Iqaluit residents pick up bottled water donated by the city on Oct. 15, 2021.Pat Kane/The Globe and Mail
Jane George is a journalist who has reported on Canada’s North for over 30 years.
For decades, Indigenous communities across Canada have dealt with potable water crises. Nunavut’s capital of Iqaluit is no exception, as the city has now endured a series of water emergencies for more than a year and a half.
Worrying about water access seems especially dissonant at this time of year in the Arctic. The month of July has seen more rain than sun. Frobisher Bay has nearly thawed for the summer, as have the ponds around the city. The creeks are rushing with water. But this appearance of plenty is an illusion.
Water shutdowns, do-not-consume orders and boil-first advisories have become almost daily occurrences. There was recently a ban on washing vehicles in Iqaluit due to low water levels in the city’s sole reservoir.
Janet Pitsiulaaq Brewster, the city’s former deputy mayor who now represents the riding of Iqaluit-Sinaa in the territorial legislature, has seen her tenure defined almost entirely by the water crisis. When she was campaigning for her seat in October, 2021, water tests confirmed the presence of hydrocarbons in the city’s water. (Water safety consultants would later report that an aging, underground fuel tank at the city’s water treatment plant had cracked, leaking vapours into its water supply.) Nunavut declared a state of emergency in Iqaluit, issued a do-not-consume order, advised that pregnant women and babies should avoid bathing in the water, and started to hand out free bottled water to Iqaluit’s roughly 8,000 residents.
Ms. Brewster stopped campaigning to deliver water to people who lacked vehicles. Then, as now, the poorest residents in the city – mainly Inuit living in overcrowded households – suffered the most. Since then, Ms. Brewster has herself developed painful eczema on her hands and peeling skin on her fingers.
This failure to provide such a basic service is out of sight and mind for most Canadians, much like many of the institutional nightmares experienced by the North since the 1950s: children shipped to residential schools, forced community relocations, dog slaughters, and the ongoing tuberculosis outbreaks of today. The impacts of climate change are felt acutely in the North, despite being caused by forces far from Nunavut.
Nunavut has promised a third-party review of the 2021 crisis, but in the meantime, Iqaluit’s water woes have continued. In early 2022, fuel traces were again detected in the water supply, this time from a tar-like substance that had been used to build its water tanks almost two decades earlier. But January brought what Ms. Brewster calls a “catastrophic freeze-up”: frigid temperatures snapped a large pipe in Iqaluit’s water connection, shutting down flow and causing residents’ pipes to freeze. Some of her constituents faced up to $20,000 in repairs. Even the sewage line out of the legislative assembly froze and backed up, the smell lingering into the spring. A new water treatment plant finally came online in April, but disruptive breakdowns in Iqaluit’s aged and crumbling pipe infrastructure continue.
It’s clear that the city is in dire need of better solutions, and quickly. Trucks provide water to about 30 per cent of Iqaluit’s buildings, while the city’s piped infrastructure, built in the mid-1970s, mainly services its core neighbourhoods and public buildings. But this network is now near “its end of life,” the city says.
The federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2022, will provide about $214-million to help Iqaluit in the matter. But Ms. Brewster believes “it may take possibly decades to replace that old infrastructure,” while the city carries out urgent repairs on a near-daily basis. And Iqaluit isn’t the only community in Nunavut struggling with its water supply. Ms. Brewster points to Grise Fiord, Canada’s northernmost community, which stores glacial meltwater in tanks for its roughly 150 residents to use during the year. In 2021, one of its two huge storage tanks leaked and water had to be rationed until it was fixed. In May, a water pumphouse problem in the community of Kinngait led to a state of emergency. With no water supply, Kinngait’s schools, health centres and other public services shut down for a week.
Ensuring a steady flow of drinking water in Nunavut would take a lot of government money: around $610-million, according to Nunavut’s new drinking-water strategy. The federal mitigation fund isn’t going to cut it. This is shameful – in a country like Canada, with its abundant natural resources and vast Arctic shoreline, water access should be the least of anyone’s worries.
For now, in Iqaluit, if you lack a stash for sudden shutdowns, you could find yourself waterless. Then, you may have to seek – as one mother recently did on social media – a donation of water. She needed to prepare formula for her two babies.