live on reserves. Most of Canada is made up of reserves, however the majority of BC is made up of territory that wasn't claimed by the crown. However this doesn't mean there aren't people on reserves in BC who don't have access to clean water.

The federal government is in charge of solving Canada's water crisis. But this decision to have the top government in Canada take care of a minority is flawed in itself.

You see, the federal government's job is to take care of larger issues that affect larger amounts of people like taxes and COVID-19.

So when a group that doesn't have a large population compared to the rest of Canada is placed in federal's hands, they shove them to the side to focus on the bigger picture.

But the government couldn't get away with doing nothing for these people. That would tarnish their image and they'd lose support from the people.

So they make it look like they're helping, but they're really not.

The budgets the government gives to the people affected by the crisis to buy water treatment plants is only enough to buy the cheapest one possible and there's never any money left over to run it. Workers have said they had to pay out of their own pockets at times to buy chemicals to clean the water.

They never really get to choose what company they work with, either. It's whatever to government is willing to pay for, which is the cheapest option. And as you may know, cheap usually doesn't mean good.

And even if these treatment plants work properly, most of the time it doesn't supply the entire community with water. Some homes are still left without water when the crisis on their land has been 'averted.'

The way that the government records the data isn't in a fair way and it causes confusion among the public.

First off all, they don't even count the territories and British Columbia in their data so there are many groups of people excluded from their data.

Second, Justin Trudeau promised to end all long term water advisories on Canadian reserves. This means that he is only working to end long term advisories. This also means that he isn't counting short term advisories that have been put into place: even after a long term one was recently lifted.

Many communities have stated that though their long term advisories were lifted, a short term one would follow within a few weeks.