McGinty, Premier of Ontario takes decisive action

MMMike

KASHECHEWAN FIRST NATION, ONT. -- It was all started by a man named Lloyd McDonald.

Flown in to be principal of the Kashechewan elementary school at the beginning of the school year, the veteran 52-year-old teacher knew the makings of a scandal when he saw one.

On Oct. 14, when a fax arrived from Health Canada at the band council office stating that laboratory results showed the drinking water was contaminated with E. Coli, he swung into action.

First, Mr. McDonald, who has worked in schools on other reserves in the North and is a passionate advocate for first nations, closed the elementary school and called a meeting of teachers.

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Then, backed by a group of mostly non-aboriginal teachers he worked with, he hatched a media campaign to bring national attention to Kashechewan's appalling conditions.

The effort was so successful it ended up embarrassing Ontario's top politicians and brought a rare admission of failure from Prime Minister Paul Martin. More importantly, it pressed authorities into making a pledge of federal funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars, a huge civilian evacuation of the reserve and even the deployment of the army.

"It was Lloyd McDonald that thought up the program for the media," Chief Leo Friday told The Globe and Mail.

"It was a campaign that ended up hammering the House of Commons."

While federal and provincial authorities were arguably negligent in their handling of the crisis at Kashechewan before it made national headlines, evidence suggests that now they have gone too far the other way, needlessly funding a huge evacuation and sending in the army to provide quality water that is already on tap.

Based on a series of interviews with teachers, politicians, band representatives and water officials, The Globe has pieced together the events that led up to the scandal surrounding Kashechewan.

It provides for a more complex understanding of the crisis and suggests that the effects of poor-quality water on the health of the local population were exaggerated by those with a broader agenda.

There can be little argument that Kashechewan is a deserving case for extra funding from the federal authorities. It is probably among Canada's poorest and most neglected reserves.

Its origins date back to the 1950s when a Cree band living at Old Post, a former Hudson's Bay trading post, split up after a dispute over religion fomented by white missionaries. Most of the Roman Catholics moved to Fort Albany on the south side of the Albany River while the Anglicans moved into tents on the northern shore.

In 1957 the government began building a settlement for the Kashechewan First Nation but, according to the band elders, ignored advice that the houses should be further upstream to prevent water damage. They say government officials argued that if the settlement were further upstream the barges carrying supplies would not be able to reach it.

Ever since, the community has been subjected to spring flooding. Floodwater has seeped into the basements of the houses and caused structural problems and endemic mould.

Over the years the band periodically called for relocation to higher ground but was ignored by federal authorities who said the costs would be too high. Its remoteness meant that, for the most part, little attention was paid to the reserve.

Chief Friday said that last week's decision by the government to relocate Kashechewan was nothing more than the just amends of a 48-year-old crime against his band.

"I believe this corrected a historical wrong," he said. "Most people in the community feel the same way."

Perhaps, ironically, the water in the taps in Kashechewan is now better than it has been for years. For the past two weeks it has met both federal and provincial drinking water standards.

Records at the water treatment plant, taken by an independent expert, show that the water was free of bacteria shortly after Oct. 14, when the E. coli results were first reported. For at least the past 10 days, the chlorine levels, too, have been normal and often even lower than in larger towns to the south.

The readings raise the question as to why the provincial government began an evacuation at the end of last week, which involves huge costs and dislocation for the natives of Kashechewan.

It also casts doubt on the wisdom of the federal decision to send in the army in an unprecedented mission in Hercules transport planes with a large mobile water purifier -- a system that only became operational early this week.

Under ordinary circumstances, one water expert working in Kashechewan said, even the long-standing boil-water advisory would probably have been rescinded by now.

Chris LeBlanc, an outside contractor who works for Northern Waterworks, flew in to take over at the water treatment plant in Kashechewan on Oct. 15, at the request of the federal government.

He said that after initial work fixing the chlorination machine all tests for E. coli at the plant have been negative.

He explained that the standard procedure was to remove a boil-water advisory after two back-to-back negative results for the bacteria and that Kashechewan's water has had three such tests.

"In a provincial setting even the boil-water advisory would most likely have been removed by now," he said. "I've been happily drinking it."

There are also questions about the extent to which the quality of the water caused the reserve's health problems in the first place.

The scandal of Kashechewan's contaminated water, with its echoes of Walkerton five years before, made headlines across the country. The charge was that the government had allowed this impoverished Cree First Nation to be poisoned by E. coli that caused terrible skin infections and then subjected them to levels of chlorine that exacerbated their suffering.

Pictures of children with terrible sores and skin complaints were circulated as evidence.

Locals, backed by Mr. McDonald, argued that water laced with E. Coli and high levels of chlorine caused scabies and impetigo.

But the head of the Emergency Medical Assessment Team, which treated Kashechewan residents, said while many of the 800 or so patients they treated had skin conditions, scabies and impetigo cases were related to hygiene, not water.

Dr. Chris Mazza, the president of Ontario Air Ambulance, which oversees the team, said in an interview from Sudbury that residents had minor skin irritations and rashes caused by chlorine in the water. Some suffered from acute diarrhea, which lasts a few days; others suffered from chronic diarrhea, which lasts weeks. Because of the diarrhea, there were some cases of dehydration among small children.

Dr. Mazza said some of the illnesses among Kashechewan residents are directly or indirectly attributable to the water .

"The diarrhea you can lock up for sure, that's because of the water," he said.

More serious skin conditions such as scabies and impetigo "were not caused by the water, but because people can't use the water. I can't say with scientific certainty that the cramps and stomach pains were caused by the water, but I have strong suspicions."

