At the Six Nations of the Grand River indigenous reserve in Ontario, 90 minutes from Canada’s largest and richest city, Toronto, ninety-one percent of the homes in this community aren’t connected to the water treatment plant. Some have no water at all. Others have water in their taps, but it is too polluted to drink.
The Six Nations are not the only First Nations community in Canada with a water crisis. There are currently 50 indigenous communities with long-term boil water advisories, which means an estimated 63,000 people haven’t had drinkable water for at least a year – and some for decades. But this may underestimate the size of the problem, since some indigenous communities, such as Six Nations, have a functional water plant but no workable plumbing. The lack of water has been linked to health issues in indigenous communities including hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, giardia lamblia (“beaver fever”), scabies, ringworm and acne.
“Why do white people live with water and we don’t?” said Dawn Martin-Hill, a Six Nations local and professor of indigenous studies at McMaster University. “They don’t have to live like we live. There’s a lot of environmental racism.”
Nestlé, the world’s biggest bottler, is extracting up to 3.6m litres of water daily from nearby Six Nations treaty land. Nestlé pumps springwater from the nearby Erin well, which sits on a tract of land given to the Six Nations under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty and the 1784 Haldimand Tract, said Lonny Bomberry, Six Nations lands and resources director. The Six Nations – Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora – sided with the British during the American revolution; as a reward they were given an area of approximately 3,845 sq km around the Grand River. Later, Ontario broke the treaty, reducing it to the current 194 sq km. No one disputes the existence or legality of the Haldiman or Nanfan treaties. If anything, their legality is finally being taken seriously, thanks to a shift in the national political climate toward greater recognition of indigenous rights, including several wins in the supreme and lower courts.
“Nestlé are taking out water for free, so why don’t they dispense it to people?” Sault said. “It’s the indigenous resources they are taking. It’s unreal what Nestlé are doing. It’s unreal the way they operate.”
The question of who owns Canadian water is as murky as the water on many First Nations lands. In theory, the provinces have owned the water since 1930, when the federal government delegated ownership with the Natural Resources Transfer Act. According to that act, the provinces have the right to sell their water to whomever they want, including companies like Nestlé.
But water is also supposed to be regulated by the federal government, which is responsible for the natural environment and Canada’s waterways. And, according to the Canadian constitution, the federal government has a “duty to accommodate and consult” First Nations and to make sure other parties do the same when extracting any natural resource, including water, from indigenous land.
This legal ambiguity has allowed Nestlé to move in and extract precious water on expired permits for next to nothing. Nestlé pays the province of Ontario $503.71 (US$390.38) per million litres. But they pay the Six Nations nothing.
Peter Gleick, co-founder and president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, a global water thinktank, and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water explained, “The fact that Nestlé is commercializing these natural resources in a community that doesn’t have access to reliable safe, affordable drinking water is a stunning example of the disparities we see around the world in access to safe water. The rich can pay for water and the poor get shortchanged over and over again.”
His view contrasts with the opinion of the former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who praised the commodification of water in a 2005 documentary, saying: “One perspective held by various NGOs – which I would call extreme – is that water should be declared a human right … The other view is that water is a grocery product. And just as every other product, it should have a market value.”
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