Diligence needed on water quality front

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Progress is being made in efforts to improve the quality of drinking water in First Nation communities across the province, but those efforts need to be more than a one-shot deal, said Bill Marion. Marion is manager of public works on James Smith Cree Nation and has been working to help First Nations improve the way they manage their water and wastewater for more than a decade.

"I'm comfortable with all the initiatives that are occurring right now in Canada and in Saskatchewan with respect to trying to improve First Nations drinking water quality, but definitely it's something that's ongoing. It's not something you can put on the shelf or it's not something you can just do for a couple of years and then drop it and then come back to it in a couple of year's time. It has to be a co-ordinated ongoing effort and commitment to ensuring that the whole program or the whole mechanism is working effectively and efficiently. And that is a concern that I have is getting that assurance that that ongoing commitment is there," he said.

There are four main components to a typical water quality program, including infrastructure, training and certification of operators, water quality testing and that ability to deal with problems that may arise, Marion said. While all components are of equal importance, it is the training component on which Marion has been concentrating his efforts, working to ensure water and wastewater operators on First Nations are certified to the same standards as non-Native operators across the country.

For a community, having a certified operator means more than just having someone on the job who knows about operation and maintenance of the plant, Marion explained.

"Going a step beyond that, that person's going to know how to troubleshoot. A person's going to know how to determine any potential emergencies or risks. But more importantly, that person is going to know how to remediate or correct or at least set in motion a process that's going to correct any problems that they may be experiencing with the water quality."

A number of parties have been working to improve water quality on Saskatchewan's First Nations, Marion said, from the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, which has undertaken creation of a drinking water framework, to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), which had sunk dollars into infrastructure improvements and training initiatives, he said.

"And definitely there are results.," Marion said. "But by no means have we reached the standards, or our expectations of those standards ... there is always room for improvement."