Cheryl Rosen, head of dermatology at Toronto Western Hospital, said scabies is caused by mites, whereas impetigo is caused by bacteria. Both conditions can spread quickly in crowded conditions, but E. coli doesn't cause either of these illnesses, Dr. Rosen said.

"E. coli is not a biggie in causing skin conditions."

That is not to say that water quality hasn't been a problem for years. Many residents reported the water was often brown or yellow.

The reserve had been on a boil-water advisory for two years and intermittently before that.

Mr. LeBlanc said that when he arrived he found the chlorination machine at the water treatment plant had broken down. As a result local technicians were manually adding chlorine to the water.

But since then, when the E. coli outbreak was first reported, chlorine levels have never been more than 2.7 mg per litre. The maximum allowable level is 4.0 mg per litre.

According to Mr. LeBlanc, 2.7 mg per litre is no higher than the maximum level reached by the city of Timmins -- the destination of many of the relocated residents -- during the same period.

The average chlorination in Kashechewan for the past two weeks, Mr. LeBlanc said, has been lower than in Timmins.

Interviews have uncovered no evidence that the band council or its team of volunteers helping with publicity purposefully misled the media.

If E. coli was the fuse for the political crisis over Kashechewan, then Mr. McDonald set the match.

When the fax arrived on his desk on Aug. 14 he wasted no time in closing down his school.

Later, colleagues say, he telephoned Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Andy Scott personally and berated him for his inaction.

When the department failed to deliver on its promise to provide enough fresh water for residents to drink and bathe, Mr. McDonald joined forces with opposition politicians to push for greater national attention.

Andrew Lychak, a 30-year-old teacher, said: "He's the kind of guy who can move heaven and earth. Because of his passion and his ability to express himself in English, he became the spokesman for the chief."

The secondary school, under principal Judy Stephen, was also alerted by the band leadership to the report of E. Coli in the water on Oct. 14 and followed suit, sending the children home just before 3 o'clock.

"We just heard this announcement on the PA system that we should take the children out of class," Mr. Lychak said. "Then all we heard was these rumours circulating about E. coli."

Over the days that followed, the volunteer public relations team and Mr. McDonald put together a campaign to try to embarrass the federal authorities into action.

They looked up numbers in the phone book, hand wrote faxes and contacted dozens of news media outlets.

"We spent hours making lists, writing up the press releases and phoning and e-mailing," one of the teachers said.

Chief Friday or Rebecca Friday, his sister-in-law and the deputy chief, gave permission to proceed, where it was needed.

On Oct. 21, Mr. Scott, under increasing pressure from Mr. McDonald, finally came to the reserve. But he offered the natives little other than a commitment to increase the supply of bottled water.

The teachers, now incensed and passionate about their cause, began sending out dozens more press releases by e-mail and fax.

"There was a real anger after the Scott meeting," Mr. Lychak said. "It was as if all the anger among the people here had built up and was ready to burst."

Quoting doctors and researchers who had visited Kashechewan in the wake of the E. coli report, the reserve's new media team sent out more reports of contaminated water and skin diseases.

Though they did not explicitly say so, the implication was that the two were linked.

The band leaders, now emboldened, threatened to demand an evacuation if their request for relocation was not met.

Meanwhile, the region's elected representatives -- MP Charlie Angus and MPP Gilles Bisson, both New Democratic Party members -- joined the activists. They organized news conferences, first in Toronto and then in Ottawa, for Chief Friday to highlight Kashechewan's plight.

Dr. Murray Trusler, who works at the hospital in Moose Factory, 100 kilometres to the south, and had visited Kashechewan recently, travelled with the chief. He showed reporters slide shows of the terrible medical and housing conditions on the reserve.

Chief Friday said he was amazed at the response.

When the band had last held a news conference in Toronto, after a housing study in 2000 concluded that living conditions were squalid, they had been largely ignored by the news media.

This time his complaints aroused national interest.

On Tuesday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty berated the federal government for its failure to act. He promised the province would launch an evacuation of the reserve.

Two days later, the NDP arranged an air charter from Timmins for the media to travel to Kashechewan to see the conditions for themselves.

There were carefully choreographed protesters waiting for them at the airport demanding federal action. Henry Koosees, a resident, gave an impassioned speech accusing the government of being racist.

After that, Mr. Scott presented Chief Friday with a document that pledged to meet every one of Kashechewan's demands.

"When I saw that I was really stunned," Chief Friday said. "I thought there would just be talk of studies, studies and more studies. But they gave us exactly what we wanted."

A spokesman for Mr. Scott said the plan for improving conditions at Kashechewan would have been put in place regardless of any media pressure stemming from the discovery of E. coli in the drinking water.

In August, Mr. Scott attended a meeting in Timmins of a task force that had been struck to give relief to the community, said Dan Brian of Indian and Northern Affairs. That was the genesis of a short-term and long-term plan for addressing a wide range of issues including water, housing, education, social services and health care, he said.

"It was accelerated because the [water] test results basically overtook the work of the task force," Mr. Brian said. So, last week, the government announced there would be new homes, safe water, more nurses and possibly a new school.

By the time the decision was made to evacuate the reserve, Mr. McDonald, who had orchestrated the campaign from the beginning, was gone. He had been flown out earlier in the week to be treated for stomach problems. (He has since returned.)

Contacted by telephone in Moose Factory, where he was convalescing, he was unapologetic about the decisive role he had played.

He said: "I did as much as I could to get the politicians up there. I raised holy hell. I love the children and the community. It's breaking my heart what's going on with the first nations. It killed me to work with children who were sick, infected and not properly housed.

"It's true E. Coli was just the tip of the iceberg. The government have totally ignored, avoided and done nothing but disservice to the first nations of this country. Paul Martin probably knows my name by now and he probably hates me. But I don't give a crap."

Durgan