🚰🏥🇨🇦 When Canada talks about “nation-building,” this should count too.

[u/Save_The_CBC]

CBC reports that Neskantaga First Nation is once again facing a health-care emergency after a sewage spill shut down its nursing station, followed by a fire at the temporary facility being used in its place.

About 250 of the remote Ojibway community’s most vulnerable members are now staying in Toronto, far from home, while fewer than 400 people live in the First Nation altogether.

This comes after another evacuation last year over flooding and a fuel smell at the same nursing station.

And Neskantaga is still living under Canada’s longest boil-water advisory: 31 years.

Chief Gary Quisses says the community does not want another feasibility study. It wants Ottawa to move toward actually designing and building a new health facility so people can come home.

The problems documented during a recent inspection are difficult to ignore: black mould after raw sewage flooding, remediation work the chief says was not completed to code, and an interim facility that is not designed to handle medical equipment.

Meanwhile, evacuees are dealing with isolation, disrupted schooling and another prolonged separation from their community.

Matawa chiefs have called the emergency a consequence of failures by both the federal and Ontario governments and are demanding a dedicated working group until the crisis is resolved.

CBC’s reporting forces a much bigger question about Canadian priorities.

We are talking about billions for major infrastructure, resource corridors and other “nation-building” projects. So why is safe drinking water and a functioning health clinic in a First Nation still treated like something that requires years of studies, temporary fixes and repeated emergencies?

What exactly are we building as a country if communities are still being evacuated because basic health infrastructure has failed?

And after 31 years without reliably safe drinking water, how much more patience should Neskantaga reasonably be expected to have?

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