Neskantaga losing patience as government once again delays tabling of First Nations clean water law

Lashaunda Waswa recalls what passed for a fire department on Neskantaga First Nation when she was a child. “I remember house fires happening,” she told APTN News, “and we’d have to do the buckets. So living in our community, it’s like living in the old ways. The water is connected to everything.” Neskantaga has endured the longest boil-water advisory of any community in Canada. In February 2026, it will be 31 years that Neskantaga hasn’t had access to potable water. As a child, Waswa recalled, she would “have to go to the jug” to get water at her school, since there was no fountain, only a jug with cups. She worried that if that school caught fire, it would be doomed to burn to the ground. “I don’t think there’d be enough pressure for the water and the fire hydrant to take it out,” she said. Waswa’s childhood was not so long ago. Now she’s a member of Neskantaga’s band council after being elected in April, just weeks before her 21st birthday. For a time during her childhood, she said, her family moved away from the community seeking better health care and schools. Though she first left Neskantaga when she was eight years old, Waswa said she had already been deeply affected by the absence of water. “I never recovered from that, because I couldn’t drink tap water at home,” she said, adding she was never comfortable drinking from water fountains at the school she relocated to outside her community. “I always requested bottled water, or I would take my water bottle to school that my mother would fill up with me.” These habits remain, she said. Today, when she goes to restaurants, she orders bottled water, because she doesn’t trust water from the tap. At home in Neskantaga, she brushes her teeth with bottled water. “My sister will use the tap water to brush her teeth,” she said, “but it feels weird to me, because I’m scared of getting infections in my mouth.” Infections are a concern many in her community share, she said, noting there are many pictures online of the rashes and lesions community members developed from bathing in the local water. “I don’t have my scars anymore, but I used to,” she said, checking her hands for marks. “I remember at one point, me and my sisters were just bathing in the water, and we noticed that we would get warts or something on our hands. My sister still has them, but they’re fading away now. Mine faded, but you can kind of see a little bit of the scarring I got from it. “It was there for a long time, until I moved back to the city and it went away. Now that I’m back in the community, sometimes I worry that it’ll come back.” Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak following his speech at the Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly on Tuesday. Photo: Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press. On Tuesday, at the Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the long-awaited reintroduction of a bill to guarantee clean water to all First Nations, most importantly the 38 Nations still enduring boil-water advisories, will be tabled in the spring 2026. The coming bill is a continuation of Bill C-61, the First Nations Clean Water Act, which did not make it out of the House of Commons before former prime minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament on Jan. 6. Neskantaga Chief Gary Quisess asked the first question of the question-and-answer session with the prime minister following Carney’s address to the AFN, reiterating that his community has been without water for 11,263 days and expressing his desire to see concrete actions rather than further promises. “It was more like a campaign speech from the prime minister,” he told APTN. “Where is the actual work that’s going to happen? I was hoping to get a clear answer for some action. For him to say we’ll start working and fix the water issue. But it’s disappointing you don’t hear the clear answer.” Carney did respond to Quisess’s comment by noting the community situation represents “a failure, to be absolutely clear.” He said his government would commit to determining why things have not worked well and how they can be made more functional. But Quisess said he was impatient with commitments. “On this [coming] bill here,” he said. “I’d like to see my community get that new water treatment plan, to fix the boil water advisory, the trauma we have in our community. It’s already intergenerational. Thirty years is a long time.” Waswa described herself as having “trust issues” with the government, but referring to a presence of Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) Minister Mandy Gull-Masty at an meeting earlier in the morning, noted her misgivings might be subject to change. “The ministers that were here today, I hope they actually listened,” she said. “Because I know there’s Indigenous people in there now, and it makes me feel a little bit less worried.” Speaking to APTN, Gull-Masty said she understood the specific case of Neskantaga. “[The boil-water advisory in Neskantaga] is quite complex,” she said, “And [the community] is also facing a lot of trauma concerning water. A lot. I want to address that because it’s a reality for that community. And to do work in that space can be quite challenging. As a minister, I also want to be respectful in meeting them where they need to be.” Gull-Masty noted that a challenging legacy of the 30-year boil water advisory is deep distrust, which she said she is working with Neskantaga’s leadership—including during this special chiefs assembly—to try to begin slowly resolving. “We had a great session yesterday,” Gull-Masty said. “I was encouraged by what I heard. They are very open to moving things forward. We’re trying to work on a number of files in that community, not just water. They’re all interrelated. We have to do that work with them in that space.” She said she also met with the First Nations Advisory Council on Water, noting the discussion of water is the product of a legal settlement. “We are trying to stay on track to meet the targets of what that settlement states,” she said. “You know, water is one huge file.” Though the bill to update C-61 was originally expected to be tabled this fall, Gull-Masty said its delay until 2026 is simply the product of requiring time to do the work properly. In particular, she noted, her office had to split its focus as they were involved in Senate Bill S-2 and the surrounding debate about second-generation cutoff. “[The delay] was just simply time needed to do the work,” she said. “I’m a new minister. I have a lot of files. Legislation is quite heavy in my ministry as well. I was really taking the space to do my work to understand parliamentary process.” Responding to questions about the possibility that the new clean-water bill may be different from C-61, Gull-Masty noted she had spoken with many people, some of whom wanted updates to the bill as it was previously tabled, others who wanted it to stay the same. “But I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’ll have to save that for the new year.” Read more: Community in crisis: The closure of Neskantaga First Nation’s health centre compounding state of emergency — that’s about to get worse Quisess said he’s clear about what he hopes to see in the bill. “I want to see some positive aspects from it,” he said, “where actually action will happen. There’s been lots of words, lots of lips moving, but there’s no actual action.” Waswa did not expect to see clean water arrive in her community in the coming year. “If we wanted it next year, they’d have to start now, right?” she said. “Because it’s going to take time for sure. They’d have to make a new building, add pipes, and that’s a long process.” Waswa called her trust in the government “a 50-50.” “But in the end, I don’t really think that we’re going to get what we want anytime soon,” she said. “I hope that they start actually working on things and start actually moving, because, you know, it’s been 30-plus years.” In 2019, a number of First Nations launched a class action against the federal government over drinking water. The government and plaintiffs agreed on a settlement that included legislation to solidify water as a human right in First Nation communities. The litigation was put on hold when Trudeau tabled C-61. With the government behind on the settlement agreement again, lawyers say their clients are considering a “motion to compel” the government to act. Continue Reading